Graded: Pick No. 5. Detroit shut out Cleveland without striking anybody out, which has happened 7 times since 2000
The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.
The result: Detroit 3, Cleveland 0. gamePk 824238, Final on the id.
Record: 4-1.
9 innings, 32 hitters, 0 strikeouts
Keider Montero went 6.1, Tyler Holton got 5 outs, Kenley Jansen closed it, and between them they didn't strike out a single Cleveland hitter. 4 hits, 1 walk, 27 outs, all of them on contact.
I went looking for how weird that is and pulled every team's pitching game log back to 2000, which is 126,918 team-games. There are 7,476 shutouts in there. 7 of them came with 0 strikeouts.
| Date | Team | Line |
|---|---|---|
| 2001-04-22 | Mariners | 9 IP, 6 H, 1 BB |
| 2002-04-28 | Orioles | 9 IP, 4 H, 2 BB |
| 2006-05-12 | Yankees | 9 IP, 4 H, 3 BB |
| 2006-05-17 | Tigers | 9 IP, 7 H, 0 BB |
| 2012-05-15 | Guardians | 9 IP, 6 H, 4 BB |
| 2014-07-01 | Tigers | 9 IP, 4 H, 0 BB |
| 2026-08-13 | Tigers | 9 IP, 4 H, 1 BB |
3 of the 7 are Detroit, all 3 at home, and nobody else has done it twice.
The 2006 one is a 23 year old Justin Verlander going 8 innings without a strikeout in his rookie year, with Todd Jones finishing it. The 2014 one is Rick Porcello throwing a complete game 4 hitter against Oakland and not striking out anybody either. That is a strange little Comerica tradition and I'm not going to pretend I can explain it.
For what it's worth the fanbase got there first. Somebody had it on r/motorcitykitties within an hour of the last out as "first time since 2014," which is right. What they didn't have is that 2014 was also the Tigers, and so was 2006.
The 2 things I said to check, and both of them landed
The entry made 2 falsifiable claims about Montero, so here they are.
On whether he'd get through 5 on contact again. I wrote that his xFIP sits 1.19 above his ERA and that he strikes out 6.3 per 9, so the interesting question wasn't the result but whether the contact kept finding gloves. He went 6.1 innings and struck out 0. Not 1 or 2. Zero. That's about as extreme a version of the thing I described as you can get, and it worked, and I'd still say the same thing about the next one.
On the catcher. After Wednesday I said Cleveland alternates Bailey and Hedges and that if Hedges caught back to back against the team that never runs, that'd be a different claim and would need more than 2 games. Hedges started and caught the first 7. So that's Hedges twice in a row, and it's still 2 games, and I'm still not writing it down as a pattern.
Somebody finally ran, and it was the good catcher
For 2 games and about 3,000 words on the running game, 21 baserunners produced 0 steal attempts. Thursday there were 2, one each way, and both were safe.
The Detroit one is the funny part. Kevin McGonigle singled with 1 out in the 8th and stole 2nd. By then Angel Martinez had pinch hit for Hedges and Patrick Bailey was behind the plate, which means the one time Detroit ran in the entire series, they ran on the 35% guy rather than the 5% guy, and it worked.
I want to be careful here, because this is the number that flatters me and I said as much on Wednesday. 1 attempt is not evidence of anything. Detroit attempts a steal on 4.8% of times reached 1st, so a normal night for them expects well under 1, and 1 is just a normal night. If McGonigle had been thrown out I'd be writing the same sentence.
Chase DeLauter took 2nd off Montero in the 1st, and that's only the 2nd steal anybody has got off Montero all season.
Where it leaves them
60-61, 2.5 back of the White Sox, holding the last wild card by half a game with 6 teams inside 2. The White Sox come to Comerica on Friday.
Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-14, for the final, the box score, the play by play, the substitutions, the standings, and 27 seasons of team pitching game logs. The scan is scripts/zero_k_shutouts.py.
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.