Graded: Pick No. 14. Right about the starter, wrong about the bullpen
The call, committed before first pitch: Rays win. Confidence Low.
The result: Tigers 4, Rays 1. gamePk 824233, Final on the id.
Record: 8-6.
Every premise held and the pick still lost
The whole thing was an innings argument. Jobe had thrown 71, 74 and 86 pitches in his 3 starts back without finishing the 6th, so the forecast in the entry was "call it 5 innings and 90 pitches if everything goes well." Tuesday:
| What the pick said | Tuesday night |
|---|---|
| Jobe, about 5 innings, about 90 pitches | 4.1 IP, 86 pitches, 19 batters |
| So Detroit's bullpen covers 4 or 5 | 4.2 innings, and every one of them |
| And that bullpen has 28 blown saves | 1 hit, 0 runs, 2 walks, 3 strikeouts |
Drew Sommers, Jacob Waguespack, Tyler Holton and Kenley Jansen went through 16 Tampa Bay hitters and gave up a single. That is the group the pick was built against, doing the exact job the pick said it could not do, on the night it had to do the most of it.
Seymour was the other half and he was fine and it did not matter. He has not been pulled before the 5th all summer and he went 5.2, which is the tendency holding, but he gave up 7 hits and 4 runs and left behind. Max Clark hit a 2-run homer in the 5th, Kevin McGonigle reached on a Jonathan Aranda error in the same inning to score a third, and Hao-Yu Lee singled in the 4th run in the 7th. Three of Detroit's 4 came in one inning.
Tampa Bay had the traffic and none of the runs
The Rays put 9 men on. 5 hits, 4 walks, and 1 run, which came in on a Jonny DeLuca single in the 4th. Detroit did the opposite: 8 hits, no walks at all, 4 runs. When a game is decided by 3 with that few baserunners on either side, the sequencing was the game, and sequencing is the thing a pitching-matchup argument cannot see.
What it actually breaks
The pick treated Detroit's relief group as a standing weakness, and the number behind that is real: 26 saves in 54 chances, the most blown saves in baseball, and 5 roster moves inside 3 days while the series was going on. One clean night does not fix a season, and I would use the same number again tomorrow.
What it does say is that the bullpen argument is a distribution, not a rule, and I wrote it as a rule. A 48 percent conversion rate means the good version shows up about half the time, and Tuesday was the half where it looked like a strength. None of the 4 who pitched were the new names either. Holton and Jansen have been here all year.
Detroit had lost 6 in a row and gone 1-9 in its last 10 coming in. That was the other leg of the pick and it was accurate right up to the moment it stopped being. The Tigers are 62-70, 2-8 in the last 10 with this one in it, and 33-32 at Comerica.
One more oddity, and it is the number this series started on. Tampa Bay and Detroit have now each scored 592 runs, dead level, through 132 games apiece, and they are 16 games apart in the standings. They were level at 587 going into Monday, went 3 apart when Tampa Bay won that night, and landed back on the same number 24 hours later.
They finish the series Wednesday at 1:10, Freddy Peralta against Troy Melton, and the call on that one is already on the board.
Not betting advice.
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.