Fundamentally Unsound

The Ernie Harwell Media Center

Comerica Park Detroit, MI

(Sunday, July 25, 2010) -- The Detroit Tigers sustained a season-ending injury here Saturday night in a 3-2 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays.

It happened when Magglio Ordonez—second on the Tigers in home runs (12) and RBI (59)—fractured his right ankle sliding into home in a vain attempt to score the game-tying run from first base on a double to right by Miguel Cabrera.

Ordonez is done for 6-8 weeks and, likely, so too are the Tigers.

As usual, the whole thing was eminently preventable and, as usual, there is blame aplenty to go around. The “what-ifs” abound and astound:

If Cabrera (what was he thinking?) had simply hit the ball 5 feet further it would have gone into the right field seats and Ordonez would have trotted around on the homer. If, when they built this baseball stadium they had not made the ill-advised decision (what were they thinking?) to recess the wall 10-15 feet in the right field power alley, again, the ball Cabrera hit would have gone into the stands and Ordonez would have scored in the manner described above. If Detroit third base coach Gene Lamont (yeah, what was he thinking?) had realized that his man was 15-feet out if he sent him and had held up the stop sign instead of the “go-for-it!” windmill, Ordonez stops at third and never slides into home base and never snaps his ankle.

All of which is to be duly noted, but the truth of the matter—and it sounds cruel to say it since he was the one who had to endure the pain—is that most of the blame must go to Ordonez himself. I’m sorry, but it was a simple slide. I don’t know about Mags, but I know they started to teach me how to slide when I was about 8. Sure, it’s a little scary at first, but you get used to it, and they keep on teaching you how to slide until you are done playing organized ball. In my case, that meant high school, by which time I could pull off a pop-up slide with the best of them. (Your pop-up is one of several types of slides and is useful in case there is an errant throw as it leaves you ready to bolt for the next base and carries the additional benefit of looking cool as hell.) Sliding is an elemental, a fundamental part of playing baseball. Seeing a player—especially one of your top players not to mention one of the highest paid players in the game—injure himself perpetrating a routine and run-of-the-mill hook slide is infuriating. Infuriating in the way you feel when you see a player at the Major League level who can’t bunt. Only in the instant case instead of failing to move the runner(s) along, your whole season is ruined. That’s all.

Detroit lost third baseman Brandon Inge to a broken hand (hit by a pitch) earlier this week and an inning or so after Ordonez left last night’s game, second baseman Carlos Guillen was lost to a pulled leg muscle.

That meant that in the first of the two games being played here today against Toronto, the Tigers had a .203 hitter, Ryan Rayburn, hitting third in a batting order which featured five rookies. The thing of it was, the Tigers still had a good chance to win the game. It was tied at 3 in the 8^th and Detroit had the bases loaded with only one out, but two of those rookies, Scott Sizemore and Jeff Larish, struck out and that was that. Then, Jose Valverde (and why he was in there in a 3-3 tie I do not know) gave up a two-run homer to Lyle Overbay in the top of the 9th and the Blue Jays had a 5-3 win. It had been 41 appearances for Valverde since his last home run allowed dating all the way back to the second game of the season at Kansas City. He’d been money since then. But that’s just the way things have gone this weekend here at the ballpark.

The fans are filing in for the second of these two games against Toronto today…