Isn't This Supposed to be the Easy Part of the Schedule?

I’m not going to give a lot of discussion on this game because I ended up missing a lot of it. I went out with my old college chums after the first inning and though we got back before the game was over, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to it. I did see that Scherzer’s velocity was still high, which is good and means that he’s sticking to whatever mechanical adjustment he made. I can’t really comment on anything besides that because Gameday doesn’t give you a good feel for such things (although I seemed to notice a lot of Royals singling on “soft fly balls” and the like, which gave me the impression that a lot of those hits were not hit hard). Meanwhile, Ryan Perry has suddenly gone from being really effective to being really ineffective in the span of two weeks. That doesn’t make sense either, and I can’t give a lot of insight into that either because most of it has happened in games I haven’t seen (though at least it made him get rid of the mohawk). And I can’t say much about the offense or lack thereof either because all the scoring happened on a Brennan Boesch home run that I did not see.

And so tonight is game 2 of this series. Justin Verlander had royally pissed me off on Tuesday because I had heard that his goatee was gone (I like facial hair. So sue me). I never saw him on Tuesday, but I have caught glimpses of him since. It definitely had been gone, but it looks like it’s coming back, and if so, I totally approve. Personal grooming aside, he’s pitched decently in his last two starts but has lost both of them (a lot of that was due to lack of run support). He’s been dominant in his career against the Royals, but this year’s brand of Royals seem to be a good fastball-hitting team that lives and dies by singling you to death, and they certainly seem capable of that. And Verlander throws a lot of fastballs. Meanwhile, the Royals will start Luke Hochevar. He’s had an up-and-down season, but he has pitched two good games against the Tigers this year (and he’s handcuffed Miguel Cabrera, who previously owned him). Again, I’m not sure how much of this game I’m gonna see. There’s more reunion stuff happening tonight.