Detroit — We will get to Jack Flaherty’s day in a minute. He was good. But unless he was darn-near perfect, the Tigers weren’t going to win this game. He wasn’t and they didn’t.
The Toronto Blue Jays took the rubber match, 4-1, Sunday at Comerica Park, handing the Tigers their 10th loss in 12 games and their second home series loss of the year.
“These guys are grinding,” said Flaherty, who went six innings and didn’t walk a batter for the first time this season. “We’re playing much better ball. We ran into a guy over there (Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman) who is pretty good. He outpitched me today. That’s the way I look at it.
“We’re going to continue to show up, continue to work and I’m going to continue to support these guys. Everybody in here is working their asses off.”
BOX SCORE: Blue Jays 4, Tigers 1
The mission right now, as the Tigers fall seven games under .500 (20-27), is to stay connected in the American League Central Division while their injured players work their way back. They started the day 4½ games behind the Cleveland Guardians, who come to town Monday for four games, and a half-step out of last place.
“We don’t hang on the past,” said Riley Greene, who didn’t reach base for the first time in 27 games. “We are a team that moves forward. We’re going to learn from our mistakes. We’re going to continue to play as hard as we can and find a way to win.”
The focus of the issue, especially in terms of the roster depletion, has been on the pitching side of things. Lately though, it’s been the offense that’s seemingly feeling the effect of the missing players (Gleyber Torres, Javier Báez , Kerry Carpenter and before that Parker Meadows).
During this 12-game stretch, they’ve scored four runs or fewer in 11 of them, two or fewer in six.
“I know you have to ask about stretches,” manager AJ Hinch said. “I can’t operate that way. I have to get to Cleveland tomorrow. We always love playing against those guys because right now they’re at the top of our division. I don’t know any other way.”
Saturday’s loss was about striking out 14 times against six different pitchers. Sunday was about Gausman, who only struck out five but didn’t allow any hard contact.
“He’s really good,” Greene said. “He was throwing his heater, slider and split all for strikes and throwing it where he wanted to.”
Gausman did not throw a pitch with a runner in scoring position during his six innings. The Tigers had four singles, none of them hit particularly hard. They put 17 balls in play against him with an average exit velocity of 84.4 mph.
“We couldn’t put back-to-back (productive) at-bats against him,” Hinch said. “We put no pressure on him. We know he’s a two-pitch pitcher mostly. He will occasionally throw his spin (slider). He’s generally fastball-splitter and we don’t want to get to the split.”
In the first couple of innings, the Tigers seemed more patient, more willing to stay aggressive to the fastball. But once they fell down 4-0, the at-bats got less selective.
“We got a little bit anxious,” Hinch said. “We started to swing early at the split and we couldn’t pile anything up on him. Whether that’s more about his mix and his ability to locate or our execution of the plan — that’s why it’s a competition.”
The only gust of offense came in the eighth. With one out, Wenceel Perez rolled a broken-bat single past reliever Yariel Rodriguez. Blue Jays manager John Schneider brought in lefty Joe Mantiply and the Tigers proceeded to load the bases.
Kevin McGonigle singled and Dillon Dingler walked. But it only produced one run, on a fielder’s choice ground out by pinch-hitter Jahmai Jones.
Mantiply ended the inning getting Greene to bounce out, ending Greene’s 11-game hit streak and 26-game on-base streak in the process.
“We felt really good when we had the bases loaded and Jahmai up and then Greeney,” Hinch said. “That gave us a chance because Jack had settled in and kept the game where it was.”
This was Flaherty’s 200th career game in the big leagues, his 194th start. He rode in on an 11-game losing streak dating to last September in which he got the third-lowest run support of any pitcher in baseball over that stretch, 2.64 runs.
In this one, he essentially ran afoul of two hitters at the top of the Blue Jays’ batting order. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., hadn’t homered since April 20. But he lashed a two-strike, 91-mph four-seam fastball that was in and off the plate on a clothesline into the Tigers’ bullpen in left.
The ball left his bat at 105 mph with a 16-degree launch angle. Had left fielder Greene been playing at the fence, he might’ve caught the ball, that’s how low it flew.
Guerrero, Jr., ended up with two hits and two runs scored. No. 3 hitter Daulton Varsho doubled and tripled in his first two at-bats and scored twice.
The top four hitters in the Toronto lineup went 5 for 11 against Flaherty. The bottom five, 0 for 12.
“Really just two pitches,” Flaherty said. “I was 0-2 on Vladdy. I could’ve missed with a pitch away, but he made a great swing on that ball. The one for me, though, was the 1-2 pitch to Varsho (first-inning double). That was a bad slider, middle-middle.”
Flaherty set down 11 of the last 12 batters he faced and the one reached on an error by third baseman Gage Workman.
“It hard to keep talking about process and making strides forward,” Flaherty said. “You look at it and the execution was good. I did a better job of being on the attack and continuing to go after them, no matter what happened, just keep making pitches. That’s what you can do. That’s what you’re trying to do, that’s what your job is.”
In this case, though, it was just good enough to lose.
“You guys keep asking me about stretches,” Hinch said. “I can’t operate that way in this job and still focus on trying to get to the finish line.”
And, fortunately for the Tigers, that’s still a long way off.
Chris.McCosky@detroitnews.com
@cmccosky
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Tigers bats struggle again as Blue Jays take series; Guardians on deck
Reporting by Chris McCosky, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
