DETROIT – The Tigers came into the rubber match against the St. Louis Cardinals on Wednesday afternoon with 17 wins. It’s the most wins the Tigers have had going into May since the 1984 championship team won 18 on its way to a 35-5 start. Manager AJ Hinch, while certainly appreciative of the solid start, wasn’t going to throw a party. “Our challenge is not milestones or creating a certain something, be it a winning month or a target of some sort,” he said. “The target is to win as many series as we can. … I don’t subscribe to spending a lot of time assessing things on a macro level.
We have a chance to win a series today, which is the key to having winning months like we had in April.” The players subscribe to that theory. “Just wake up and try to win every day,” Riley Greene said before the Tigers did indeed win the series, beating the Cardinals, 4-1, at Comerica Park.
St. Louis native Matt Vierling put a hurting on his hometown team, knocking in three runs and scoring another. He singled and scored from first base on a bullet double to the right-center-field gap by rookie Colt Keith in the second inning. It was just Keith’s second extra-base hit of the season. One inning later, Vierling lined his third home run, a two-run shot that left his bat at 106 mph and sailed over the bullpens in left-center field.
That damage was against Cardinals starter Miles Mikolas, who set down the last 10 Tigers he faced through the sixth inning. In the eighth against lefty reliever JoJo Romero, Wenceel Perez singled and romped to third on a pinch-hit base hit by Andy Ibanez. Vierling sent Perez home with a sacrifice fly to right. That three-run cushion ended up being sufficient.
The flip of the calendar has generally been a good thing for starter Kenta Maeda, especially when it flips to May. Over his career, he’s 10-4 with a 3.75 ERA and a 1.046 WHIP, holding hitters to a .619 OPS.
His ERA was 5.96 in April but on Wednesday he limited a lefty-loaded Cardinals’ lineup to one run in six innings. He mixed sliders and splitters off well-placed four-seam fastballs and sinkers, getting 17 called strikes. There was one slider he’d like to take back. The one he hung to Willson Contreras. That ball flew 433 feet and landed in the shrubs in center field.
The Cardinals hit a lot of balls hard – 15 balls in play with an average exit velocity of 92.6 mph – but Maeda got solid defense (two excellent plays by second baseman Keith in the fourth), a line drive that first baseman Spencer Torkelson turned into an unassisted double play in the fifth and a strike-em-out, throw-em-out double play from catcher Carson Kelly in sixth. Maeda also struck out five without issuing a walk.
Will Vest gave up a couple of singles to start the seventh inning, but a double play started by Vierling at third base calmed things down. Lefty Joey Wentz, who hadn’t pitched since April 22, was summoned to face left-handed hitting Alec Burleson with a runner at second. Wentz punched him out. Wentz also got the first two outs in the eighth before giving up a single to right-handed pinch-hitter Jose Fermin and walking Brendan Donovan.
Hinch brought in Alex Lange to face Contreras. With dangerous left-handed hitter Lars Nootbaar on deck, it was a critical at-bat in the game.
Lange got ahead 0-2 but Contreras worked the count full. Lange had misfired with a couple of breaking balls, but threw a beauty and got Contreras to swing over the top of it for strike three. Lange locked down the ninth, too, earning a four-out save. Copyright (C) 2022, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
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