DETROIT -- While a handful of Tigers were out for early batting practice Tuesday afternoon at Comerica Park, manager Ron Gardenhire took the mound for some tosses. He wasn’t pounding the strike zone, but he wasn’t trying to. He was making a point.

“I purposely was throwing balls,” Gardenhire said before Tuesday’s 5-4 loss to the Marlins. “They think I was doing it just normally. I was purposely misfiring just so they would swing at it and recognize the ball over the plate and off the plate. They swung at a couple and I would ask them, ‘Where was that ball?’

“That’s what we need to do better: Recognize all pitches around the plate.”

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A matchup with Marlins left-hander Caleb Smith was probably not a good setup to carry that into a game. While Smith entered Tuesday leading qualified National League pitchers with 12 strikeouts per nine innings and a slider with a nearly 40 percent whiff rate, the Tigers took the field with the Majors’ highest swing percentage on pitches outside the strike zone at 35.6 percent, according to FanGraphs. They were just 18th in the Majors at making contact on those swings.

“[Hitting coach] Lloyd [McClendon] talks about it all the time. We preach it again,” Gardenhire continued. “It’s just something that we have to do better. We have some young hitters that have to get better. We’re putting a little pressure on ourselves. That causes you to swing outside. There’s a lot of reasons why. Now we just have to stop, and we have to get back in the zone.”

It was a bad combination on a chilly night. And as the Tigers contemplated their seventh consecutive loss -- despite a bizarre ninth-inning comeback that forced extras -- they had to figure out the balance between trying to ignite a dormant offense while not swinging into oblivion in the process. With 17 strikeouts and one unintentional walk, including a swing and miss on a wild pitch that hit in the dirt in front of the plate, they didn’t find it Tuesday.

“I think everybody here is probably trying to impress and do too much, myself included,” Nicholas Castellanos said afterward. “But it is what it is, man. Losing sucks.”

It’s a difficult balance to find, because the Tigers’ most productive hitters are also their most aggressive. Ronny Rodriguez entered Tuesday having swung at nearly half the pitches outside the zone. Castellanos was just under 40 percent, followed by Christin Stewart and Miguel Cabrera.

Rodriguez struck out three times Tuesday, all swinging at sliders and curveballs. He fanned on two of Smith’s sliders, as did Stewart chasing one. Smith racked up seven strikeouts over five innings, with relievers Austin Brice and Tayron Guerrero adding two each.

“It’s the speed of the game,” bench coach Steve Liddle said. “You get sped up mentally, and you feel like you need to do more than you really need to do. … On veteran teams, you might have seven or eight veteran players and you incorporate a younger player that’s not counted on to do a whole lot, and that’s kind of how you get your feet wet in an ideal situation. But here, where you have a bunch of young players at the same time, it tends to snowball every now and then.”

The Tigers have a few veteran hitters: Castellanos and Cabrera in the middle of the order, and Josh Harrison further down. But they’re not enough to carry the offense, though Cabrera had a pair of RBI singles to keep them in it.

Not until Marlins closer Sergio Romo’s intentional pass to Stewart in the ninth did the Tigers draw a walk. By then, they’d tied the game in an example of what can happen when the ball is put in play.

Romo missed first base on Niko Goodrum’s ground ball to first. Two batters later, Starlin Castro missed the throw on a potential force out at second. After Cabrera’s first-pitch single moved the tying run to third, Rodriguez lifted a sacrifice fly to deep left field that Harold Ramirez dropped. The ball was ruled a catch on replay review, leading to manager Ron Gardenhire’s 80th career ejection, but the tie game stood.

Dawel Lugo’s leadoff walk off Nick Anderson in the 11th started another comeback attempt after Chad Wallach’s RBI double put Miami in front in the top of the inning. Anderson struck out the Tigers in order in the 10th, then struck out Castellanos and Brandon Dixon after Lugo’s walk. Dixon swung and missed at a wild pitch in the dirt that moved Lugo into scoring position before becoming the Tigers’ 17th strikeout.

By contrast, the Marlins -- the only team in the Majors that has scored fewer runs than the Tigers -- had a plan against Spencer Turnbull and executed it, shrugging off his secondary pitches and slugging his fastball for eight balls in play with an exit velocity over 101 mph. Wallach’s go-ahead hit off Jimenez came after an 0-2 count.

“I just have to make adjustments,” Turnbull said. “Nothing too crazy -- just notice when the hitters are gameplanning on me.”

The pressure to get the big hit was obvious. How the Tigers alleviate that is not.

“Just keep playing ball, really. That's it,” Castellanos said. “It's not fun, man, but you grind through it. That's all you can do.”