Graded: Pick No. 6. I said nobody would let Jobe see the lineup a third time and Chicago made sure he did
The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.
The result: White Sox 9, Tigers 5. gamePk 824237, Final on the id.
Record: 4-2.
Detroit is 60-62, 3.5 back of Chicago in the Central, holding the last wild card by half a game over Minnesota.
The one sentence I'd take back
From Friday's entry, about Jackson Jobe, who had thrown 5 innings all season:
Nobody's letting him see a lineup a 3rd time on Friday either.
He faced 23 hitters. Nine of them got hits. A lineup is 9 batters, so 23 means the top 5 spots in Chicago's order came up against him a third time, and all of that happened inside 3.2 innings.
I had the mechanism completely backwards. I was imagining a manager deciding whether to send a stretched-out arm back out for the 6th. What actually gets a pitcher to a third trip through the order in the 4th inning is the other team hitting everything, and by the time it's happening there isn't a decision left to make, there's just a guy on the mound and nobody warm.
Jobe's line: 3.2 innings, 9 hits, 6 runs, 2 home runs, 74 pitches. Detroit led 3-1 after 3. Chicago scored 5 in the 4th.
The part I got right did nothing
Two other things in that entry were checkable and both came in.
Sean Newcomb was an opener, exactly as advertised. 1.1 innings, 5 hitters, 25 pitches, and then Jose Urquidy for 3.2. Chicago's bullpen threw 7.2 of the 9 innings, which is the way that team is built and the thing the whole piece was about.
And the closing line of the pick was that I thought Detroit's bullpen would hold one more than Chicago's. Detroit's relievers threw 5.1 and gave up 3. Chicago's threw 7.2 and gave up 5. Per inning that's 5.06 against 5.87, so Detroit's pen was in fact the marginally better one on the night, same as the season numbers said it would be.
I won the argument I picked and it had nothing to do with the game. Both pens showed up after the score was 6-3, and the difference between them across 13 innings of mop-up was worth less than one inning of the starter.
The thing I said scared me is not what happened
Here's the whole section, and it's wrong in a specific way worth naming:
Detroit is 12-20 in 1 run games, 4th worst in baseball. That matters more than usual here, because a game where both teams empty the pen from the 5th inning on is exactly the kind of game that ends 4-3, and 4-3 is the score Detroit keeps losing.
It ended 9-5. There was never a moment after the 4th inning where a close-game record was going to decide anything.
That's the second night in a row I want to write about, because I've now leaned on the 1-run record twice and neither game was close. It's a real weakness and it's on the board, but naming it as the danger in a specific game is a different claim, and in this one it bought nothing. The danger was a starter with 5 innings on his arm.
The pattern the whole pick rested on broke
The season series had gone 3-3 and every one of the 6 games went to the home team. Chicago swept Detroit in Chicago in May, Detroit swept Chicago at Comerica in June, and 4 of the 6 were decided by 1 run.
That was the tidiest thing in the entry and it's the reason I liked Detroit: Chicago is 37-24 at home and 25-34 on the road, and this game was at Comerica.
Chicago won at Comerica. The series is 4-3 Chicago, the home team is 6-1 instead of 6-0, and the one number I built a call on stopped being true in the first game after I published it. A 6 game pattern is 6 games, and I knew that when I wrote it down, and I used it anyway because it was clean.
Detroit's offense was not the problem, which is new
10 hits and 5 runs against a staff that pitched 5 different arms. Given that Riley Greene, Matt Vierling, Kerry Carpenter and James Outman are all on the injured list and Friday's outfield had two rookies in it, 5 runs is more than I would have guessed.
Detroit's rotation ERA came into the night at 3.30, the lowest of all 30 teams, and that is the team's entire identity this season. Friday they scored 5 and lost by 4, because the one start they got from a pitcher who isn't part of that rotation yet cost them 6 runs in under 4 innings.
Saturday is Troy Melton, who is part of it.
Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-15, for the final, the box score, both pitching lines, the inning by inning scoring, the season series game by game and the American League 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.