DETROIT — Twenty years to the day after Miguel Cabrera hit a walk-off homer for the Marlins in his Major League debut for his first big-league hit, he nearly hit his 509th home run. His third-inning drive took Royals left fielder Dairon Blanco just in front of the left-field fence before corralling the ball. At 380 feet, it would’ve been out of five Major League parks. Cabrera paused at the plate for a second before beginning his trot, then looked to the skies as he headed back to the Tigers dugout.
There was plenty more frustration where that came from for Tigers hitters. That out was the closest Detroit came to scoring a run off Royals lefty Daniel Lynch, who picked up his first win since Aug. 1, 2022, with a one-hit performance over seven innings.
For a Tigers lineup that roughed up Joe Ryan and Spencer Strider this month, Tuesday’s 1-0 loss to Lynch and Kansas City was a reminder that while Detroit’s offense has had better at-bats and big innings, it’s still searching for consistency. Tigers starter Michael Lorenzen tossed six innings of one-run ball, striking out seven, but was handed his fifth loss of the season.
The Tigers have scored six or more runs seven times in June, but they’ve also been shut out five times, half of their league-leading season total of 10. That includes two 1-0 defeats.
It’s a dichotomy that president of baseball operations Scott Harris acknowledged when talking with reporters on Monday.
“On the offensive side of the ball, our topside performance is not where we want it to be,” Harris said. “I think part of that is due to us missing some key bats that should be hitting in the middle of our order [or] at the top of our order right now. Part of it is that some players are just not performing to the level that they would want to be right now.
“However, if you look under the hood at some of the things that we are doing offensively right now, I think there are some important notes. We’re walking more than we did last year. We are making more contact than we did last year. We are hitting the ball hard a lot more frequently than we did last year. We are lifting the ball more frequently than we did last year. And we’re seeing a lot more pitches than we did last year.”
Some of those trends came through against Lynch on Tuesday. Though Detroit batters swung and missed nine times in 19 swings against Lynch’s changeup, an offspeed pitch that carried a 45 percent whiff rate entering the night according to Statcast, they struck out just twice — Eric Haase in the second inning and Jonathan Schoop in the fifth. They reached five other two-strike counts against him, once for a full-count walk, the other four for outs in play, including Spencer Torkelson’s double-play grounder to end the sixth.
The Tigers walked twice, but reached just two other three-ball counts. One was Cabrera’s aforementioned fly ball to the fence. The other was Haase’s line drive to short to end Lynch’s seventh and final inning at just 78 pitches.
“We just didn’t do anything offensively to pressure Lynch,” Hinch said. “And obviously when you go in and swing at a lot of first pitches and then we don’t generate a lot of hard contact, it makes for a quick night.”
The changeup was Lynch’s equalizer against an all-righty lineup and a team that entered Tuesday hitting left-handers for 14 points higher in average than right-handed pitchers.
“The changeup was pretty good,” Jake Rogers said. “He was throwing it kind of away today and we couldn’t really stay through it, so something was pretty good about it.”
So, too, was pace an equalizer. A day after Hinch noted that Royals starter Jordan Lyles was seemingly speed-pitching at times, getting ready to pitch as soon as he got the ball back, Lynch followed a similar pace. The pitch clock at Comerica Park ticked down below eight seconds just a few times on Lynch, and he was often beginning his delivery with 10 or more seconds to go. The Tigers did little to get him off his timing.
Detroit’s patience re-emerged when Aroldis Chapman entered for the eighth and walked the bases loaded. But while Torkelson connected with Chapman’s 101 mph fastball, the ball went to shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. for an inning-ending forceout.
In some cases, those at-bats have been the difference this month. At some point, the Tigers’ patience tends to create a run-scoring opportunity. They need one big hit to cash in.