Indians 12, Tigers 2: Let’s get the funk out of Ohio

The brooms came out in Cleveland today, despite a pitching mismatch that looked to favour the Tigers. That’s baseball for you.

Matthew Boyd looked to rebound from his last start in Cincinnati which was, frankly, lousy. Would he be able to right the ship? Short answer, no. Longer answer, noooooooooo.

The second rookie starter of the series for Cleveland, Adam Plutko, came into the game with a winner’s record but a loser’s ERA. Would he get lucky again, punk? Well, would he? (Yes.)

A pair of doubles plated a run for the Cleves in the first, and they tacked on three more in the second. There weren’t a lot of hard-hit balls, but that’s the way it goes sometimes, I guess — not to mention the Cleves running wild on Boyd, who was on the ropes with the bullpen on high alert in the second.

Three straights hits to start the fourth got the Tigers on the board, but John Hicks poured cold water all over the rally by grounding into a double play. James McCann stepped up and drove in Victor Martinez to narrow the gap to 4-2, though.

Francisco Lindor hit his third home run of the series to get those two runs back for the Cleves in their half of the inning, though. That chased Boyd in favour of Artie Lewicki, who gave up a pair of hits, which obviously isn’t great, but then a double play and a groundout got him out of trouble.

Lewicki was mostly successful at stopping the bleeding... well, for a while, anyway. After 4 ¹⁄₃ innings he’d given up two runs on six hits, then after getting hit on a comebacker and arguing to stay in the game despite visibly hobbling around, naturally he served up a grand slam to Edwin Encarnacion. That’s three slams in five days given up by the Tigers. Yikes.

Please note, tomorrow’s Tiger game against the A’s has a bit of an unusual start time of 3:10 pm. This is to allow people to get out of downtown after the game, before a fireworks show later in the evening gets underway.

Random Ex-Tiger Update

The radio guys briefly mentioned one Steven Moya during the broadcast, so I got curious. The low-down:

• spent all of 2017 split between Toledo and Erie, hitting .213 with 30 BB and 126 K
• signed in the offseason with Chunichi of the Japanese Central League
• after 31 games in Japan, he’s hitting .306/.354/.389 for a .743 OPS, with 5 BB and 19 K
• therefore, more of the same but with slightly more singles