My Mom Literally Laughed When She Saw The Score After The First Inning

A collection of thoughts from last night's game

• Is there a more perplexing member of the Tigers' roster right now than Jason Grilli? In his first outings of this year, he looked terrible and got rocked repeatedly. Then he looked decent for a few appearances. Then he looked awful again. And now in his last four outings, as Mario pointed out, he's looked terrific. As I write this, he's popping out Gerald Laird to end the third and he looks great. He would be the immediate replacement for Jose Fucking Mesa's old role of my least favorite member of the Tigers' bullpen, but he saved the Saturday and Sunday games of the Cleveland series from becoming too close and is keeping the Tigs in the game right now, so he's safe. Todd Jones, look out.
• As we all thought, the beard was Nate Robertson's source of power. It's like taking Birdman out of the sun or making Superman sleep in a kryptonite bed. He looked completely off today on every single pitch. He threw 17 pitches to the first two hitters. That's a big sign for trouble. I'm confident it's only an aberration, but Nate has some issues with his game right now that he has to work on. Five out of his last six starts have been bad, a far cry from April and early May when Nate was arguably the ace of the staff.
• Omar Infante might be one of the more valuable members of the Tigers' defense and offense right now. He started the whole series at third base in Cleveland and looked completely at home and was anything but a liability at the plate, a la Neifi Fucking Perez. But tonight, on a night when Curtis Granderson is getting a rest against a lefty, he's playing centerfield and, surprise, he looks right at home. He's also getting on base, reaching on all three of his first three at bats.
• Brandon Inge looked good coming back from injury, with Brandon hitting a solo shot for the Tigers' last run of the game in the fourth. He's playing at less than 100% right now, and it's pretty obvious that he's doing so, so I'm going to lay off him until I hear the report that he's feeling better, but his power stroke apparently doesn't need a big left toe to be useful. There were a few scary moments though when he decided to hit two foul balls off of his left ankle in the same at-bat as the home run though.
• Carlos Guillen did not impress in his first game back as Inge did. Kind of a rough game for Carlos, but I'm more than willing to chalk that up to rust and hope that in tonight's game he'll be doing much better.
• The game last night was the kind that the Tigs should be a shoo in to win every time. It's the worst team in baseball and they loaded the bases in the first- unfortunately, they left them loaded too. Nate Robertson's outing did not help at all, but hopefully Mr. Verlander will have better results on the mound today and can get the Tigers back on the same track they seemed to be veering onto in Cleveland. Don't tease us boys.