To the handful of baseball fans who slipped into a coma sometime around the beginning of the season and came to in the last two days, the match-up between the preseason favorites to win the American League Central Detroit Tigers and the reigning American League champion Kansas City Royals--who were widely thought to be the third-best team in the division behind the Detroit and Cleveland after suffering multiple losses to free agency and addressing those losses in questionable ways--must be a surprising one.
The Royals headed to Detroit today to start the first in a three-game series in which the Royals can symbolically take the reins from the Tigers, whose hold on the division was operating on borrowed time as their core trudged down the hill from their collective phase of peak performance.