Tigers hope to turn the World Series tide at home

• The Tigers will give the ball to ALCS Game 2 winner Anibal Sanchez Saturday night
• The Tigers won 50 games at Detroit's Comerica Park this season and only 38 on the road
• After facing back-to-back lefties, the Tigers finally get to face right-handed starters

The pitcher got hit in the head with a ball. The catcher got hit in the head with a bat. The first baseman misjudged a slide into home plate and the third baseman crushed a line-drive right into the glove of the man they call Kung Fu Panda.

There was a bunt that stayed fair when it looked as if it wouldn't and an easy groundball that caromed off the third-base bag and into the outfield. It was all enough for the Tigers to wonder whether the baseball gods were frowning. No wonder they couldn't wait to get out of California on Thursday night.

A week ago the Tigers had swept into the World Series by brooming the New York Yankees. So much possibility hung in the air. Then the ball started taking unfavorable bounces, and the Tigers' bats went silent — not for the first time this season — and the team's ace got shelled, mostly by the man known as the Panda, and the Tigers lost the first two games.

None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the Tigers this unpredictable and crazy season. But none of it matters, either, especially not Saturday night, as the Tigers attempt to salvage this series at Comerica Park in Game 3 when Anibal Sanchez takes the mound.

"It's been tough," said Gerald Laird, the catcher who get smacked in the head with a bat; he is OK — his catcher's helmet softened the blow. "It's gonna be nice to get home and play in front of our crowd.… where it's nice and loud, where we are comfortable."

Now it's the Tigers' turn to sleep in their own beds and spend the day with family and friends and play in a park where they can use their designated hitter.… and remove Delmon Young from the outfield. This means Detroit gets an extra bat in the lineup and the pitcher no longer has to hit. Not that Justin Verlander and Doug Fister fared any worse than the regular Tigers batters — Detroit managed just two hits Thursday night.

The Tigers scored three runs in two games at AT&T Park. You can blame the lack of a DH if you want. You can blame the soft-tossing left-handed starters employed by the Giants and Detroit's season-long struggles to hit this kind of pitcher.

Or you can blame the time change, the alluring view from the ballpark, the blue skies, the mountains, the shimmering bay and the affable fans who turned the most festive ballpark in the country into their own orange-and-black tinted Mardi Gras. Personally, this sportswriter blames the Dungeness crab panini for tasting so good.

Now that the games are back in Michigan — only the fourth World Series here since 1945 — Detroit has a chance to put its own imprint on the series. In the postgame clubhouse Thursday night, no Tigers player doubted they could come back against the Giants.

It's what they've done all year.

The Tigers won 50 games at Comerica Park this season. They won only 38 on the road. For whatever reason, the Tigers pitch and hit better at home. Most teams do, of course, but few teams showed such a disparity between home and away.

Yes, the team will have to win at least one game on the road to win this series, and very likely two. But as Miguel Cabrera said, if "we can the first one then I think it's gonna be a different story."

Detroit's Triple Crown winner — Cabrera had one hit in the first two games, although he did draw two walks — said he and his teammates needed to be more aggressive at the plate.

"Our game is a little slow right now," he said. "We need to pick it up. We have to play better."

The good news is that the Tigers finally will get to face right-handed pitchers. The bad news is that Ryan Vogelsong and Matt Cain are the Giants' two best pitchers. Yet maybe their extra velocity could help Detroit's hitters — righties traditionally throw harder than lefties.

Cabrera, for example, hits righties better than lefties, despite being a righty himself — of his 44 homers this year, only four came off left-handed pitchers. Prince Fielder, a lefty, hits right-handed pitching better, too. When asked whether he was looking forward to seeing some, Fielder said, "I guess.… mostly I'm looking forward to getting a win."

Fielder pointed out that the Tigers hadn't played all that poorly in San Francisco in their 8-3 and 2-0 losses.

"I don't think we lost," he said. "We got beat.

"There is a difference. We just couldn't come up with the runs."

Their chance to do that should be better tonight. With Vogelsong on the mound, expect to see Andy Dirks and Quintin Berry back in the lineup — and in the corners of the outfield; Young, a weak fielder, will go back to the designated hitter role. Left-handed-hitting catcher Alex Avila also should be back in the lineup.

That's gap-power and speed and defense that Detroit couldn't consistently put on the field in San Francisco. Now that the Tigers are back in an American League park, where AL rules apply, this should theoretically help them.

Then again, theories don't win baseball games.

Players do. And Detroit's players have been making plays at unexpected times all season. They went from prohibitive favorites to underachievers to scrappy and resilient in a matter of weeks. Yes, the labels are unfair. But don't think this team isn't aware of what it did to reach this point.

"We've been able to pull out wins regardless," Avila said. "We just haven't been able to do it the first couple of games."

The trick now, he said, "is to think about getting one win, to try to win each inning, to relax and swing at strikes. We have no choice but to move on."

No, they don't.

The last time a team won the World Series after losing the first two games was in 1996, when the Yankees beat the Atlanta Braves. That series ended in six.

The Tigers, of course, aren't worried about winning four in a row.

They want Game 3.

Get that, Laird said, "and we get the ball to (Max) Scherzer and Verlander. And I like our chances."

Shawn Windsor also writes for the Detroit Free Press