After limping out of Kansas City bruised and full of more question-marks than The Riddler, the Tigers went to New York City to face the Mets, who have been terrible so far. Well, the questions kept coming as fast as the Mets scored runs in this one, with the New Yorkers besting the Detroiters by a 10-2 score.
Opening the series on the mound for the visitors was Jack Flaherty, who had a better start in his last outing, against the Red Sox: he gave up four runs, sure, and he slipped a bit in an inning
that was threatening to get completely out of control, but when he was on, he was absolutely locked-in. He struck out the first five and the last four batters he faced, which has got to be some sort of first. In a rotation full of chaos, the Tigers absolutely need Flaherty to give them solid innings. Sadly, tonight, he didn’t give too many.
Freddy Peralta faced Flaherty in Flushing; the righty is in his ninth year in the major leagues, and his first with the Mets after spending eight years in Milwaukee. He’s dependable: he’ll keep extra-base hits down (especially home runs), he’ll give you six solid innings, and while his strikeout rate is down a bit this season, it’s still about one per inning. His final three years with the Brewers were a really nice run: a 3.40 ERA, WHIP of 1.136, and 10.7 K/9 innings, making thirty or more starts each of those years.
The Tigers opened the scoring in the second with a Dillon Dingler dinger.
The Tigers kept the party going: Wenceel Pérez singled, Gage Workman doubled, and Spencer Torkelson hit a fly ball deep enough to plate Pérez for a 2-0 lead. With two outs Kevin McGonigle walked to put two runners back on base, but Matt Vierling flew out to end the inning and this party was about to have someone put something awful in the punch bowl.
The bottom of the second saw Flaherty get into trouble… and this is the kind of situation that has had the potential to spin out of control for him: a leadoff walk and a single, and some big misses of the strike zone against Marcus Semien. Semien harmlessly lined-out, but A.J. Ewing walked in his first-ever major-league plate appearance to load the bases with one out. A sharp grounder to shortstop saw the Tigers try to turn a double play, and despite a fantastic turn at second base by Zach McKinstry, the throw to first wasn’t in time and a run came in to score. A harmless fly ball to shallow centre limited the damage, but it was clear that Flaherty was nowhere near as dialed-in as he was in his previous start.
The trouble followed Flaherty and his shaky fastball into the third, with a pair of singles to put runners on the corners. Another single plated the tying run, and after a pair of hard-hit outfield outs, a wild pitch pushed Juan Soto up a base to put runners on the corners. But a Semien grounder to shortstop saw McGonigle make a nice play and throw for the third out.
Again, in the bottom of the fourth, traffic on the basepaths produced a run: a one-out double-single combination pushed the Mets ahead 3-2. He stuck around to strike out Bo Bichette, and departed in favour of Tyler Holton to face the lefty Soto. Holton did the job, getting Soto to not-quite check his swing at a low-and-away sweeper for strike three. Thus, Flaherty’s final line: 3 2/3 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 3 BB, 2 K. That’s… not great.
You know what else wasn’t great? Colt Keith on the basepaths in the top of the fifth. He singled with two out, and he went first-to-third on a Riley Greene single to right-fielder Carson Benge. Benge’s throw skipped a bit past the third baseman; Keith took off for home, forgetting that Peralta was (quite correctly) backing-up third base, but he also managed to run into an umpire on the base path, which also didn’t help, and he was thrown trying to score.
Shoot, it looks like Keith also took a pretty good forearm to the left side of his jaw, too. That’ll learn ya.
Holton carried on and had a 1-2-3 fifth; Burch Smith took over in the sixth and struck out Semien, but walked the next two batters and an infield single loaded the bases. A ground ball found Workman at third; he threw to second to start what probably would’ve been an inning-ending double play, but he airmailed the throw into right field, two runs scored, and Smith departed a 5-2 game. That was really the play that put the game ultimately out of reach for the Tigers. Enmanuel De Jesus took over, a grounder to first got another out but allowed another run to score; a sharp liner to Vierling in centre ended the inning with the Tigers in a 6-2 hole.
They started the seventh against a new pitcher, Brooks Raley, and suddenly showed signs of life: with one out Hao-Yu Lee singled, and McGonigle followed with a double to put two runners in scoring position. Alas, a popup to second base and a strikeout ended the inning with those two runners staying right where they were.
In the bottom of the seventh the Mets tacked-on: with two out and a runner on first, Ewing — who’d already walked twice in his debut — tripled to the right-field corner to make it 7-2 and chase De Jesus. Ricky Vanasco was brought in to stop any further damage, which he did not, as he surrendered a single to score Ewing for an 8-2 tally.
They scored even more runs in the eighth in ways I’d rather not describe. At least Jake Rogers got to pitch in this one, getting the final out in the bottom of the eighth. He touched a cool 80 mph on his fastball, but sadly we didn’t get to see his sterling knuckleball.
Final score: Mets 10, Tigers 2
M*A*S*H Update
Oodles of Minutiae
- In case you missed it, Gary Jones and his toothpick were named as the new manager of the Toledo Mud Hens.
- In the second inning, Kevin McGonigle walked. That was his 24th walk in the year, against 21 strikeouts. That is an impressive stat, and doubly so for a rookie. I can’t wait to see what he’s capable of in the years to come.
- Colt Keith came into tonight’s game with a .304 batting average. If you’re not into some more advanced stats, though, here’s how they can be useful: his Batting Average on Balls in Play (BAbip) is .386. A normal value of that these days is around .285, which means he’s getting lucky. He’s also not getting too many extra-base hits, which isn’t great, but his hard-hit percentage is 46.0% (average is 40.0%), which is good.
- Towards the end of this miserable contest, on the radio broadcast Dan Dickerson read off the standard “without written consent” blurb, which I have always found puzzling. (Isn’t this an “account or description” of such a game?) Anyway, Dickerson mused that, if you wanted to get written consent from MLB to do whatever it is people do that need this legal disclaimer, you’d be better off picking a game other than this one.
- Happy birthday to probably the weirdest of the Kids in the Hall, Bruce McCulloch. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to battle Satan in a guitar showdown, learn about the Daves he knows, or get advice on your 13th birthday from your drunk dad, Bruce has got you covered.
- It’s also Lou Whitaker’s birthday, and every single day that guy isn’t in the Hall of Fame is a pretty lousy day.
