CINCINNATI -- The Tigers were sitting in the visitors' clubhouse at Great American Ball Park, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards, watching other games on TV while preparing for their own to eventually restart, when they heard the booming sounds from the field.
They were fireworks, scheduled for after the game but set off during the rain delay so that they wouldn’t run up against a midnight noise curfew.
“We heard the fireworks, which was kind of crazy,” Kerry Carpenter said. “In-game fireworks.”
It was an anomaly. It ended up being an omen.
The Tigers and Reds combined for eight runs over six innings before the rain delay. They scored nine runs over the final three innings after the delay, including seven runs on homers. They traded the lead three times.
“Like trying to stop a train on either side,” Kenley Jansen said.
And as Nathaniel Lowe’s walk-off two-run homer off Jansen hit the third row of seats in right-center field, well beyond Carpenter’s attempt at a leaping grab, the Reds still had a couple minutes to spare in setting off celebratory fireworks after a 9-8 win, each round as thunderous as the gut punch the Tigers just took in a game they once led by five runs.
“Long day,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “A long day and a loss. We were in a position to win it a couple different times, but the game turned in so many different directions. And they got the last swing. …
“Two different games: One before the delay, one after the delay.”
One common thread between the two: The Tigers' offense is heating up, led by the big bats usually at the center of it:
Riley Greene’s second-inning homer to open the scoring was his second homer in as many days, both on breaking balls at or below the bottom of the zone.
Greene entered Friday with the steepest swing path tilt in baseball among qualified MLB hitters, according to Statcast. Yet at 43 degrees, it isn’t even as steep as his 45-degree tilt from last year, which also led the Majors. It’s an angle that works well on breaking pitches, evidenced by his 12 homers, .550 slugging percentage and 91.7 mph average exit velocity off breaking balls last year. It came at a cost, particularly a 39.8 percent whiff rate, but when he connected, he hit breaking balls on average harder than he hit fastballs.
In a smaller sample size, Greene entered Friday crushing breaking balls for a .407 average with an even higher average exit velo (92 mph) than last year, while dropping his whiff rate.
Spencer Torkelson’s third home run in as many games – his longest homer streak since his sophomore season at Arizona State in 2019, and after nearly four homerless weeks to open this season – was his biggest of all in distance and destruction, a 435-foot drive that clanked off the near-empty seats in the left-field upper deck.
The echoes resounded around the ballpark and in the Tigers' dugout, where the frustration of a five-run lead lost quickly shifted to the determination to play the full 27 outs.
“Tork looks awesome. Riley's been awesome for a couple weeks now,” Carpenter said. “I feel pretty good up there, too. I think that we're getting hot at the right time. I mean, Tork getting hot is huge for us. He gets really hot with the best of them.”
Three batters later, Carpenter’s second homer in three days was a go-ahead two-run, two-out drive off a first-pitch fastball from Tony Santillan, who had yet to give up a run in 10 2/3 innings this season before Torkelson’s homer. Carpenter knew it off the bat; he was grinning before the ball landed in the seats by a dejected Reds fan.
“He's got a really good upshoot fastball and gets above barrels a lot,” Carpenter said. “I think we were all kinda just on the heater. I think most of us are always on the heater anyways.”
This was the right place for it.
“Obviously in this ballpark, you’re never out of it,” Hinch said. “You also never have a comfortable lead.”
It’s especially uncomfortable when Tigers pitchers battle the strike zone for six walks, five of them from an uncharacteristically wild Framber Valdez. But if they can settle down the bullpen pecking order and get their late innings in line, they have an offense seemingly on the verge of a breakout after an up-and-down start to the season.
“Only [two strikes] away, man,” Jansen said. “They played a great game. I just have to let it go. The beauty of it is there's another day tomorrow.”