NEW YORK -- This couldn’t be the same Tigers team that just left Detroit lamenting close losses over a .500 homestand.
This couldn’t be the same Yankees team that took two of three at Comerica Park a week ago.
And yet, here they were.
Sometimes there’s a danger in two teams playing two series against each other in a short span, that one team might run into the other at just the right time and take advantage. But sometimes, the clock seems to flip.
“We really believe that we can put together a really good stretch of games,” manager A.J. Hinch said before Monday night’s 7-3 win at Yankee Stadium.
Arguably no team does a better job of putting a bad game behind it and focusing on the task at hand than the Tigers, who have heard Hinch talk about winning the day’s game for several years running. But also, few teams are as ruthless as Detroit when it senses an opportunity to pounce on a team having a bad night.
It explains how the Tigers (36-49) entered Monday with the second-worst record in the American League, 14 games under .500, yet finished the night as one of just six AL teams with a positive run differential.
“That’s a tough question to answer,” said Tarik Skubal, who will try to continue the momentum Tuesday night and avenge his loss to the Yankees from last Wednesday. “I could sit here and say it’s encouraging, and we’re playing really tight baseball games, and we know what caliber of team we are. But at the end of the day, results matter. Winning baseball games matter.”
Monday looked more like the Tigers team that swept the Rays at Tropicana Field at the start of June than the team that lost five of its past six.
“We’ve had some good stretches, and we’ve had some tough, close losses,” Hinch said before the game. “But then, you set into your reality of where we are, and some of the difficulties we’ve had getting to the finish line in some games. …
“We feel like we have a good team. We feel like we have winnable games that are there for us.”
Detroit scored seven runs over Monday’s first four innings, but just two runs were earned thanks to a pair of errors. Yet to characterize it as the Tigers pouncing on a bad defensive night from their hosts would be oversimplifying it.
Detroit drove in three runs on two-out hits with runners in scoring position, ran the bases with the opportunism of a team trying to crawl back into the playoff picture before the Trade Deadline and played a clean game behind a quietly efficient Casey Mize, who struck out 10 Yankees over seven scoreless innings of one-hit ball, six days after allowing four runs on eight hits over 5 2/3 innings in a 4-3 loss to the Yankees.
Consider Hao-Yu Lee, who seemed on his way out of the game after writhing in pain on a slide into second base on a first-inning double. Not only did Lee stay in the game, he drove in two runs with a two-out single the next inning.
The Tigers even played with a hint of swagger, with Kevin McGonigle dapping hands with a fan after leaning over the tarp to catch a Cody Bellinger fly ball in the seventh.