:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/photo_images/866642/GYI0060881270.jpg)
All eyes were on Andrew -- nee -- Andy Oliver as he made his major league debut. It went, well, too. Had he had a little help from his offense, the memory would have been a better one.
Welcome to the Tigers, Andy. Don't expect much from the guys with the bats. Well, other than Brennan Boesch, who got his 40th RBI in 51 MLB games. Since that side of the game went so normal, I'm just going to focus on Oliver tonight.
A glance a the Pitch F/X data supplied by Brooks Baseball shows his fastball peaked at 97 and averaged 94. Not too bad. It classified 68 of his 97 pitches as four-seam fastballs (70 percent) with seven changeups and 22 sliders mixed in. Six of his 59 strikes were the swing-and-miss variety, which isn't too bad.
He did mix up his location pretty well, and forced nine ground-ball outs. The second inning was a struggle, as Carlos Guillen first failed to turn a clean double play, and then Oliver failed to put away batters when he got to the two-strike mark. That problem cropped up more than a few times throughout the day, though he did finish with four strikeouts in six innings.
Knee-jerk reaction (mainly because you expect something of that sort at the blog)? I thought he pitched pretty darn well. You can point to some things that make you a bit cautious: his inability to put batters away mainly, a bit too much reliance on the fastball.
Too much can be made of one game either way, so caution is always advised when looking at a young pitcher. Still, it was a nice debut and he'll only get better with time.
Hopefully that is true of the Tigers' batters once they get back to American League rules, because right now, they've lost five of the last seven games at NL parks and it's getting pretty boring to watch.