Pick No. 10: the better ERA belongs to the guy who has never blown one up
Tigers at Pirates, Tuesday 6:40pm ET at PNC Park. The call: Tigers win. Confidence Low.
Low, and I want to say why before the argument rather than after it. Monday's pick was a High and it was a High because the opposing starter had a hole in him you could see from the street. Tonight's opposing starter threw a 9-inning complete game 5 days ago on 85 pitches. There is no hole. What there is, is a shape.
Same season, different tails
Keider Montero has a 3.31 ERA in 20 starts. Braxton Ashcraft has a 3.82 in 24. Half a run apart, and the back of the card would tell you Ashcraft is the better pitcher having a worse year: 155 strikeouts in 141.1 innings against Montero's 86 in 128.2, which is not close.
The averages hide the thing that decides one game.
| Pitcher | Starts | ERA as a starter | Starts of 5+ earned | Worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keider Montero | 20 | 3.31 | 1 | 5 |
| Braxton Ashcraft | 24 | 3.82 | 5 | 7 |
Montero has given up 5 earned runs once all season, on August 7 in San Francisco, and that is also the most he has ever allowed in a game this year. Nineteen of his 20 starts came in at 4 or fewer. Ashcraft has 5 starts of 5 or more, and the worst of them, 7 earned in 3 innings against the Yankees on July 20, is worse than anything in Montero's log by 2 runs.
That is the whole edge and it is a narrow one. Over a season the strikeouts win and Ashcraft is probably the better pitcher to have. Over one night, Detroit's guy has a floor and Pittsburgh's guy has a trapdoor he has fallen through 5 times.
Pittsburgh's late innings have been open all week
Monday cost them. Carmen Mlodzinski recorded 9 outs and Pittsburgh needed 6 innings out of the bullpen. Isaac Mattson and Yohan RamÃrez took the middle, and then Kirby Yates, Gregory Soto and Camilo Doval threw the 7th, 8th and 9th of a game Detroit led 8-5.
| Reliever | Days worked, Aug 12 to Aug 17 |
|---|---|
| Kirby Yates | Aug 12, 14, 16, 17 |
| Camilo Doval | Aug 12, 14, 16, 17 |
| Gregory Soto | Aug 14, 15, 17 |
Yates and Doval have each pitched 4 of the last 6 days including back to back Sunday and Monday. Pittsburgh's bullpen carries a 4.26 ERA over 498.2 innings, the most relief work in this series, and Detroit's sits at 3.75. The gap is not huge. The availability gap on a Tuesday might be.
Detroit's own leverage arms are comparatively fresh. Kenley Jansen has thrown twice in 6 days, Kyle Finnegan, Drew Sommers and Jansen covered Monday's last 3.1 innings scoreless on 60 pitches between them, and Tyler Holton and Tanner Rainey have not pitched since Sunday.
The bats are not the problem, and neither is the pitching
I have spent 3 days writing that Detroit's offense is fine and its run prevention broke. Now that August is 15 games long, the second half of that is wrong and I corrected it in this morning's grade.
| August, 15 games | Per game | Season |
|---|---|---|
| Runs scored | 5.80 | 4.58 |
| Runs allowed | 3.40 | 3.90 |
Detroit is 9-6 in August, outscoring people by 36, and doing it with Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman all on the injured list. Chris McCosky reported Monday that Carpenter has been sent to a foot specialist, so that is not ending this week.
What has filled the gap is a rookie class the fanbase cannot stop talking about. Kevin McGonigle hit his 13th home run Monday. Max Clark and Hao-Yu Lee both drove in runs. Brett Callahan, called up Sunday, tripled in his first at bat and singled in 2 more Monday. It is the second night in a row I am backing a lineup that on paper is missing its 4 best outfielders.
What scares me
The strikeout gap is the more repeatable skill and it is not close. Montero has a 0.99 WHIP on 6 strikeouts per 9 innings. That combination is a season of weak contact going where fielders are, and it is the single most likely thing in this piece to stop being true on a random Tuesday. Ashcraft misses bats, and missing bats does not need anything to break right.
Ashcraft is better at home in the way that matters here. 6 home runs allowed in 64.2 innings at PNC against 14 in 76.2 on the road. If the plan was to slug him, PNC is the wrong building for it.
Pittsburgh's lineup is better tonight than the one that lost Monday. Oneil Cruz came off the 60-day injured list on the 17th and did not play. A .822 OPS with 14 home runs walks back into that order, and my read of their offense is a day out of date the moment he is in it.
And the shape of the pick worries me. Detroit won 8-5 last night and I am backing them again tonight, which is exactly what somebody talking themselves into a streak looks like. Detroit is 29-33 on the road. The floor-versus-trapdoor argument is real but it is thin, and thin is what Low means.
The call
Tigers win. Low. Detroit is getting the pitcher who has not handed anybody a crooked number all year, against a club whose 3 best relievers have worked 4 of the last 6 days, in the best month this offense has had.
Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-18: 2026 season lines, home and road splits and complete game logs for Keider Montero and Braxton Ashcraft; both clubs' starter and reliever splits, standings and home and road records; Pittsburgh's and Detroit's box scores for August 12 through 17 for the reliever usage table; Oneil Cruz's season line and both clubs' transaction feeds and 40-man injury lists via scripts/injury_check.py 823341. The chart and the summary table come from one run of scripts/er_spread.py 672456 677952. The Carpenter report is Chris McCosky's, surfaced in the r/motorcitykitties sweep on 2026-08-18 and not something the transaction feed carries.
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.