DETROIT -- Kerry Carpenter couldn’t have picked a better week to be back from the injured list.
Carpenter loves hitting at Tropicana Field, where he contributed a home run and three RBIs during the Tigers’ three-game series sweep of the Rays to begin the week. And he loves hitting Mariners pitching, which he did again on Friday night with a go-ahead two-run homer off Bryan Woo in the third inning in a 7-3 win at Comerica Park.
The Tigers, who hadn’t won consecutive games in a month until this week, have won four in a row, their longest winning streak since mid-April. Their turn coincides with the return to health for Carpenter, who sprained his left shoulder crashing into the right-field sidewall in Kansas City in May, and Gleyber Torres, whose left oblique strain cost him about four weeks.
Friday marked the first meeting between the Tigers and M’s since their incredible 15-inning battle in Game 5 of the American League Division Series, in which Carpenter not only accounted for both Tiger runs on a homer, but four of their eight hits.
Add together Carpenter’s ALDS performance and his regular-season work, and he has nine career home runs and 19 RBIs in 16 games against Seattle pitching.
The only Mariners starter he seemingly hadn’t figured out was Woo, who had struck Carpenter out three times in as many at-bats during their lone previous meeting on Aug. 14, 2024. Woo fanned him again in his first at-bat Friday, getting him on a 97-mph fastball.
Woo seemingly had Carpenter thinking first-pitch fastball when he came back up in the third inning. Woo put a slider at the bottom of the zone that Carpenter missed. Woo went back to the slider, seemingly wanting to bury it, but put it right on the inside corner. Carpenter turned on it and sent his eighth homer of the season into the right-field seats to put the Tigers ahead for good.
Woo settled down from there before three consecutive one-out singles from the bottom of Detroit’s lineup chased him in the seventh. Torres, who returned from the injured list to go 4-for-9 at Tampa Bay, greeted Eduard Bazardo with a line drive over Victor Robles and off the right-field wall for a two-run double
Seattle rallied with single runs off Drew Anderson in the seventh inning and Tyler Holton in the eighth, but Spencer Torkelson’s two-run homer off Alex Hoppe with one out in the bottom of the eighth put the game away.