MINNEAPOLIS -- The in-game entertainment crew at Target Field does a popular celebrity lookalike promotion in the middle of the third inning, pointing out faces in the crowd that look like movie stars or famous athletes or characters. On Tuesday, they panned to the Tigers radio booth and play-by-play broadcaster Dan Dickerson, posting him alongside a photo of longtime football coach Pete Carroll.
By the third inning Wednesday, they could’ve been excused had they panned to the Tigers dugout, not for any resemblance to celebrities, but to the upstart Detroit team that came within a game of the ALCS in back-to-back seasons.
Don’t be confused; these are the Tigers. But too often amidst their 4-8 start, they have admittedly struggled to play Tigers baseball. And as they trudged through the first half of Wednesday’s 8-6 loss to the Twins, falling behind by seven runs through four innings, they did not resemble the team that started the season with back-to-back wins over the Padres in San Diego two weeks ago, let alone the team of the past two seasons.
“I think team-wise, you're always pushing to play winning baseball,” manager A.J. Hinch said before the Tigers’ fourth straight loss, “and right now we haven't done that. And we're trying to find ways to get back to our brand of baseball that produces those wins without overreacting.
“I think in April you can certainly overreact to a lot of things as the competition gets stronger. You can also underreact if you just chalk it up to just April. So I think it's a fine line in coaching to address the things that create success and create wins.”
Seemingly at their lowest point since last September, the Tigers found their brand of baseball and pushed it. For four innings, the Tigers chipped away at their deficit with a flurry of singles and doubles, a dose of opportunistic baserunning and some much-needed quality relief. They brought the potential tying run to the plate in the seventh and put the potential tying run on base in the eighth and ninth. And as Zach McKinstry’s two-out, ninth-inning line drive carried towards right field, they were within inches of potentially tying the game or at least continuing it, until Twins second baseman Luke Keaschall scrambled behind first base and stretched out his glove to make the grab.
“I don’t know how he caught that ball,” McKinstry said.
It was the kind of never-out-of-it comeback that has become a hallmark of Tigers baseball since their late-season charge to a Wild Card spot in 2024. But they’re done complimenting themselves for it. At this point, it’s the standard.
The running theme in the postgame clubhouse wasn’t how close they came to winning, but how they fell behind so much in the first place.
“I think it’s always good that we know that we’re going to play 27 outs. It should be expected. It’s the big leagues. We’ve done it for multiple years,” Hinch said. “But the first half of the game was equally as bad. We just didn’t do enough to put any pressure whatsoever on them, and we paid the price. …
“The story is not the comeback. The story is the complete game, where we continue to do just enough to not win.”
Or as McKinstry put it, “We need to start better, make better plays. We’re playing sloppy right now. We need to start the game like we’re down seven.”
The start was rough. After the Tigers went down in order against Bailey Ober in the first inning, the Twins blitzed Framber Valdez for six runs, using his pitch-to-contact skills against him. Some plays, like Josh Bell’s RBI blooper to left, could be chalked up to ball-in-play fortunes. Some, like a hit-by-pitch to Austin Martin, or Javier Báez’s ensuing off-balance throw to second on Keaschall’s grounder to load the bases with nobody out, were regrettable.
“He’s a good first-pitch strike thrower this year,” Hinch said. “They obviously came in with the approach they were going to get after him early.”
The flurry of runs came so quickly and with so few pitches that Valdez was able to pitch into the sixth once he finally settled in. And in the end, add-on runs from Byron Buxton in the fourth and sixth, the latter on a pickoff play at first that allowed Buxton to bolt from third, proved the difference.
“It was a bad day for me,” Valdez said through translation from Tigers manager of Spanish communications and broadcasting Carlos Guillen.
It was a bad day overall. The strong finish nearly overcame it, but couldn’t erase it.