Orioles will fly South, Tigers will Roar

There are a few things that get frustrating as a sports fan, and one of them is bandwagon jumpers. I've had to suffer through Davidson's run to the Elite 8 and the Giants making the Superbowl, but now I've actually heard people talking up the Baltimore Orioles and downplaying the potential of the Detroit Tigers.

At what point do people realize that the season is 162 games? As a life-long Cubs fan I endure the pain of watching the team show promise in April and suffer through August, and that bitter reminder every fall is enough to tell me that how a team starts the season has relatively little to do with how they'll finish it.

Certainly the AL Central is a difficult division with the Cleveland Indians the trendy pick to win the World Series this year, but people forget the Yankees were 21-29 at one point in 2007. A number of years ago the Houston Astros were 15-30 and still went on to make the playoffs.

I was amazed to hear commentators pulling out the statistic that no team has ever started 0-6 and made it to the playoffs. Yes, that is a true statistic, but it also means about as much as how Brett Favre's passer rating was influenced by a full moon. The Tigers have a strong start to the rotation, but their bullpen is suspect. However, the team boasts an outstanding lineup and right now it's all a matter of the bats heating up. Granted the team could have scored 12 runs in the final game against the White Sox and still lost, but the team is last in the AL in run production.

The Tigers need to snap out of their slump, but Jim Leyland is too good a manager and the lineup is too strong for the team to play sub-.500 ball for long. By fall the Orioles will have fallen to 4th in the AL East unless they can beat out the Rays in the battle for worst MLB franchise, and the Tigers will be incontention for the Wild Card or AL Central.

Speaking of bandwagons, what happened to the Houston Rockets?