The Tigers started their post-Gage Workman era with a three-game series in Seattle against the Mariners after a day off on Monday. The pitching was magnificent and the hitters more than did their part, especially late, as the Tigers rolled to an easy 8-0 victory in the series opener.
The Tigers’ starting pitcher was Troy Melton. The young right-hander was coming off a sensational performance against the Orioles in which he pitched seven shutout innings and giving up a mere trio of hits, walking two
and whiffing five. He had a fantastic July: five starts, 29 1/3 innings, three earned runs, and one single home run surrendered. Curiously, by WHIP (walks + hits per inning pitched), it was actually his worst month, as his per-month WHIP went 0.947, 0.800, 1.023 (after missing all of April). I know that’s a cherry-picked statistic, but it’s my recap and I’ll do what I like.
Emerson Hancock took the mound for the Mariners, and he’s been solid so far. He had a great seven-shutout-inning start himself in July, at home against the Blue Jays, and his WHIP for the season was a meagre 1.042 coming into tonight. He made his debut in 2022, and the biggest thing that jumps out about his statistics this year is a significant uptick in strikeouts per nine innings: last year it was a pedestrian 6.4, but this year it’s a more-robust 8.3.
After walking the leadoff hitter in the first, Melton really dialed-in his stuff, efficiently mowing down the Mariners. His four-seam fastball was hitting 97 mph, and he had both his cutter and changeup working against both lefties and righties.
In the top of the third Zach McKinstry led off with a double, and Kevin McGonigle’s grounder to second advanced McKinstry to third with one out. Gleyber Torres hit a chopper to shortstop and McKinstry immediately broke for home; a perfect throw barely got McKinstry at the plate for the second out, and the Tigers really should have challenged the call. Dillon Dingler singled to push Torres up to second; Riley Greene hit a grounder to the shortstop’s right, and Colt Emerson tried an off-balance throw to second base but it got away from him, allowing Torres to score.
Colt Keith then followed with a two-run single to make it 3-0. You gotta love it when errors are capitalized-upon.
In the top of the fourth, Max Clark made a lovely sliding, tumbling catch. He was playing deep but made up a ton of ground in a hurry, reaching a peak sprint speed of 30.1 ft/s (33.0 km/h, 9.17 m/s), per Jason Beck, per Statcast, per sophisticated cameras and computers.
With a single and a walk, the Mariners got runners on first and second with one out in the fourth. But Melton got Josh Naylor to strike out on a low splitter, and Cal Raleigh waved and missed at an outside changeup, and that was that for the threat.
Greene extended the lead in the top of the fifth with a one-out solo home run to centre for a 4-0 score. It was his sixteenth home run of the ear.
Melton looked great and capitalized on the Mariners trying to be aggressive early in counts: plenty of first- and second-pitch grounders kept his pitch count low and let him cruise through seven shutout innings, surrendering three hits, walking a pair, and striking out four. Fantastic.
Jacob Waugespack came in for the eighth and gave up a two-out walk, but otherwise did a mighty fine job at keeping Mariners hitters off-balance.
Seranthony Domínguez made his debut for the Mariners and let’s just say it didn’t go well for him, as the Tigers got to him pretty good. Javier Báez, whose swagger and confidence I really missed in his absence, challenged a full-count strike pitch to lead off the top of the ninth and was successful, getting on via a walk. McKinstry singled up the middle off the second baseman’s glove to push Báez up to third, and McGonigle’s grounder to second allowed Báez to score, putting the Tigers up 5-0. Torres followed with a two-run home run to left to make it 7-0, and Dingler followed that with a home run of his own for an 8-0 score.
Greene singled and Keith walked, and that was it for Domínguez. Cole Wilcox took over and got a pair of strikeouts to end the inning but plenty of damage had been done by that point.
Yilber Díaz, a waiver pickup from the Diamondbacks in June, made his new-team debut in the bottom of the ninth in a low-pressure situation. He struck out his first batter on a 98-mph fastball, but then he served-up a single and walked Naylor. However, Raleigh looked at a perfect bottom-rail strike three for the second out, and a challenged ball on a 2-2 count was overturned to a strike for the final out of the game.
Final score: Tigers 8, Mariners 0
How hot have the bats been?
Very!
Numbers and Notes
- I looked at the standings in the American League as a whole lately, and of course much has been said of the Tigers being 2.5 games out of the final Wild Card entering tonight. But something else jumped out at me, that I’d heard bandied-about: the Tigers had the second-biggest Run Differential in the league, only behind the Yankees.
- Tigers bench coach George Lombard’s son, George Jr., made his major-league debut tonight with the Yankees — and he hit a home run! George Sr. managed to make it to New York for the game.
- A certain ex-Tigers left-handed pitcher made his debut for the Dodgers tonight: 6 IP, 4 H, 2 R, 2 BB, 6 K. The Dodgers lost to the Cubs 5-1. Make of that what you will.
- On this day in 1914, both Belgium and the British Empire declared war on Germany after the Germans invaded Belgium. This happened a bit more than a month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated; the complex set of treaties between nations in Europe ended up precipitating the Great War, and this was a big event in its evolution.
