The Post In Which You Get To See Lohan Boob (like you haven't seen it before)

With the next phase of the season beginning, the series with the Ligers that starts tonight is starting to take on Fat Bastard-level heaviness in my mind. As you may have gathered from random roller coaster rantings from me in the past, things tend to ebb and flow in the miasma between my ears, and obesity of ideas is a recurrent issue. Anorexia of ideas, I'm hoping to implement soon. But I think this one is for real.

I've heard all matter of pundits comment on Silva's somewhat odd outing last night. Both odd because (gasp) he actually pitched out of his gourd for the first time in phases. But also odd because of the way it ended -- as prematurely as Lindsay Lohan's "next Laren Bacall" super-stardom. How's THAT going for her (and how about wearing undergarments occassionally?) 59 pitches through 6 innings and then "inexplicably" takes himself out of the game. To read the quotes from the manager and pitching coach, it came out of nowhere. But I've heard elsewhere that the management was well aware ahead of time that he was feeling under the weather going into the game. As stated by Carlos though in the above-linked article:

"I'm not feeling good the whole game, and shoot, we have the best bullpen in the league," he said.

I find that hard to argue with even given, 1)Silva's taken himself out under "questionable" circumstances twice before this season, and/or 2)Common baseball wisdom is that you want your starter to go as long as possible in order to preserve the pen, no matter how good they are.

I'm still with Carlos. But maybe not for any of the reasons listed above. The real reason we should maybe be grateful for his vomitousness is that it exposed a troubling, dare I say, pattern? Neshek is living up to his original minor league billing: "Pat Neshek! One Night Only! Watch him mow down righties, but struggle to get lefties -- at least after he's in the league long enough for big league hitters to catch up with his Crazy Ass delivery" This is not a mirage people. Thank god Jessie Crain has found it a bit. I think Neshek is firmly ensconced himself in the Situational category, which is good because I hear Denny Reyes was getting lonely.

A squandered quality Silva start aside (you weren't really expecting to win that game anyway, were you?), this Detroit series has me all a'twitter. I'm getting a little veclempt just thinking about it. They're struggling. We're struggling. And somehow, we're 1/2 game up in the Wild Card, and 4 games back in the division, with the big dogs in town, and Santana finishing off the series at home, where he's been more invincible than Superman in a panic room. Let's just struggle a little less then them the next four days.

A few addendums:
Here's hoping Carlos passes around those awesome pills to Boof and Garzy.

And speaking of awesome.