Is There Doom With No Zoom?

They're dropping like flies in Detroit.

Detroit Lions: Guard Damien Woody -- gone for the season. Something the matter with his foot.

Guard Ross Verba -- hardly played this season. Hamstring problems.

Tackle Rex Tucker -- also mostly MIA.

Receiver Roy Williams -- missed most of the last game with a "stinger", that injury unique to football players.

Detroit Tigers: First baseman Sean Casey -- out for the rest of the ALCS. A calf muscle that has torn a little bit, but enough to cause problems.

Now pitcher Joel Zumaya. Zoom Zoom. The 21 year-old wonder. The thrower of 103 mph BB's. Out for a few days -- forearm/wrist trouble.

Zumaya was held out of last night's ALCS Game 2 because of soreness in the lower arm/wrist area. In hockey playoffs it would have been slyly called an "upper body injury." But in baseball, as in football, we work in specifics, or at least descriptive generalities. And Zumaya's injury is troublesome enough to render him out of action for at least Game 3. And with no more days off until Monday -- unless the Tigers sweep -- Zumaya may miss the next two or three games.

This is not insignificant. Zumaya gives manager Jim Leyland one of the game's most precious commodities: a guy who can practically give you a strikeout on demand in the 7th or 8th inning. The reason it would be absolute folly to make Joel Zumaya a closer is this: the outs Zoom Zoom gets are usually far more important and pressure-packed than those Todd Jones is asked to get. Zumaya usually enters the game with runners in scoring position and less than two outs. A situation that cries for a strikeout, or a pop up. And more often than not, Zumaya provides it, snuffing out a rally and ripping the heart out of the opponent in the process. He did it to the Yankees in Game 2 of the ALDS. In Yankee Stadium.

But the Tigers aren't going to go into the tank because Zumaya is lost to them for a weekend. The committee that would replace him -- Fernando Rodney, Jason Grilli, and Jamie Walker most notably -- are capable, if not as ostentatious as Zumaya. It's a loss, but one that can be absorbed. A 2-0 series lead makes it so, more so.

Hurry back, Zoom Zoom, but the fort will be held down without you. The way things are going now, Leyland could summon 63 year-old John Hiller and get some outs.