Can the Rangers Hunt Down the Tigers?

Tonight the ALCS will begin, matching the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers. Before I continue I want to extend both my congratulations and respect to both teams, especially Detroit. As you may know I wrote a post saying that the Yankees would and should win a decisive game 5 in Yankee Stadium and Detroit stunned me with their poise and pitching ability. 

Now on with the predictions.


This ALCS match-up is very similar to the Tigers-Yankees ALDS match-up. The Tigers should have Justin Verlander go a minimum of two games and potentially three games in the series, a tough task for any offense to overcome. However, the Rangers, like the Yankees, have a prolific offense and can smash the ball from almost any position in the line-up. During the regular season the Rangers had FIVE hitters with over 25 HRs, and they had SIX with 75+ RBIs, and the craziest stat of all is that they had FIVE players within .005 points of a .300 avg. So they score runs with the HR but also by manufacturing runs with big innings (something the Yankees lacked).  The match-up to watch will be how each team's MVP candidate plays in the series: Miguel Cabrera for the Tigers and Michael Young, not Josh Hamilton, for the Rangers. If Young can out do Cabrera from the plate the Tigers will have very little chance to win.  

For the Tigers to win it will be about getting their line-up to start producing at an extremely high level. I feel like most of these games, with the exception of the Verlander games, will be slugfests which means that Cabrera, Victor Martinez and the rest of the Tigers line-up will have to pick it up. It is true that the Tigers rotation shut down the Yankees line-up but the major difference is in the strike-out department. Texas just doesn't strike out as much as New York does. A quick comparison and it is obvious how large the difference between the two teams is: The Rangers had only THREE players with more than 90 strike outs in the regular season, and only one player over 100. The Yankees had FIVE players over 90 K's, three of whom were over 100 SO's on the year (Also, A-Rod had 80 K's through 99 games, so it's pretty safe to assume that he would have been over 100, had he played a whole season.) 

All in all I don't think that the Tigers pitching staff is good enough to hold down the Ranger's explosive offense. It will be very interesting to see how Fister, Scherzer and Procello do in their second straight series against ridiculous line-ups. I don't think they have what it takes to win so I believe that the Texas Rangers will advance to the World Series in six games.