Pick No. 9: Pittsburgh's starter has a 3.79 ERA and it belongs to a different pitcher
Tigers at Pirates, Monday 7:05pm ET at PNC Park. The call: Tigers win. Confidence High.
That is the first High I have put on a game, so it's worth saying up front what it costs. Low means I'm picking a side because picking a side is the job. High means I like it and I'm going to look stupid if it misses. This one is High.
The number on the back of the card is an average of two different pitchers
Carmen Mlodzinski's 2026 line is 27 appearances, 99.2 innings, a 3.79 ERA and a 1.40 WHIP. Read straight, that's a solid mid-rotation season and nothing to be excited about facing.
He hasn't been a starter, though. He's been a swingman, and Pittsburgh has used him both ways all year, 11 starts and 16 relief outings, interleaved from March to August. Those two jobs went very differently.
| Role | Outings | IP | ERA | WHIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting | 11 | 49.1 | 5.47 | 1.68 |
| Relieving | 16 | 50.1 | 2.15 | 1.13 |
Nearly identical innings, and the ERA more than doubles. A 1.68 WHIP as a starter means he's putting a man and two thirds on base every inning he starts a game.
He has finished 6 innings once, in March through August
| Date | Opponent | IP | H | BB | K | ER |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-03-29 | New York Mets | 4.1 | 6 | 0 | 8 | 2 |
| 2026-04-04 | Baltimore Orioles | 4.2 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 2 |
| 2026-04-10 | Chicago Cubs | 5.1 | 6 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| 2026-04-21 | Texas Rangers | 4.1 | 6 | 2 | 6 | 5 |
| 2026-04-26 | Milwaukee Brewers | 3.2 | 5 | 1 | 4 | 4 |
| 2026-05-02 | Cincinnati Reds | 5.2 | 8 | 2 | 10 | 5 |
| 2026-05-08 | San Francisco Giants | 6.0 | 7 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| 2026-05-20 | St. Louis Cardinals | 5.0 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2026-05-25 | Chicago Cubs | 5.0 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2026-08-07 | New York Mets | 3.0 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| 2026-08-12 | Miami Marlins | 2.1 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
Once. May 8, against a San Francisco club that is 51-72. That's the only time in 11 starts he has recorded 18 outs, and 6 of the 11 ended before he got 15.
The 2 most recent ones are the reason this is a High and not a Low. Since coming back into the rotation on August 7 he has thrown 5.1 innings across 2 starts and given up 9 earned runs. Against the Mets: 3 innings, 7 hits, 5 runs. Against Miami, a club that has scored the 6th fewest runs in the National League: 2.1 innings, 5 hits, 3 walks, 4 runs.
There's no injury behind the gap in his starting log, either. He wasn't on the injured list at any point this season. Pittsburgh moved him to the bullpen after May 25, he was good there, and they moved him back. The 2.15 is real. It just isn't what shows up Monday night.
Detroit doesn't have to beat him. It has to get past him
If Mlodzinski goes 4, Pittsburgh needs 5 innings from a bullpen carrying a 4.24 ERA over 492.2 innings, which is the most relief work of the 2 clubs in this series. Detroit's own pen is at 3.78. The comparison isn't close and it's the part of the game most likely to actually happen, because a starter who has gone 6 once in 11 tries is a starter whose team is planning around the pen already.
Pittsburgh is also short. Ryan O'Hearn, .788 OPS in 398 plate appearances, is on the 10-day. Oneil Cruz, .822 in 283, is on the 60-day. So is Konnor Griffin. Endy Rodriguez, .840 in 159, is on the 10-day. That's 4 of their better bats, and it's the mirror of Detroit's outfield situation rather than an edge to either side.
The thing everybody watching this team believes right now, and the numbers say it's wrong
Detroit has lost 4 in a row and 3 straight at home to the White Sox. The fan reaction to that is that the offense has gone quiet with Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman all hurt.
It hasn't.
| Runs | Result | |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 13 vs Cleveland | 3 | Won 3-0 |
| Aug 14 vs Chicago | 5 | Lost 9-5 |
| Aug 15 vs Chicago | 3 | Lost 4-3 |
| Aug 16 vs Chicago | 5 | Lost 7-5 |
Across all 14 games Detroit has played in August the club is scoring 5.64 runs a game, against a season rate of 4.56. With 4 outfielders on the shelf and a lineup running rookies out there, this offense is having its best month of the year. Brett Callahan tripled in his first big league at bat on Sunday.
What has gone wrong is the run prevention. 9, 4 and 7 allowed in the 3 losses. Detroit's team ERA is still 3.55, 4th in baseball, so the last week is a slump rather than a level, and a slump is exactly the thing you want to buy against somebody with a 5.47 mark in the job he's doing tonight.
What scares me
Framber Valdez walks people. 50 in 133 innings, a 1.39 WHIP, and 5 walks in 5.2 innings his last time out against Cleveland. PNC Park is a hard place to hit home runs and an easy place to score on singles and traffic, and Valdez's bad starts are traffic starts. When he's off, he's off early: 0.2 innings and 6 runs against the Cubs on July 21.
Detroit is 28-33 on the road and Pittsburgh is 32-31 at home, so the venue runs the wrong way.
Mlodzinski's stuff is not the problem. 78 strikeouts in 99.2 innings, and his relief line says that when he only has to face a lineup once, he's genuinely good. If Pittsburgh has decided to pull him at the 18th batter and hand it to a fresh arm, the whole shape of this pick changes and the game becomes a bullpen contest that Detroit's own 27 blown saves make a coin flip.
And the honest structural one: Detroit is 60-64 while its run differential says 71-53. That gap of 11 wins is the largest in baseball. A team that has spent a season converting good underlying play into losses is a team you should be slower to back than the numbers suggest, and I'm backing it anyway.
The call
Tigers win. High. Detroit's offense is in its best month of the season, it's facing a starter who has cleared the 6th inning once since March, and the club waiting behind him has the worse bullpen of the 2.
Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-17. Mlodzinski's and Valdez's 2026 season lines and complete game logs, both clubs' standings, run totals, home and road splits, starter and reliever ERA splits and save conversion, the Detroit and Pittsburgh transaction feeds and 40-man injury lists via scripts/injury_check.py 823343, and Detroit's game-by-game scoring for August 1 through 16. The chart and the start-by-start table come from one run of scripts/start_lengths.py 669387.
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.