by Michael Duca

OAKLAND–While it’s odd that that the Giants and only the A’s are in the post season and my wife works for the Giants and they have a post season breakfast where the front office comes and speaks which includes Giants manager Bruce Bochy, Giants General Manager Brian Sabean, but Sabean won’t be there because he’s in the Dominican Republic with Giants vice president of operatons Bobby Evans. Bochy said the guys were tired when they showed up in February and their still tired.

I don’t think people understand how much winning a championship takes out of a team because basically what it does it just backtracks your body clock to adjusting to a normal baseball schedule to recuperate and that’s not just a physical thing that’s also a mental thing and an emotional thing. The Giants have decided to adapt the old former Royals pitcher Brett Saberhagen’s method of being outstanding every other year.

How Tigers and A’s series shapes up: This is going to be a very interesting series both offenses decided to get a jump on the government shutdown and close themselves in the last week or so. Each team is not scoring very much, the last time the A’s went into Detroit they manhandled the Tigers pretty well and then you have the weight of history on the other side the Tigers have knocked the A’s out of the playoffs three times in row.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, having the home field advantage may help the A’s get a little bit of an edge and Tigers pitcher Matt Scherzer had one of his worst outings all year this year. Tiger pitcher Justin Verlander hasn’t been the pitcher that he was and what you’ll find out is that most of the guys who pitched to any extent in the month of March there just weren’t very good pitchers in Major League Baseball this year.

Verlander, the Giants Ryan Vogelsong, and a few other that I haven’t mention, it’s going to be difficult for Tigers manager Jimmy Leyland he’s gong to have to manage his team a little bit more like a National League team they’re going to have to play station to station baseball. The Tigers are going to have to scrap for runs and runs are going to have to come at a premium in this post season series. Despite how scary that Detroit offense is on paper they saw good pitching shut them down in late October last year and it certainly could happen to them.

The Tigers will have to see the A’s pitcher Jarrod Parker who won 17 straight starts without a loss he kind of got lost in the winter in September and he best find himself real quickly the A’s are relying on 40 plus year old Bartolo Colon to get them out to a good start and the A’s are in need to win game one at home and it must give the A’s some advantage. The A’s really need to thrust hard to get the first two games so that at worst they have the opportunity to come back to Oakland in a tie.

Bob Melvin the A’s manager’s chances of being manager of the year are between slim and none just because he’s Bob Melvin and it’s Oakland whether or not that he deserved it is a whole different question. He absolutely needs to be in the discussion and he probably deserves to finish in top two at the worst but I question that he’ll make it, but I expect that Terry Francona will get manager of the year for piloting Cleveland not just out of the wilderness but to have a ten game winning streak to close out the season.

Michael Duca is covering the 2013 Oakland post season playoffs for Sportstalk radio