Graded: Pick No. 4. The first miss, and the catcher I told you wouldn't be out there caught all 9 innings
The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.
The result: Cleveland 6, Detroit 4. gamePk 824241, Final on the id.
Record: 3-1.
Detroit falls to 59-61, 3.5 back of the White Sox and half a game out of the last wild card. Cleveland is 7-1 against them this year.
I got the catcher wrong, and it's the part of the entry that mattered
Yesterday's piece answered 2 commenters who wanted Detroit running on Cleveland. I said they were right about Cleveland, right about Detroit, and wrong about the night, for this reason:
So tonight you've got a lefty who runners mostly don't test, and probably the catcher who's been throwing people out. The 5.1% guy is the backup now. The edge you're describing is real and it's aimed at a matchup that isn't on the field tonight.
Austin Hedges caught all 9 innings. Patrick Bailey was on the bench and never came in.
The 5.1% guy, the one who has thrown out 2 runners all season, was on the field the entire time. The matchup the thread was pointing at was exactly the matchup that showed up, and I'm the one who told them it wouldn't.
Worth separating 2 things there, because only 1 of them was wrong. The number was right: Bailey had caught 7 of Cleveland's 9 games in August, Hedges 4, and that checked out then and checks out now at 7 and 5. What was wrong was reading a 10 game sample as a depth chart. Cleveland has alternated all month, and last night was Hedges' turn.
And Detroit still didn't run
8 times on 1st base. Singles plus walks plus hit by pitches, same approximation the original entry used.
0 steal attempts.
Cleveland's pitchers threw over to 1st 6 times, 5 of them by Foster Griffin in the 3rd and 4th. Nobody went.
Here's the part where I have to talk myself down, because this is the number I wanted. Detroit attempts a steal on 4.8% of times reached 1st, and 8 baserunners at 4.8% buys you 0.4 attempts. Zero is the expected result. One game with 8 runners on cannot tell you whether a team ignored an open door or just had a normal night, and if Detroit had gone once I'd have been writing that the door was open and they walked through it, off the same nothing of a sample.
So the honest version is narrow: the specific reason I gave for saying no tonight was wrong, and the game did not produce enough baserunners to test what the readers were actually asking. Thursday afternoon is Parker Messick, who's 3rd of 58 qualified starters at suppressing attempts, so that one won't answer it either.
Cleveland didn't run either, which nobody predicted including me
The entry's other half was that the real running game edge in this game belonged to Cleveland, who attempt on 12.7% and convert 83.6%, against a Framber Valdez who'd allowed 13 steals and caught nobody:
Detroit's catchers are above average, which helps. But the team with the running game edge in this game is Cleveland, going the other direction, and in a 1 run game that's where it'll show up.
Cleveland reached 1st base 13 times and attempted 0 steals.
2 teams, 21 runners on 1st, 0 attempts, in a game between the sport's most aggressive baserunning team by rate and the sport's least. I spent about 2,000 words on the running game and the running game did not occur.
What actually decided it was the walks
Valdez went 5.2 and gave up 4 earned on 6 hits and 5 walks. Detroit's staff walked 7 in total. Cleveland scored 6 on 10 hits and those 7 free passes.
Detroit led 3-2 after 3 innings. Cleveland got 2 in the 5th, 2 more in the 7th off Ty Madden and Enmanuel De Jesus, and that was the game.
The thing I said scared me was Griffin, on the grounds that he's the better pitcher and I was picking the worse one. Griffin went 5 innings and gave up 3 runs, only 1 of them earned, and handed the ball off with a 4-3 lead. He wasn't the problem. The pitcher I defended was, and I defended him by pointing at 2 good starts:
Valdez has a 4.17 ERA which isn't good, but his last 2 starts are 14 innings and 2 earned runs.
That's 2 starts. I knew it was 2 starts when I wrote it.
The pillar held up and then it didn't
The entry's own argument against itself was Cleveland's offense: 28th in baseball at 3.98 runs a game, and 4.00 a game against Detroit specifically over 6 meetings. I called it the pillar that had produced nothing.
They scored 6. That's their 2nd most against Detroit this season, behind an 8 on May 18. Across the 8 games the season series is now Cleveland 34 runs to Detroit's 21, 4.25 a game to 2.62.
I've now written 2 entries arguing that Detroit's 0-6 against Cleveland was variance rather than a mechanism. The permutation test behind that still says what it said. But the record is 1-7, and at some point "it's variance" stops being an analysis and starts being a thing I keep saying.
Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-13, for the final, the box score, the play by play, both pitching lines, the August catcher assignments game by game, the season series and the standings.
Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.
Got a Detroit number you want looked at? Email projectunmuted@proton.me and it gets looked at properly. A stat somebody quoted that smells wrong, a thing you have always assumed about one of these 4 teams and have never seen checked. Every question that arrives is listed with its answer, including the ones where the answer is no.