Talking about Wednesday's tough game........

First, besides renewing my best wishes to Jesse Litsch for a full and speedy recovery, I wish to highlight again his very good 2008 numbers: he went 13-8 in 28 starts and one relief appearance with a 3.58 ERA, the 13th-lowest ERA in the American League.

He is the third member of last year’s rotation to require major surgery.

On the positive side, Tuesday night Scott Rolen had his second consecutive three-hit game and his fourth of the season. It was also his fourth multi-hit game in his past seven. Extremely good news but I was confident it would happen.

Turning to Doc, he is the first AL pitcher to win at least 10 of his team’s first 59 games of a season since David Wells did it for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2000. Doc’s seven-game win streak is also the longest of any pitcher in the majors and the same goes for his 100 innings pitched. Doc leads the majors in innings pitched since the start of the 2006 season.

Vernon Wells entered Tuesday’s game 2-for-21 in June but thankfully went 2 for 5 with two runs scored. He tripled in his first at-bat to record his first extra-base hit since May 30 (terrible stretch!). He also doubled in the seventh inning to pick up his first multi-hit game since May 27 (very bad number!). It was also just the second game this season in which Wells has had two extra-base hits. The other was April 24 vs. the White Sox, when he also doubled and tripled.

On Tuesday night, Lyle Overbay singled home a run in the seventh inning to increase his hitting streak to 15 games. He is three games shy of matching the longest streak of his career, which occurred in 2004 when he was a member of the Brewers (we can only hope with all ourselves that he gets there!).

Adam Lind hit his 12th home run of the season on Tuesday night, setting his new career high. For the third time this season, he has homered in two consecutive games.

I never thought or suggested that he’s a starter that we can afford to take lightly. While I am talking about pitchers, I just found out a very interesting statistic that shows once more Doc’s greatness. So far in 2009, Doc is third in the AL (among pitchers who have thrown at least 700 fastballs) for the fewest fastballs thrown out of all pitches made: he has thrown fastballs only 30,8% of the time, while using cutters 44% of the time and the curveball 24% of the time. Mixing pitches well is already half of the story, his movement and speed do the rest. Let’s hope our last three performances, including Doc’s most recent and then the two against Texas, do carry over positively into tonight’s contest.

So far, so good in that department but we need to have always the same focus. We are playing on the road in a very tough place so for example early-inning caution is surely extremely crucial, as it is great concentration about fielding. Lastly, a good balance between starters’ workload and the pen’s workload is essential for us especially on the road. If the Maple Leafs can’t win the Cup right now, we deserve a different miracle eh……