Teams to do live by homers alone

Let's see.

Thursday got off to a bad start. My friend Bruno Sniders' stepson called to tell me that Bruno had died Wednesday night.

That set back my schedule for the day. The biggest casualty was that I didn't have or take the time to switch quarterbacks from Kirk Cousins to Aaron Rodgers. When I heard the early scoring from the Packers-Vikings game, I thought that omission would be costly. It could be, but Rodgers finished with just 18 points and change.

As Thursday's games played out, they reminded me of something that I observed about the Pirates' 8-0 loss to the Giants the night before.

My biggest concern coming down the stretch was that the Bucs' offense frequently depended solely on home runs, and not on building runs and sustaining big innings. The biggest example was during a five-game stretch when Pittsburgh scored just nine runs but still went 4-1 because the pitchers held the opponents to five. But even those meager nine runs, if I'm not mistaken, all scored on home runs.

My observations on the National League wild card game I expressed in a Facebook post: The Pirates were like McCroskey in "Airplane!". I guess they picked the wrong day to start walking people. I guess they picked the wrong day to stop hitting popups. I guess they picked the wrong day to have no range in the infield. Bottom line: The Pirates did almost everything poorly. It didn't help that Giants LHP Madison Bumgarner was in his best postseason form, which is very good.

Back to Thursday's American League Division Series games and home runs. The Tigers scored three runs, all on solo homers, and lost. The Angels scored two runs, both on solo homers, and lost. The dagger in Los Angeles' loss was that the Royals won that game on Mike Moustakas' 10th-inning ... solo homer.

Baltimore put a game-clinching eight-run eighth inning together with a series of base hits and misplays.

And don't you know today the Orioles overcome a 6-3 deficit with a four-run eighth built on hits and walks. No home runs. Four of the Tigers' runs scored on homers, but even for the purposes of this post, you can't really complain when three consecutive hits started their five-run fourth inning, which closed with J.D. Martinez's three-run homer and Nick Castellanos' solo shot.

But aside from that one inning, the Tigers couldn't put together any sustained offense. If they go home this weekend and do the same, they won't make it to a Game 5.

A few words about J.D. Martinez. Two years ago, he was the best player I saw in the Double-A Texas League and in the Corpus Christi Hooks' lineup. That's saying something, because one of his teammates was 2B Jose Altuve, who was almost as good in the Texas League as he was as this year's AL leader in batting average, hits and stolen bases.

This season didn't start out well for Martinez. The Astros released him. The Tigers signed him. After Martinez tore up the Triple-A International League, Detroit called him up and he almost immediately began to hit.

He talked about how he reconstructed his swing during the off-season. After he joined the Tigers, I asked him whether he went back more to the hitting style he used at Corpus Christi, and he said it was similar. He indicated that the Astros and hitting coach Dave Mallee wanted Martinez to hit more to the opposite field. He had trouble doing that, partly because he couldn't change his swing adequately and partly because he was resistant.

Another time-consuming task Thursday was running playoff fantasty drafts for the three Inner League Baseball leagues.

In those leagues, which began a year before Rotisserie Leagues, our starting lineup is one player in each of nine statistical categories. I'm in the playoffs in two of the leagues. In one of them, J.D. Martinez is in my lineup for RBI. In the other, he's my HR guy. It appears that I did something right.