Random thoughts

Thom Brennaman and Steve Lyons are absolutely dreadful in the booth. You can't count the number of mistakes these guys make. Lou Piniella isn't very polished, and is horrible with the small talk, but actually makes some good observations and comments. His only faux pas so far was gushing about Kendell batting leadoff as a catcher and saying he couldn't imagine any other catcher being able to pull it off. The problem: One other catcher, playing the same game, had done it. Pudge led off 4 games this year.

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The Marco Scutaro chant is pretty good.

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I missed this story on the Onion Web site, but saw it linked on one of the Tiger blogs. It's pretty funny.

The headline: "George Steinbrenner fires Tigers."
Best line, attributed to Derek Jeter: "The Yankees have a long tradition of winning, and the Detroit Tigers failed to respect that."

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Last week, Al Kaline and Willie Horton threw out the first pitches. The lineup for this weekend: Mickey Lolich, George Kell and Ernie Harwell. Lolich, from what I've heard, was Wayne Gretzky's favorite player as a youngster. Still hard to believe he won games 2, 5, and 7 of the 1968 World Series -- staving off elimination in Game 5 and beating Bob Gibson on two days rest with CG in Game 7.

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It's funny how Tigers fans seem to be jacked up about Kenny Rogers' great record against Oakland. Particularly since they fail to see the irony that a week ago Yankee fans were delighting in Rogers' horrible postseason record and record vs. NY, and we know how that worked out.