Rogers reinvents himself as postseason ace, mentor

DETROIT -- The old guy ambled down the hallway with an ice pack on his left shoulder, then, after spotting his young protégé sitting in the Detroit Tigers players' dining room at Comerica Park, came to a sudden stop.

"Bon-do!" Kenny Rogers hollered as he made his way toward Jeremy Bonderman, who was born in 1982, the same year his 41-year-old teammate was drafted by the Texas Rangers. "Same game plan tomorrow," Rogers said as he pointed at Bonderman, just moments after the left-hander's masterful ALCS Game 3 performance against Oakland. "It's your game tomorrow."

On a frigid Detroit night, in front of yet another frenzied, white-towel waving Motown mob, Rogers did the improbable: he nearly topped his virtuoso performance from a week earlier against the New York Yankees. On Friday afternoon, the soft-tossing October intimidator wasn't throwing 94 mph fastballs -- he topped out at 89 mph -- but was as dominating as he painted the strike zone with dawdling changeups, tumbling curveballs, and sinking fastballs, and did so with the precision of a pointillist.

Said Oakland skipper Ken Macha, whose A's recorded two hits in Game 3, the fewest by a club in an LCS in two years, "When you can throw any of your pitches at any time for strikes and you're throwing them with sink on the fastball and good bite on your curveball and slider and great arm action on your changeup, it makes it difficult for hitters."

Rogers may not have the triple-digit heater his younger teammates possess but he has nonetheless embraced the mantra of the Tigers' pitching staff in this postseason: attack, attack, attack. On Friday night, Rogers threw 13 straight first-pitch strikes. "That's what our pitchers do, they go after hitters," says third baseman Brandon Inge. "That's our style. You have to attack these teams to beat them. You gotta go hard at them."

Like a nitpicking artist comparing two masterworks, Rogers after the game sized up his ALCS performance against his start against the Yankees. "Today I don't feel like I was better," he said. "I don't feel like I was maybe as good as I felt like I was against New York. I really felt like I had a much better fastball against New York, but I did locate in and out pretty well with changeups to both sides. Today [the] sinker wasn't great because it's very difficult to get a good feel with the baseball being cold. ... Curveball was adequate. It wasn't great, but I think in the latter couple of innings it got a little bit better and I got a few strikes out of it."

In Detroit, the reputed malcontent has reinvented himself not only as a postseason weapon but also as a mentor. "He got a bad rap for the incident a while back, but he's not like that at all," says Inge, referring to Rogers going Sean Penn on a cameraman in Arlington, Tex., last year. "After getting to know him, man, that's the furthest thing you would think he would do. It's not only on the field, it's when he's not starting, when he's sitting down watching the game, asking the guys, did you see that? He's talking to the pitchers all the time to keep every guy in the game. Things that he's learned over the years. He's like a 150 -- people better listen to him. People go up to him all the time -- he's very approachable. That's just the type of guy he is."