The Tigers continue their west coast trip in San Francisco
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Detroit Tigers vs Giants-Preview
A.J. Reilly: So the attention now turns to San Francisco where the Detroit Tigers are going to be taking a two-game series in the Bay area, heading to a team that is 39 and 33 and third in the NL West on Tuesday.
Tarik Skubal is going to be facing off against Carlos Rondon on Wednesday in the afternoon. It’s a 3:45 pm start. Ronnie Garcia is going to be facing off against Alex Wood. There are your pitching matchups.
There’s a lot to look at when we talk about these pitching matchups. First of all, Skubal has gotta rebound. With three bad starts in a row, it’s time for him to make the adjustment. Carlos Rondon is a very good pitcher. Someone that should have been an old English D this season, but alas he is not. He’s pitching for the Giants. He’s currently 6 and 4 with a 270 ERA.
On Wednesday Ronnie Garcia has a great outing from Arizona that he can build on against Alex Wood, who has an elevated ERA. Now, hopefully, the Detroit Tigers can at least scratch out one of these games, maybe split this two-game series, and head back to Detroit for their weekend series with the Kansas City Royals.
And last week I gave you a segment in the preview where I said, this is what the team that we’re facing does well, and this is what the team that we’re facing doesn’t necessarily do well.
And so I want to get into that as we end this segment here. So what do the Giants do? I was looking through the numbers and looking at what they do. They have a pretty good offense. They’re ninth in the MLB in total runs scored on the season. They’re eighth in the MLB in weighted runs created plus.
So when they get on base, they are creating runs and they’re getting on base 10% of the time by walking. So they draw walks, which leaves our pitchers with a catch-22 because you can’t flirt with the edges because of their plate discipline. You can’t necessarily put the ball right down the middle either because that’s never a good strategy.
So the Detroit Tigers pitchers really have to find a way to get them off-kilter, throw inside, move their feet, and make them uncomfortable. Don’t let them barrel the ball up, but make sure that you’re living around the plate. So hopefully those close pitches get called strikes and not balls. And we don’t let them walk 10% of their at-bats.
Another thing they do well is according to fan grass, they have one of the best top pitching staffs in major league baseball. They have currently a FIP of 353, which is pretty decent for an entire staff. And they only strike out opposing hitters about 8% of the time and looking at their batting average on balls in play.
They also. The hitters are hitting at a clip of 304 when the ball’s put in play against the Giants. So there’s definitely an opportunity against their pitching staff to hit the ball like we did in Arizona and make sure that we are creating the runs and not giving them an opportunity to create runs.
And here’s the reason why that batting average is probably so high is their defense ranks worst in major league baseball. The fan grass dashboard concludes, that when the ball gets put into play they struggle to convert those into outs. So it’s gonna be a quick two-game series. It starts Tuesday night at about 9:45 pm, and it’s gonna conclude Wednesday afternoon at 3:45 pm.
Therefore the goal here for the Detroit Tigers who are not a very good road team this season the goal for them is to win one of these games. Split. A sweep is obviously icing on the cake, but you cannot get swept. You cannot. There is no room for error in this season to be swept as a baseball team.
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