Oh nos! Delmon Young is hurt and can’t play in the ALCS!!
Double oh nos! Magglio Ordonez is even hurter!! He can’t play at all anymore!!!
Hoorays! Delmon Young is all betters!!
OK, seriously, what the heck is going on in Detroit? Far be it from to question a team that has advanced all the way to the ALCS, but do the Tigers really know what they are doing with their roster?
When the Tigers decided to leave Delmon Young off their ALCS roster after he injured his oblique in Game 5 of the ALDS, it seemed like a pretty bad break for the team. Young is hardly a great player, but he was the team’s hero in the ALDS and had been serving as the Tigers’ three-hole hitter, for better or worse. Say what you will about the flaws in his game, but he was a pretty important player in Jim Leyland’s eyes, so opting to keep him off the roster for the entirety of the ALCS seemed like the kind of tough decision they must’ve thought long and hard about… or not.
Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, but when Magglio Ordonez re-injured his ankle, ending his season, the Tigers surprisingly opted to activate Young even though two days ago he was supposedly too injured to play AT ALL this series. And they didn’t just activate Young in hopes of him being healthy enough to pinch-hit or make some starts in the latter games of the series; they stuck him right in the starting lineup and right back in the three-hole to boot. Yeah, sounds like he was real hurt.
I just don’t get it. How did Detroit misread the situation so badly? Young is a player they clearly felt was crucial to their success, yet they were fully prepared to do without him the entire series all so they could get Danny Worth, who has a career .648 OPS in 143 ABs, on the roster. If they knew there was a shot that Delmon could’ve played after the first two games or three games, it would seem like the sensical solution would be to leave him on the roster and hope for the best. Seeing how Young was able to play after missing just one game (with some help from a rain delay without any actual rain) and actually look pretty good in the process, that is what they should have done.
Lucky for Detroit, sort of, they got a do-over by putting Ordonez on the DL, thus creating an opening for Young. It is a plan almost a little too perfect. I would never, EVER suggest that a big league team would try and skirt the rules, but maybe such a move is what the Tigers had planned all along. Oh, sure, they probably weren’t planning on Ordonez’s ankle turning into dust, that was just a very inconvenient convenience. Perhaps they were arranging for the aforementioned mostly useless Danny Worth to suddenly develop a bad case of Czervik Arm? No, of course not, that would be under-handed. Surely the more likely explanation is that the Tiger training staff completely botched Young’s diagnosis and got confused between “day-to-day” and “week-to-week.”
Yeah, I’m sure that was it.
