Anibal Sanchez and the completely hosed Detroit Tigers

Baseball is what happens when you’re busy trying to predict baseball. All of the words in the winter months. All of the speculation. All of the certainties. Whisper this into the ear of a Tigers fan in January:

The Tigers will trade for David Price in July.

And watch the grin threaten to split both ears in half. There’s no such thing as an invincible baseball team, but there are Big Red Machines and ‘27 Yankees, teams that felt inevitable. Teams can be hurricanes, forecasted well in advance, allowing everyone else to stock up and feel helpless as the storm does exactly what it’s supposed to, with no one capable of stopping it. The Tigers pitching staff, especially with Price, should have felt like that.

The Tigers most certainly do not feel like that. They’re hurting. Quite literally. Anibal Sanchez, specifically:

“It’s nothing like what I feel when I had my shoulder or elbow issue before. This kind of pain kill me when I feel it.”

Sanchez’s injury is to his pectoral muscle, and he’s not sure if he’s going to pitch again this year. This comes shortly after Justin Verlander revealed his shoulder problems, which were supposedly fixed with a couple weeks of rest, though getting cuffed about by the Twins suggests that we’re still some distance from the Verlander we’re used to.

Sanchez hurt. Verlander ineffective. It’s time for a point/counterpoint on the Tigers’ 2014 season.

The Tigers have a gaggle of seemingly incapable spot starters at the ready, none of whom are going to help much. Robbie Ray and Buck Farmer have been the baseball equivalent of veterinarians performing open heart surgery because they were close and had stethoscopes. The Tigers were one game over .500 since the start of June with Sanchez. The front of the rotation is sterling, but it’s not going to help much in front of a lineup that’s spent much of August scuffling for runs.

Verlander is back in name, though not spirit. The time off didn’t bring his fastball back, nor his typical dominance. That’s 40 percent of the rotation the Tigers can’t trust, and the lineup is anchored by a suddenly powerless Miguel Cabrera, who’s been hitting like vintage F.P Santangelo since the start of August.

The bullpen is a mess, with big-ticket acquisition Joakim Soria getting shelled and injured within minutes of landing in Detroit, and Jim Johnson playing the role of spring-loaded snakes in the fire extinguisher. The Royals might not be this good, but the Tigers might be this bad -- a .500 team playing to its potential.

They just need to get to the playoffs.

Max Scherzer, Rick Porcello, and David Price will make up for a ton of flaws. The bullpen, for one. The lineup for two. Assuming that Porcello is the pitcher he was always expected to be, and not a mirage, the Tigers have as good of a front three as anyone in baseball, and they’ll be the obligatory Team No One Wants To Face in the playoffs.

If they get there.

If they do make it, they’ll be at a disadvantage without Sanchez or an effective Verlander, of course. Outside of the 2009 Yankees, there hasn’t been a successful three-man/short-rest rotation in the playoffs for a long, long time, which means the Tigers would have to rely on Verlander. That is a sentence that’s absolutely bizarre to type. But as far as fourth starters in the playoffs go, the promise of a (still-hard-throwing, just-not-as-hard) Verlander matches up well enough with the rest of the league.

Just ... need ... to ... get ... gaspwheezegasp ... to ... the short ... playoff series.

Considering the constant win-now moves of the win-now Tigers, this would be a funny time to play it safe. Bartolo Colon is available. Scott Feldman is available. Jon Niese is technically available. There are problems with the last two (Feldman has $20 million left on his deal, Niese would cost whatever prospects the Tigers have left), but Colon is a laughably good fit. The world would lose the gift of Colon swinging hard enough to make his helmet fly off, but the Tigers would get a pitcher who would be likely to out-pitch the in-house options like Ray and Farmer.

Even without a deal, the Tigers aren’t in bad shape. Once they make the playoffs. If they make the playoffs. As long as they make the playoffs.

They’re still alive in the AL Central, and they still have 60 percent of a monster rotation, including two of the 10 best pitchers in baseball. The Sanchez news isn’t helpful, but this is still a team that can persevere by standing still, and it’s also a team that can also this newfound hole before the August 31 waiver deadline. They seem screwed. They probably aren’t. And if they can make the playoffs, they’ll still scare the bejeepers out of anyone they face.

Phew. An entire article without mentioning Doug Fister, who was traded for no good reason for the very pitcher who explodes every time he fills in for an injured starter. Feels like someone should buy me a drink for that. Which I’ll use to forget about the Doug Fister trade that still wakes me up at night.