Detroit — It was coming. Spencer Torkelson could feel it.
In his first at-bat, he hit a sizzler, 106.2 mph off his bat. To that point, it was his hardest-hit ball of the year. But it went right into the glove of left fielder Brandon Lockridge.
“That’s a win in my eyes,” Torkelson said. “Obviously, it’s 0-for-1. But what are you going to do? You can’t totally manipulate where the ball is going to go.”
Just hit it harder. Two innings later, with Riley Greene at second base following a double, Torkelson ignited a 2-1 sinker from right-hander Chad Patrick.
The ball left his bat on a line with an exit velocity of 106.4 and flew 400 feet over the bullpen in left-center. In his 88th plate appearance of the season, Torkelson notched his first home run of the season.
“I just kept reminding myself, it’s coming, it’s coming,” said Torkelson, whose two-run blast flipped the game and sent the Tigers on their way to season-evening 5-2 win over the Milwaukee Brewers in front of 20,378 at Comerica Park Wednesday night.
The ball ended up in the Little Caesars glove on the bullpen roof, but it caromed off a fan. No free pizza.
“We’ve been aiming for that for a while,” Torkelson said, laughing. “They even made it bigger and we still haven’t hit it. It’ll happen.”
It was an impressive recovery from the 12-4 drubbing the night before, with the Tigers matching the Brewers’ aggressiveness and crispness on both sides of the ball.
“Yesterday was embarrassing,” Torkelson said. “They totally outplayed us. We made some uncharacteristic mistakes. But this was as unbelievable bounce-back for the boys.”
Not that it should come as any surprise, as manager AJ Hinch was quick to point out afterward.
“I know my team is going to come back and show up and play,” he said. “We are going to have a bad game between now and the end of the year and we’re going to bounce back from that one, too. I don’t have any doubt in these guys.
“It doesn’t mean we’re perfect. We’re not and we shouldn’t expect to be perfect. It’s baseball. But we are expected to show up every day ready to win. That’s been proven.”
Casey Mize set the tone, allowing a run and three hits in six innings with seven strikeouts.
BOX SCORE: Tigers 5, Brewers 2
“It was a great team win,” said Mize, who lowered his ERA to 2.51. “Whenever I pitch, I want to give us a chance, obviously. But tonight, I just didn’t want to put us in a hole early to kind of set the tone in a negative way for the rest of the game. But we played really clean.
“It was a nice win all the way around. I’m proud of our group for bouncing back and now we have a chance to win the series with Skub (Tarik Skubal) pitching tomorrow. We feel good about that.”
The Brewers are hard team to strike out, but Mize started the game striking out four of the first five batters and he got the punch-outs with each of his four primary pitches — splitter, four-seamer, slider and sinker.
“Yeah, we know they don’t strike out a lot and they walk a lot and it can make for a tough day,” Mize said. “To get seven (punch-outs) means we had a pretty good plan and good execution. Three walks are more that I’d like but they lead the league in walks. It’s what they do well. But I was pretty pleased with some of the swing and miss tonight.”
He and catcher Jake Rogers mixed his full arsenal expertly, even the occasional slow, sweeping slider. And the result was a lot of soft contact. The Brewers put 13 balls in play with an average exit velocity of 85.7 mph.
“I love catching Casey,” Rogers said. “When he’s attacking the zone like that, he’s really fun to catch. He really attacked and mixed his pitches and kept those guys off balance. He punched out quite a few early and it’s tough to punch those guys out.”
The Tigers also gave the Brewers a taste of their own aggressive-baserunning medicine.
Javier Báez singled to lead off the bottom of the fifth inning. With one out, rookie Kevin McGonigle, who extended his on-base streak to 20 straight starts, engaged Patrick in a 10-pitch battle. McGonigle fell into a quick 0-2 hole, worked the count full and then fouled off four straight pitches.
Báez took off for second base on all four of them. There was a fifth one, too, where he took off but the play was stopped when the umpire called timeout during the pitch. On the 10th pitch, McGonigle drove a ball off the wall in right center. Báez, gassed from all the sprints to second, still managed to scamper all the way around to score.
“That’s about as much running as I’ve seen Javy Báez do in my time here,” Hinch said with a smile.
McGonigle said he was so locked in on his at-bat, he wasn’t even aware Báez was running.
“I was just in battle-mode,” he said. “Just trying to shrink the zone and get my pitch. I finally got a heater a little low and a little in and I turned on it.”
Said Torkelson: “I felt bad for Javy. I’ve done that before, running sprints to second base like that. But I never had to score from first after that. I can only imagine. But he took it like the champ that he is. He was going to get his teammate that RBI. That says a lot about him.”
Báez had ended the top of the fifth with one of his patented but never boring quick tags, as Rogers threw out Sal Frelick trying to steal second. Báez stood motionless as the throw was coming and then, at the last second, caught it and slapped the tag in one motion.
“I just think that was a perfect throw from Rog,” Mize said. “Javy didn’t have to do too much. That was a huge play right there.”
Kerry Carpenter capped the Tigers’ scoring, launching his fifth home run into the right-field seats in the bottom of the eighth inning.
Which ended up being big, given that the Brewers loaded the bases in the ninth against Kenley Jansen.
Kyle Finnegan, who hasn’t allowed a run in 11 innings this season, pitched a scoreless seventh. Then after the Brewers sniped a two-out run off Will Vest (RBI single by Jake Bauers) in the eighth, it took Jansen an agonizing 36 pitches to finish the game.
With two outs and a runner on, he walked the number eight and number nine hitters — David Hamilton and Luis Rengifo — on a total of 13 pitches to load the bases. Before the walks, pitching coach Chris Fetter made a mound visit to give Jansen a breather.
“I relaxed too much,” he said. “When Fett came out, I relaxed too much and that got me in trouble. When you relax, it’s no good.”
But Jansen pulled it together and got the dangerous Brice Turang to bounce out to first, earning him his fifth save.
“It’s doesn’t matter how you do it,” said Jansen, who has 482 career saves. “Just get it done.”
Chris.McCosky@detroitnews.com
@cmccosky
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Torkelson breaks homer drought in Tigers’ victory: ‘A win in my eyes’
Reporting by Chris McCosky, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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