DETROIT -- Sometimes in baseball you just get beat.
That’s what Ross Stripling has been facing lately, first in a tough loss to the Reds last Wednesday and now in a 5-1 loss to the Tigers on Monday afternoon at Comerica Park.
Stripling put together a solid outing, allowing three runs in six-plus innings for his second consecutive quality start. He threw 87 pitches, the most he’s thrown since returning from the injured list after missing more than a month with a low back strain, and pitched into the seventh for the first time this season. For the Giants, it was a fairly encouraging sign: after struggling mightily to start the season, Stripling’s ERA since his return is 3.91.
But it was a start that could have -- or perhaps should have -- gone better.
“At the end of the day, [I] still kept us in the game, so I feel like I did my job, thanks to some hustle, some great defensive plays from [Michael] Conforto and [Austin] Slater in some big spots,” Stripling said. “Overall, I feel like I’m pretty much back to myself. … But yeah, there’s some spots in there where I wish I could have gotten a big strikeout or that kind of stuff, kept it under three.”
For the second straight start, Stripling couldn’t seem to catch a break, as the slightest of mistakes downgraded his outing from excellent to pretty good. After a three-run homer on Wednesday marked the entirety of the scoring against him, Stripling ran into misfortune of a different kind against Detroit: he made his pitches, but the Tigers hit them.
Facing catcher Jake Rogers to lead off the bottom of the third, Stripling opened the at-bat with a perfectly located slider on the outside corner at the knees, but he didn’t get the call. He followed with a fastball and painted the outside corner for a called strike, then after a changeup away, evened up the count with another perfectly located slider in the same spot. With a 2-2 count, Stripling painted another fastball, this time on the inside corner above the belt, but Rogers managed to muscle it into center field at an exit velocity 66.4 mph.
After Zach McKinstry flied out, Stripling got ahead of Riley Greene 1-2, then placed another changeup perfectly on the outside corner at the knees. But Greene, one of the toughest outs in the Majors since the beginning of May, shot it into center for a single.
Stripling got the second out of the inning when Spencer Torkelson lined out to center, then faced Kerry Carpenter with a chance to escape the frame. With a 1-1 count, Stripling landed another changeup at the bottom of the zone. Carpenter couldn’t do much with it: his grounder had an expected batting average of .220, per Statcast. But it snuck between first and second base, bringing home the Giants’ second run.
In the fifth, the story was similar. With two outs, Greene swung at a fastball on the inside corner and grounded it to right for a single. Torkelson then reached on a squibbed infield single to second. Stripling finally slipped up against Carpenter, who lined a middle-middle curve for another RBI single.
“I thought he threw great,” said manager Gabe Kapler. “I think he’s been throwing really well since he came off the IL, and throwing a ton of strikes, mixing up his pitches well, staying off barrels, being very aggressive and obviously getting built up more and more. Gave us a chance to win the game; we just weren’t able to get it done for him.”
Of course, just because a pitch is well-executed doesn’t mean it'll be successful against big league hitters. But all Stripling can do is make his pitches as well as he can. So a start like this one is simultaneously frustrating, because Stripling’s best wasn’t enough, and encouraging, because he executed his pitches in the way he wanted. In the long run, that will be a necessary ingredient for sustained success. The other ingredient? A dash of good luck.
“Days like that are definitely where you wish your strength is having strikeout stuff,” Stripling said. “But that’s not who I am, so I’m going to have days like that, where stuff finds holes.”