Detroit Tigers beat the Boston Red Sox, 3-1 in series opener: Game thread recap

Game notes: Red Sox Nation can finally relax a bit, as Boston pulled out its first win of the season, 4-3, against the Yankees on Sunday night despite getting only five hits. And of course, the final hit of those five ended up as the most important — Bobby Dalbec homered with no outs in the top of the sixth inning, sending a sinker from Clarke Schmidt (a name that sounds dirtier than it actually is) out to right field to snap a 3-all tie.

Winning games without a lot of hits is something the Tigers are working on, actually. They had eight hits — not awful — in their walk-off win over the Chicago White Sox on Opening Day, but only two came in the first seven innings. Loading six hits into the final inning and change (there were only two outs when the winning run scored Friday) is probably not a repeatably favorable occurrence. For evidence, see Saturday, in which the Tigers were held two hits over the first five innings in a 5-2 loss, and Sunday, in which they had two hits for the entire game, a 10-1 loss.

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But that’s the past, and we’re here to talk about the future: Namely, Monday's afternoon/evening matchup against the Red Sox and their starter, former Tampa Bay Ray/New York Met/St. Louis Cardinal Michael Wacha. The righty has fallen off quite a bit since his All-Star season with the Cards in 2015, with just one sub-4 ERA since. That was in 2018 (3.20) and the ERA’s have just gotten crooked-er: 4.76 in 2019, 6.62 in 2020 (that was the Mets year, so it’s kinda understandable) and 5.05 last season.

Wacha doesn’t have an extensive track record against most of the Tigers' roster, owing to spending most of his career in the National League. The current Tigers roster is 13-for-58 (.224) against him — including reliever Drew Hutchison’s 0-for-1 in 2018, which seems unfair to include now that the DH is in both leagues.

Michael Wacha pitching for the Rays last season.

But if we had to pick a Tiger to break out against Wacha, it’d be Javier Báez. Not because he’s under the big-contract microscope this month, but because he has a career .286/.348/429 slash line against Wacha, with three doubles, nine strikeouts and two — TWO! — walks off him in 23 plate appearances. (We might also like Eric Haase’s line of .500/.500/2.000 – that’s a solo home run in two career plate appearances against Wacha.)

Today’s matchup is the first of a three-game series, with Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s games starting at 1:10 p.m. After that, the Tigers will finally be done with all the hosiery — which is usually a term we reserve for when our friends from Windsor cross the river — for a few weeks and zip over to Kansas City to face the AL Central-leading* Royals, who are somehow 2-1 despite a minus-11 run differential, beginning Thursday. At least they have rookie stud Bobby Witt Jr. to enjoy. Meanwhile, the BoSox will head home to host the Minnesota Twins over the weekend, capped by their annual 11:10 a.m. start Monday for Patriots’ Day.

*Tied but it still counts, says the lone Royals fan on the FreepSports desk, who did not write this.

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