One is the loneliest number.

Especially for a baseball manager, who looks around for a substitute in the dugout, and realizes he has none.

When the Tigers head out to the field Saturday night, Jim Leyland will be surrounded in the dugout by a handful of starting pitchers, a sprinkling of walking wounded, and one useable sub: Ramon Santiago.

Even the Tigers emergency catcher, Don Kelly, will be in the field.

“He’s in left field. I don’t have any players. (Andy) Dirks can’t play. (Gerald) Laird can’t play. Now Alex (Avila) can’t play. That means I’ve got one guy on the bench tonight,” Leyland said before the game. “Somebody gets hurt, and I’m going to have Eddie Feigner and the King and his Court.”

That reference was to the popular touring softball exhibition, where Feigner (the King) would pitch, backed only by a shortstop, a first baseman and a catcher.

It seems like that’s been the Tigers lately — lots of holes, and not enough bodies to fill them.

Dirks hasn’t been in the lineup since Tuesday with a sore Achilles tendon.

Avila came out of Thursday’s game after getting smoked in the mask by a foul tip, was given Friday off in favor of Laird and new call-up Omir Santos, but was a late scratch from Saturday’s lineup when his right hamstring tightened up.

Laird started Friday’s game at designated hitter, but came out with a hamstring strain of his own after legging out an infield hit.

That left Santos to catch for the second straight day. He caught Friday’s game because of his familiarity with call-up Casey Crosby, who was taking the injured Doug Fister’s spot in the rotation.

“It seems like we’re either having to play short, for some reason, or make moves all the time, which is not a good thing. ... To be honest with you, I didn’t think June 1st, we’d be pitching Crosby and catching Santos. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. Just because of the way things have turned out, and a couple injuries, we’ve had to do a lot of improvising,” Leyland said.

In all, the Tigers have already made 20 transactions with their big-league roster just two months into the season.

“This isn’t bad. You live with this. You don’t make a big deal about it. You just move forward. I think the more the manager talks about stuff like that, the more it affects your team. So it doesn’t make any difference,” Leyland said.

“You’re talking to your general manager and your assistant general manager a lot more, because you’re always making moves. You’re talking to Toledo a little too much to be honest with you. Sometimes you just can’t help those things.”

Avila’s absence was the most disconcerting, since it came out of nowhere.

“It is bad luck, basically. It’s frustrating because I can’t place a time on when it happened and I know how bad I need to be in the lineup right now,” Avila said. “I started to some running and stuff and I just couldn't. I was afraid that I was really going to hurt myself.”

Laird knew he’d hurt himself trying to hustle down the first-base line, choosing to dive head-first into first base rather than run through the bag, and risk straining it more. He said as much to Leyland, when he came out to check.

“I just felt a little tweak, nothing like I’ve had in the past, where I pulled one, so I’m hoping it’ll be just a couple of days,” Laird said after Friday’s game, admitting he didn’t think the injury was worth of a stint on the disabled list. “I don’t think so, but obviously our hands are tied as a team right now, with some of the guys that are down, and guys that can’t go. But I told them how I feel. ... I feel like I can be back ready to go by at least Tuesday.”

Dirks’ injury is the second lingering problem he’s had to his lower body. He fought through a hamstring injury of his own earlier this season, only to have another part flare up.

“I don’t know if it’s because I was favoring my left leg for a while. It got sore, but we were treating it, and stuff, then the day in Boston, about halfway through the game, it started barking worse and worse and worse, to where it was hurting jogging off and on the field. I was feeling it good. Then running down to first, running the bases and stuff, it was pretty painful,” said Dirks, who got an MRI Friday that showed inflammation in the tendon, but no further damage.

All three are day-to-day, but there could be a roster move soon out of necessity. There were rumors of one Friday night, when outfielder Matt Young was pulled out of the game in Triple-A Toledo.

“I was asked to take Matt out pending a possible move. The move didn’t happen,” Mud Hens manager Phil Nevin told the Toledo Blade’s John Wagner Saturday.

The move was likely nixed because of the injury to Laird.

“Sometimes, you gotta put things on hold," Leyland said.

Young would have to have his contract purchased, and be added to the 40-man roster, should the Tigers call him up. The organization made room for that possibility Saturday afternoon, transferring reliever Daniel Schlereth from the 15-day DL to the 60-day DL.

None of the news is all that good for a team that had pretensions of being a World Series contender, but all is not lost, either.

“We’ve got over 100 games left, and no one’s really running away with our division, and we’ve just gotta tread water. Being a part of a team last year, we just treaded water until the end, we got hot. Next thing you know, we’re playing for the World Series,” said Laird, who was with the World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals last year.

“This team is definitely capable of doing what that team did last year. I mean, look around the clubhouse, look at the faces we’ve got. It’s just one of those things, just tread water. Just stay in it, stay in it, because we’re going to get hot. Every team does, and especially a team like this is going to get hot. Just stay right where we’re at, and just play one game at a time, and when we get healthy, hopefully things will take off.”