Huff comes up empty again for Tigers

Detroit --Aubrey Huff came to bat in the first inning of Tuesday's first game of a big doubleheader against the Twins, runners at second and first, two out, and the Tigers hoping for a quick knock that would give them a boost in an enormously important game.

He bounced out to second base to end the inning.

Huff came to bat in the third with runners at third and first and none out. The Twins, staring at a big inning, would happily have settled for a double-play grounder and a run scored. Huff instead hit a high chopper to first that enabled Michael Cuddyer to throw out lead runner Clete Thomas at the plate. The Tigers didn't score in the third.
Huff had two more at-bats in Tuesday's first game. He had two more groundouts.

He was not the only culprit in a gut-ripping 3-2, 10-inning loss to the Twins that turned a big crowd (35,243 tickets sold) into a frustrated, heartsick group of the grief-stricken. The Tigers blew chance after chance in the early innings when Nick Blackburn was struggling to throw strikes and giving up his share of hits.

But it was Huff's anemic day that underscored not only what is fundamentally bad about the Tigers -- they don't hit -- but how improbably sour a couple of supposedly life-saving trades have turned out to be for the Tigers.

No relief
Huff is batting .190 since the Tigers acquired him Aug. 17 in a trade with Baltimore for minor-league reliever Brett Jacobson. He has two home runs -- one of them a game-saver against Toronto -- and 13 RBIs.

But it is not what the Tigers expected of an established, left-handed power hitter who had 15 homers and 85 RBIs with Baltimore in 2009, and who hit 32 home runs a year ago.

Jarrod Washburn, likewise, has blown up on the Tigers in ways that were fairly unimaginable when they made the July 31 trade deadline deal to bring a poised left-hander with a 2.62 ERA in 2009 to stabilize the Tigers' down-the-stretch rotation.

The Tigers, though, have filled in adequately for Washburn. The hitting has been another story, entirely. And when Huff failed to bring the Tigers any noticeable muscle to a lineup begging for it, games such as Tuesday's lost cause occur, and with it could go the Tigers' playoff hopes against a more reliable Twins team.

Huff's third-inning at-bat Tuesday was catastrophic. Rolling over on a Blackburn pitch and swatting a high bouncer to first base when he needed, at the very least, to hit the ball deep into the infield, destroyed the Tigers' chance for what could have and should have been a game-deciding inning.

Ground balls have been his habit of late. A man with 203 home runs and 294 doubles in his 10-season career has struggled, in step with his team, to drive the baseball to the outfield and beyond.

"If I knew the answer I'd, certainly be doing it," Huff said, sitting in front of his locker, feeling no better than the heads-down fans who shuffled out of Comerica Park. "I've been getting good pitches to hit.

"It's been one of those things."

Dissapointing time
Those things, however, have been happening repeated to the Tigers. They often get a pitcher in trouble early in a game, as they did Tuesday with Blackburn. They put men on base. They run up pitch-counts. And then they stall, as they did Tuesday when from the fourth through the eighth innings, 15 consecutive batters went down.

Huff can't change those numbers by himself. But he was brought to Detroit to at least drive a ball out of the infield with runners at third and first and no one out.

He failed, as did his team Tuesday, and as it yet might be doomed in its playoff chase because of the Tigers' collective futility at hitting the baseball.



(detnews.com)