Injury-Riddled Tigers Not Interested In Excuses
By: Will Burchfield
@burchie_kid
When Tyler Collins was forced out of Wednesday night's game after taking a 99-mile-per-hour fastball to the knee, the Tigers felt like a suddenly snakebitten ballclub.
Just don't expect that sentiment to take root in the clubhouse.
"I'm not whining about it. We got another game tomorrow," said Brad Ausmus after his team's 4-1 loss to the Royals.
Collins, diagnosed with a right knee contusion, is unlikely to be available for said game, a Thursday matinee against the Red Sox. If he is indeed sidelined, he'll join a swelling – and swollen – group of Tigers, one that seems to grow by the day. The team has lost five players to the disabled list since the beginning of August, running into an injury fix at a decidedly inopportune time.
First it was Mike Pelfrey, immobilized by a lower back strain. Then it was his rotation-mate Jordan Zimmermann, whose recovery from a neck strain was promptly derailed by a lat strain. The tireless Nick Castellanos broke his hand shortly thereafter, and was later joined on the D.L. by Cameron Maybin, whose sprained thumb was more debilitating than originally thought. The injury bug – by now seemingly contagious – afflicted Jose Iglesias next, who was knocked out of action last weekend with a strained hamstring.
And then Collins was felled by a wayward missile on Wednesday night (one of many launched by Yordano Ventura), triggering thoughts of woe and doom and "Oh, c'mon, who's next?"
But the Tigers aren't feeling sorry for themselves.
"I mean, it's part of the game, so we've gotta deal with it," said a downcast Shane Greene, who surrendered the deciding runs in the top of the ninth. "It's the reason Al [Avila] did what he did this offseason, and we'll be ready to play tomorrow."
It's also the reason Avila did what he did on Tuesday, when he acquired shortstop Erick Aybar from the Braves. The Tigers are beginning to fade and the playoff race is turning for the finish, leaving the team little time to dawdle in the waiting room as the infirmed get healthy. The acquisition of Aybar illustrates the urgency of the Tigers' situation.
"Basically the moment we have right now, with this many guys out, it's really tough for the team," said Anibal Sanchez, who was terrific on Wednesday night over seven shutout innings.
There is a necessary qualifier to that statement, an ineluctable "but." It is one heard often in the Tigers' clubhouse, and it goes exactly like this: every team is dealing with injuries. If it is tired and trite, so is it undeniably true.
If the Tigers continue to struggle in the coming weeks, if they – gulp – miss the playoffs, it won't be because of injuries. It will be due to a lack of compensation elsewhere. Injuries are only crippling if other players allow them to be, only hobbling if the weight is too much for the healthy to bear. Thus have the Tigers struck a resilient tone in the face of their own misfortune.
"We're trying to win on a daily basis. You lose, you move on to the next game," said Ausmus, rebuffing the notion that his team has reached a crisis point in the season.
The Tigers aren't staring at their own demise. They're not on the precipice of a collapse. They are battered and bruised, yes, but they are also slumping and slipping. The former is only partly to blame for the latter, for this team is plenty deep enough and plenty skilled enough to overcome a few ill-timed injuries.
Quite simply, the Tigers need to start playing better - and they know this. They've been dealt an unlucky hand of late, but they refuse to use that as a crutch for their uneven play.
