DETROIT – Tarik Skubal dialed up the intensity level in his first start at Comerica Park in two months. After striking out Colson Montgomery to escape a bases-loaded jam with one run allowed in the fifth inning, the reigning American League Cy Young award winner pointed to the White Sox dugout and got in a shouting match with multiple players until manager A.J. Hinch led him back into the Tigers' dugout.
Maybe it was a response to the White Sox home run celebration. Or maybe it was an effort to fire up his own team, which had a golden opportunity to make up ground in the AL Central with a three-game series against the division co-leaders. If it was the latter, it might have worked. Kerry Carpenter’s blooper into shallow center field fell just out of Tristan Peters’ diving attempt for a two-run double in the sixth inning, lifting Detroit to a 4-3 win Friday night at Comerica Park.
Skubal entered Friday with a 5-0 record in five starts against the White Sox since his return from flexor tendon surgery in 2023. He had allowed five runs over 30 innings in that stretch, none of them on homers. No White Sox player had homered off Skubal since Luis Robert Jr. on July 8, 2022.
Not only did the White Sox end that streak by homering twice off of Skubal on Friday, they hit both off of changeups, a pitch he hadn’t given up a homer on all season entering the night. After Randal Grichuk homered in the first inning to open the scoring, Junior Perez powered Chicago in front with a sixth-inning solo homer. In between, they turned a flurry of singles into a fifth-inning tally before Skubal escaped further damage and entered trash-talking mode.
Matt Vierling’s two-run homer in the opening frame stood as Detroit’s lone offense until the Tigers struck in the sixth off Erick Fedde, who had retired nine in a row until Dillon Dingler’s leadoff single. Riley Greene’s one-out walk put the go-ahead run on base. Fedde got an infield popout from Carpenter and initially seemed like he had gotten the fly out he needed from Carpenter. But the ball was just shallow enough to elude Peters, who tried to make up for a split-second of hesitation with a diving attempt.
Carpenter’s blooper bounced in front of Peters and then got past him, allowing Greene to scramble home from first as left fielder Sam Antonacci scrambled to back up the play.
It was just the rally the Tigers needed after dropping four out of five on their road trip to fall back to the fringes of the playoff race with the Aug. 3 Trade Deadline inching closer.