'If Cleveland goes 9-8 the rest of the way, Detroit needs to finish 15-1 to force a first-place tie in the AL Central. If the Yankees play .500 ball down the stretch, the Tigers have to go 12-4 to tie for the wild card. In short, the math looks grim for Jim Leyland's team. '

we lost today, but i found this comforting bit of trivia. we lost today, playing our 23rd consecutive day. tomorrow we rest. wedge gave both pronk and jhonny days off today so that they had two games off, instead of just one. a luxury permissible because of the above statistic. barfield started today, and his 'rust' hurt us. he was caught stealing. he made an error on a groundball that could have been two. instead, no outs were made. thome takes advantage with a 2 run single. konerko followed with an RBI single. three runs scored, none should have. at least josh had an RBI single.

but that is ok. yeah, detroit did win also. our lead is down to 5-1/2. now we have an off day, finally. then KC at the jake. with c.c. to start things off. and more importantly, we went 17-6 in those 23 consecutive games. down the stretch, we are winning (so far) when it matters the most. it was during this stretch that we stretched our division lead to a season high 7 games going into anaheim. they have been playing well, winning some games in their final AB's. in a week, they made up 1-1/2 games. at that rate, they could overtake us in 5-6 weeks. good news for us, we only have approximately 2 weeks left in the season. we do have one 3 game series left with them. it is at the jake.

oh yeah, i now see why our brass was correct in handing laffey the 5th spot in the rotation, and not to cliff lee as i hoped. there is always next year cliff. but even he has to like what is going on with the team, to this point.