Lots of things have to go wrong to lose a game by six runs. There’s no one thing that would have made the difference. In some ways, that’s a relief because we don’t have to endlessly dissect a decision to leave George Kirby in to face Kerry Carpenter or whether Julio Rodríguez should have danced his way out of a tag. And so it was today, as the Mariners fell to the Tigers in Game 4 of the ALDS, forcing a Game 5 in Seattle on Friday.
But we start with the player I was most nervous about coming into
the game: Bryce Miller. Miller has had a difficult year, battling through the pain of a bone spur in his throwing elbow which necessitated two separate trips to the Injured List. When he has been available, he has looked like a greatly diminished version of the pitcher we’d come to know over his first two seasons. Most notably, he had trouble commanding his excellent fastball, a problem that usually worsened as a game went on. He wouldn’t have even gotten a postseason start if Bryan Woo had a faster bounceback from the strained pec he sustained while curb-stomping the Astros at the end of September.
Spitting on those expectations, Miller was excellent today. He averaged 97 with his fastball in the first inning and his splitter was splitting to go along with it. He completed the inning in 13 pitches with a pop-up, a strikeout, and a weak ground ball. The strikeout included a middle-middle fastball to Gleybar Torres, and my first thought was, “Boy, he got away with one there.” But then I realized that wasn’t really true. Even down the chute, Torres looked completely overmatched by it. It had been so long since Miller’s fastball looked like this that I forgot just how dominant he can be when he has it.
Yet Miller has looked good in the first inning several times this year; it’s mostly been later that he’s gotten into trouble. He has an xwOBA of .271 for the first inning this year, which spikes to .385 in the third or later. And most pitchers have a little extra juice in the first inning of a playoff game as the adrenaline shoots through their veins. So it was a beautiful sight to see Miller maintain that velo and the positive results for another three innings. He even touched 98 in the second.
The closest he came to a jam through his first four innings was a leadoff single from Gleybar Torres in the fourth, struck at 101.5 off the bat. But even then, Josh Naylor cleaned it up with a high-baseball-IQ unassisted double play. Naylor fielded a groundball and Torres retreated back to first. Naylor tagged Torres, ensuring that there was still a force at first base, then stepped on the base to record the second out. If he’d done that in the other order, Torres would have been safe at first. These things seem so basic when you’re watching the game on your couch, but I have seen MLB players mess it up countless times or at least need someone yelling in their ear. I remember similar play from 2019 when Ryon Healy fielded the ball and he said after the game that he was overwhelmed by the moment and was grateful that Dee Strange-Gordon was yelling at him what to do, saying it was as if Dee was controlling him in a video game. Naylor looked cool as a cucumber.
So Miller made it through four innings and was staked to a 3-0 lead (which we’ll get to). But his velocity was starting to dip just a little, with more 95s and even some 94s. It would have been reasonable to pull him and bring in Emerson Hancock to try to get through a couple more innings. But 94-95 is still OK for Miller, and he had looked good enough to get a chance to keep going. Given the velocity dip and the margin for error, though, I personally would have had him on a first-base-runner-to-reach leash.
But with 5-6-7 due up, Dan Wilson seemed committed to letting him go through all three before turning things over to the lefty Gabe Speier for Parker Meadows, Javier Baez, and Kerry Carpenter batting at 8-9-1, and I get that thinking. Certainly the leadoff single that Miller allowed to Spencer Torkelson wasn’t particularly alarming because Miller had hit 95.3 in the at-bat, and the splitter Tork hit was on the bottom rail, which he only hit at 76 mph. Miller even got the double-play ball after that, but it was hit too slowly so the defense had to settle for a fielder’s choice. It was the Dillon Dingler double that followed, hit at 109, that would have gotten even the least aggressive manager to pull Miller from the game even if Wilson weren’t already planning on it.
Overall, however, Miller was excellent, exceeding even my wildest expectations for what he might pull off. Though he was ultimately charged with two runs on four hits while recording just two strikeouts over 4.1 innings, that line does not do credit to the quality of his pitching, even before you consider the low expectations. In a game where a lot went wrong, the player I was most nervous about is the one I hold most blameless for the loss.
And then the bullpen came in. After combining for five innings in which they retired fifteen of the sixteen batters they’d faced with seven strikeouts over the first three games of this series, the Tigers were ready for what they were going to see from the usually reliable Gabe Speier and Eduard Bazardo. First, pinch-hitter Jamai Jones and Javier Baez jumped on a couple of Speier fastballs to drive two runs and tie the game at three. After getting out of the inning, Wilson left Speier in to face the lefty Riley Greene, who, seeing Speier for the third time in five days, pounced on a slider for a home run that gave Detroit the lead. Then the Tigers battered Bazardo to the tune of four hits, three for extra bases, concluding with a home run. By the time the sixth inning was over, the score was 7-3 Detroit and the momentum was firmly on the Tigers’ side.
The big cats tagged on another two runs off Carlos Vargas in the final innings, but the game was already functionally over. It feels bad seeing the game slip away behind the guys who have been so reliable over the regular season and especially down the stretch. But I am reminded that this is how it always goes in the playoffs. Every playoff team has plenty of good players and they use those players in the important spots. Since one of the teams has to lose every game, that inevitably means reliable players will take the fall when a team loses a postseason game.
None of this would have been such a big deal if the offense had delivered more than the three runs they put together over the first half of the game. It actually started promisingly enough with Josh Naylor leading off the second inning with a convincing double for his first hit of the postseason. (For getting the offense started and the double play, Naylor wins today’s Sun Hat Award for a notable contribution to the game.) Dominic Canzone drove him in with a single, and a Víctor Robles walk that same inning meant that Tigers’ starter Casey Mize had thrown almost 40 pitches through his first two innings.
Although the Mariners had only gotten one across, AJ Hinch saw Mize not looking especially sharp and pulled him after just three, as elimination games become bullpen games in the blink of an eye. First up was Tyler Holton, who loaded the bases to the first and only three batters he’d be allowed to see. After he was replaced with Kyle Finnegan, Víctor Robles grounded into a double play. It did score a run, but that one being all the Mariners got out of a bases-loaded-nobody-out situation was the pendulum on which the game swung in retrospect. Finnegan got another four outs and then rookie Troy Melton utterly flattened the Mariners across three innings of work. If the Mariners bats had been able to do anything against him, it might have arrested the hit parade Mo Town was on, but it seemed like the Tigers hitters were always up over the last half of the game, which made it hard to stop the bleeding.
Fortunately, you don’t get an extra win for winning convincingly, so the Tigers were only able to tie the series up at 2-2. Unfortunately, that means Friday’s Game 5 in Seattle is a winner-take-all affair with the Tigers lined up to start the best pitcher in baseball, Tarik Skubal. That’s not an appetizing thought, especially as we and the Mariners have to sit through an off day stewing on the ugly loss today. But on the other hand, it’s not as if all is lost just because Skubal is pitching. He can be beaten. Just ask the Mariners.
