Just a bit left of dead center and then to the tough, tough left-center gap on a line. Not a lot of homers hit to either spot there, and he didn't seem to have a tough time.

This will work for me if he can continue to, as you rightly put it, become more comfortable with what he's doing at the plate and putting those natural skills to work. The result could be, for awhile, something closer to lower-minors Aaron Hicks where he jumps all over lefties (both homers yesterday were against the same LHP) and works long, leadoff-y at-bats against RHP. And we accept the BB/K tradeoff inherent for Hicks in the latter.

Bringing back Dunn's homer was icing on the cake too.

>is it just me or does that beard make ryan dunn very, very
>punchable?

That is absolutely not you.

>surprised this division is as competitive as it is right now.
>what's up with the tigers?

They're scoring/preventing runs like a 24 win team, so it's a bit of bad luck at the moment. Some against the Twins, who have taken a lot of the one-run karma leaguewide so far.

Ordinarily, if a team is underperforming their RS/RA expectations, the bullpen is a place to look for an answer that isn't "luck" and though the re-installation of Jose Valverde says that by the time the season is over we may end up pointing to that, but that's not the case at the moment as this bad-on-paper pen is pitching really well. A couple guys given back-end responsibilities have been trouble though. Coke, Dotel, Rondon.

They'll be fine, sadly. It's not a historically great team, but I actually really dig the cleverness with which they were assembled. Sort of an anti-Twins on the run prevention side. This is unintentional Ceej-bait, I realize, but they are defensively an absolutely miserable team. With the hitting personnel they've assembled, it's obviously a sacrifice they're comfortable with. And they should be, since living with Miguel Cabrera's defense at third so you can get Prince Fielder and (well... on paper) Victor Martinez both in the lineup is totally different than, say, living with Brendan Harris' defense at shortstop because of his bat.

But then they doubled up on that principle and asked themselves how they can help out all of their shitball defenders. The answer: put together a staff that strikes out just shy of TEN guys per nine innings. Now aforementioned strangegloves only need to turn seventeen balls in play into outs instead of twenty seven.

It's not like this is rocket science. The reason elite power bats (Cabrera and Fielder) and high-strikeout starters (Verlander, Scherzer, and Anibal Sanchez who is suddenly strikeout out guys at TWICE his career rate*) are supercrazy expensive is because there are exactly thirty GMs in baseball who know that those are the some of the best things you can have. Still, the idea is cool from a team construction perspective.

*take the under on that as the season goes on. though it's odd that he's getting fewer swings on balls both in and out of the zone but batters are making less contact. did he develop a pitch that's literally an optical illusion?