BOSTON – Detroit Tigers prospect Hao-Yu Lee was in a hotel with Triple-A Toledo on Thursday, April 16, in Louisville, Kentucky, when he received an unexpected call from Mud Hens manager Gabe Alvarez.
Alvarez told Lee to meet him in his hotel room.
“My initial thought was, ‘Oh, did I do something wrong?’ Lee said in Mandarin, interpreted by Peter Lin. “I must’ve done something wrong, and my manager is going to scold me. I was pretty nervous.”
Lee couldn’t have been more wrong.
The 23-year-old learned from Alvarez that the Tigers were calling him up for Friday’s opener of a four-game series against the Boston Red Sox, but his MLB debut wasn’t guaranteed. It was a precautionary promotion tied to the health of Zach McKinstry.
The right-handed hitting Lee is valued by the Tigers for his track record of success against left-handed pitchers, so he immediately started studying Red Sox lefties Ranger Suárez and Garrett Crochet.
“Being right-handed, and given our schedule, I think six of the next 12 games are going to be against lefties, so he’s likely to be in and around those games,” manager A.J. Hinch said before Friday’s game. “He may or may not start against righties. The timing of the schedule and what he can do on the field made our decision to bring him up.”
En route to Boston, Lee received another phone call about the situation.
It was assistant general manager Ryan Garko.
The message: The Tigers placed McKinstry on the 10-day injured list with left hip/abdominal inflammation, and Lee would be making his MLB debut in Friday’s game against the Red Sox.
“It was pretty tough to go to bed,” Lee said, recounting his journey before Saturday’s game. “When normal people check into a hotel super-late, your first thought is, ‘I need to go to bed,’ but I don’t know why, but I just opened up my travel bag, took out my bat and started swinging.”
Lee practiced his swing in the middle of the night in his hotel room – less than 24 hours before his MLB debut.
How long did that last?
“For like three or four minutes, until I realized that I was pretty goofy,” Lee said.
In Friday’s game, Lee started at third base and batted eighth as the Tigers lost, 1-0, to the Red Sox in 10 innings.
Lee finished 0-for-3 – flying out to shallow right field in the third inning, flying out to deep right-center field in the fifth inning and striking out looking in the eighth inning. His fifth-inning flyout was crushed 376 feet with a 101 mph exit velocity off Suárez’s fastball, but it was caught at the warning track in front of the wall.
“I was more focused than nervous the whole game,” Lee said.
“This is a big stage – and I thought he handled himself well,” Hinch said.
Lee made a throwing error with two outs in the ninth inning, but it didn’t come back to haunt the Tigers. More importantly, he made a clean throw from the hot corner for the final out that inning, sending the scoreless showdown to extras.
That moment stood out to Hinch.
“I thought he recovered from the error with a really good play after that. I think that’s key,” Hinch said. “It’s tough to settle in from the get-go, but I thought he did a good job.”
Lee went out of his way to reflect on the defensive mistake.
He holds himself to higher standards.
“My performance defensively wasn’t on par with my expectation,” Lee said. “I’m going to make sure to keep grinding, keep practicing and keep doing my homework to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
The entire experience was a whirlwind: Lee went from fearing a meeting with his Triple-A manager at a hotel in Louisville to standing under MLB lights at the historic Fenway Park in Boston. His debut wasn’t perfect, but that’s not what matters in this situation.
Lee is a big-leaguer.
And the Tigers need his help against left-handed pitchers.
“Everything that has happened to this point during the season is pretty chaotic, but I just have to be positive,” said Lee, who suffered a left oblique strain in early March during spring training. “This is not something that you can control. I’m just trying to be positive.”
Contact Evan Petzold at epetzold@freepress.com or follow him @EvanPetzold.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tigers’ Hao-Yu Lee makes MLB debut: Hotel nerves to Fenway Park lights
Reporting by Evan Petzold, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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