Game Two of the three-game weekday series at Wrigley Field saw a bunch of young Tiger hitters make a whole lot of noise in an 8-2 victory on Wednesday over the Cubs.
Getting the pseudostart tonight was Beau Brieske. He gave the Tigers three gorgeous, hitless innings in San Francisco on August 9, striking out five, and that’s pretty much been the high point of his season so far. Since then he’s started twice, going 1 ⅓ in Seattle and an inning on August 16, giving up one run and ultimately taking the loss against the Yankees. Then again, he didn’t get out of the first inning in Cleveland on July 29th, coughing up five hits and three runs, so what would we get tonight?
Facing the Tigers was Jameson Taillon, who’s had a really nice season so far for the Cubs. This is his second season in Chicago, after a pair of years with the Yankees. He started off with the Pirates in 2016 and has been generally pretty healthy, save for a stretch in which he was shelved with elbow issues midway through 2019; he also missed the entirety of the 2020 season, for what that was. Three of his previous four outings coming into tonight were on the rough side, though.
Parker Meadows led off the game with a double, and eventually the Tigers had runners on the corners with two outs, but Spencer Torkelson popped out to second and that was that.
The new kids got things cooking in the second: Jace Jung led off with a walk, and with one out Trey Sweeney got his first career home run to straightaway centre, into the wind, for a 2-0 lead.
After Meadows’ second double of the evening, Riley Greene joined the Dinger Parade with a two-run rocket of his own, pushing the lead to 4-0. It was 112 mph (180 km/h, 50 m/s) to right-centre, so I’d say he pretty much got all of ‘er.
Brieske was done after two pleasantly boring one-hit, three-strikeout innings, and he turned things over to Brant Hurter, who struck out three in the third. However, since a runner reached on a Jung throwing error (which should’ve been on Torkelson), then in this scribe’s humble opinion, he did not “strike out the side.”
Taillon, meanwhile, settled down quite nicely and set down a whole bunch of Tigers in a row after that pair of home runs in the second. In the fifth that string was broken with a one-out Kerry Carpenter single and a Colt Keith double to put runners on second and third with two outs. However, Torkelson was then “called out for excessive window-shopping,” as Ernie Harwell would’ve put it, and the threat thus ended.
The Cubs got a pair of runs back in the fifth with a Christian Bethancourt home run to left, cutting the lead in half to make it a 4-2 game.
In the sixth, Seiya Suzuki blasted a 110-mph comebacker off Hurter’s left thigh; after a visit from the trainer and manager he soldiered on to retire Cody Bellinger on a grounder, then gave way to Brenan Hanifee with two outs. An infield single put Cubs on first and second, but a soft tapper to the mound got the Tigers out of the inning unscathed.
Tyler Holton took over for Hanifee with runners on first and second with one out in the seventh, and he quickly got a strikeout of Ian Happ for the second out. Pinch-hitter Patrick Wisdom hit a high fly ball to the left-field corner, but Zach McKinstry put it in his pocket for the third out. Then Holton carried on into the eighth and carved through the next three hitters with brutal efficiency. Look, whatever he’s making this year, double it.
Jack Neely, a highly regarded pitching prospect the Cubs acquired from the Yankees, made his major-league debut in the top of the ninth. He’s struck out a boatload of people in the minors — 14.2 per nine innings between Double-A and Triple-A this year — and he walked McKinstry to start things off. McKinstry scooted over to third on a two-out single from Meadows and scored on a Greene single to push the lead to 5-2. But the big blow came next: Carpenter completely ruined Neely’s debut by smacking a 3-0 fastball over the left-field fence for a three-run dinger for an 8-2 lead.
Welcome to the Show, kiddo!
Joey Wentz then came in to pitch the ninth and he set the Chicagoans down in order to seal the victory.
Notes and So Forth
- Spencer Torkelson had a four-hit game on Tuesday night against the Cubs. The starting pitchers that night were Alex Faedo and Javier Assad.
- Torkelson’s previous four-hit game was on August 21, 2023 against the Cubs. The starting pitchers that night were Alex Faedo and Javier Assad. (Courtesy of Christopher Kamka on Twitter, or whatever-the-deuce it’s called now.)
- Zach McKinstry stole his eleventh base in the sixth inning. He has not been thrown out yet this season.
- Joey Votto officially retired today. It would’ve been fantastic if he’d been able to spend at least part of a season playing for his hometown Blue Jays, but since tweaking his ankle in the spring he hasn’t really recovered, and his results in Triple-A Buffalo weren’t great. Honestly, couldn’t the Jays have just brought him up for the series this week against Cincinnati, his old club, as a nice gesture? And if he went 0-for-whatever, who cares? It’s not like the Jays are doing anything this season anyway, and it would’ve created a ton of good vibes around a club that sorely needs them.
- On this day in 1415, a Portuguese fleet headed by King John I and Prince Henry (later called “Henry the Navigator”) attacked and conquered the city of Ceuta on Africa’s north coast, surrounded by Morocco. Control of the city was later transferred to Spain in the Treaty of Lisbon in the 1600s, but this conquest has been noted as the first step towards the once-vast Portuguese empire which once spanned the globe.