CHICAGO -- Facing White Sox rookie Colson Montgomery in the bottom of the fifth Tuesday night at Rate Field, Jack Flaherty went to the knuckle curveball for a fourth straight time.
Montgomery had laid off curve No. 3 of the at-bat on the previous pitch, but the Tigers had seen him swing through the first two below the zone. So, with the 1-2 count, Flaherty threw another knuckle curve to try to get another swing and miss for the strikeout.
Unlike the previous three, Flaherty’s offering finished low and away but remained in the strike zone. Montgomery drove it on the ground through the infield and into right-center, bringing in two runs to give Chicago the lead. Detroit ultimately couldn’t claw its way back, taking a 9-6 loss.
“Tried to put one more along the lines of the first two that he swung at, and I left it a little bit up,” Flaherty said. “He put a good swing on it.”
“The game plan is to get [Montgomery] to miss, and he missed a lot of them,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “You've got to credit the hitter for making the adjustment. … Their guy beat our guy.”
Montgomery’s at-bat was part of a larger grind of a fifth inning for Flaherty.
He allowed some hard contact through the first four innings -- six of nine balls in play were hard-hit balls -- but the White Sox didn’t score.
The bottom of the fifth was a different story. Chicago’s first four hitters in the frame and six of its first seven singled off Flaherty. Only two of those came on hard-hit balls, with three even registering exit velocities of 72.7 mph or lower.
That station-to-station approach worked, and Sox center fielder Luis Robert Jr.’s single (the sixth of the inning) took Flaherty out of the game, with the deficit growing to 5-1 before the inning was over.
“It is frustrating, but that's the game of baseball,” Dillon Dingler said. “Couple bloops here and there. It is frustrating, but you try to get past it. Try to look forward to the next [hitter] and try to get out of it.”
Flaherty's final line Tuesday totaled five runs, eight hits, a walk and six strikeouts over 4 1/3 innings. However, Flaherty didn’t think he pitched badly during that fifth inning. He felt he made some good pitches that the Sox were just able to hit. Dingler said he thought Flaherty did better than the box score shows.
There may have been a bit of misfortune in the inning, too, though Flaherty isn’t thinking about it that way.
“Kind of freaking hard at this point to chock [it] up to bad luck,” he said. “Call it what you want, but you execute pitches and balls fall in. You can say [it] is bad luck, but it's frustrating at this point.”
Flaherty has had an up-and-down second half with the Tigers. On July 21, in his first outing after the All-Star break, he lasted three innings while giving up three runs to the Pirates. He followed with six scoreless frames versus the Blue Jays on July 27 and six innings of one-run ball against the Phillies on Aug. 1, but then he allowed six runs (five earned) over 4 2/3 innings in his Aug. 6 start against the Twins.
The season hasn’t gone as smoothly as he’d have liked overall, either. His month-to-month ERAs go like this: 3.34 (March/April), 4.67 (May), 6.84 (June), 3.55 (July) and 6.60 (through three August starts). He’s currently at a 4.76 ERA, up from the 2.95 ERA he posted with Detroit last season.
The Tigers still have a firm grasp on a playoff spot, including a 5 1/2-game lead in the American League Central. Flaherty looking more like his best self more consistently would be a huge help in trying to keep it.
“With Jack, we try to focus on himself and try to get his delivery intact, try to get him to use his pitches correctly and go out and execute -- and when he does, he's incredible,” Hinch said before Tuesday’s contest. “Like everybody else in the league, when you don't execute in the right spots or you find yourself in bad counts to good hitters, it's a tough league.
“We spend more time on what we're trying to do, not what we're trying to avoid, and I think that's important for Jack to know that any given time that we put him out there, we know he can help us win. We know he's got the ability to dominate and the stuff to match, and we expect him to go out and do it.”