NEW YORK -- The visiting clubhouse at Yankee Stadium smelled of beer and shower stuff Tuesday night. The Tigers were in a mood to celebrate.
It wasn’t about the nine-run seventh inning the Tigers put up to turn a potential postseason preview into a 12-2 win over the Yankees to open a three-game series. It was the way the game ended, with Chris Paddack earning the first save of his seven-year Major League career.
“These guys don’t miss a thing,” manager A.J. Hinch quipped.
It doesn’t matter that Paddack has been a Tiger for barely a month, or that he’s pitching out of the bullpen after a rough stretch as a starter. After rejoining the team last weekend following a bereavement leave for a death in his family, Paddack tossed three scoreless innings after Casey Mize, and the Tigers wanted to celebrate him.
“He’s a grinder. He does the right thing for us,” said Gleyber Torres, whose return to Yankee Stadium for the first time since he was a Yankee in last year’s World Series was an emotional moment in itself. “He’s tried to figure out a way to pitch better for us and for him. Tonight, first save, three innings, no runs, it’s really special, and we celebrated together.”
Paddack choked up talking about it.
“I forgot what that feels like. I haven’t had a beer shower since 2019,” said Paddack, who thanked his teammates and Tigers fans for their support. “It was good to get back in the basket and dance around with the boys. You never want to take those opportunities for granted. Usually that means something special happened, and I finally got my chance to close out a game.”
It says a lot about this team. It also says a lot about this game.
When Mize struck out Aaron Judge and Ben Rice around a Cody Bellinger groundout to retire the Yankees in order in the sixth inning to keep the game at 2-2, he received a fist bump from Hinch indicating his outing wasn’t over. There was a scenario, Hinch said, in which Mize would’ve faced Giancarlo Stanton to begin the seventh inning, with left-hander Tyler Holton warming for the left-handed hitters to follow.
By the time Stanton stepped to the plate, the Tigers had an 11-2 lead. What made the inning incredible, beyond the raw numbers, was how those runs scored. Just four of the nine runs scored on base hits, none of which left the cozy confines of Yankee Stadium for a home run.
“Just really good at-bats,” Hinch said. “We put nine at-bats in a row that were extremely good. Some of them were hits, some of them were walks and some pressure points where we could really push them to make some pitches. So I was really proud of our guys.”
Riley Greene hit a leadoff ground-rule double off Fernando Cruz and scored on a bases-loaded single from Parker Meadows, whose two-run homer in the fifth inning had accounted for all of the Tigers’ previous scoring.
Dillon Dingler followed with a bases-loaded walk scoring Spencer Torkelson, who had also reached on a walk.
Trey Sweeney’s blooper off former Tigers farmhand Mark Leiter Jr. brought Wenceel Pérez home.
Meadows came home when Leiter hit Colt Keith.
Torres had the second bases-loaded walk of the inning.
When Kerry Carpenter tripled in two runs, it completed the Detroit order batting around in the seventh without recording an out, something the club hadn’t done in an inning since July 19, 2021 against Texas. The Tigers scored eight runs without recording the first out of the inning, something they hadn’t done since June 1, 2013.
“It was a special inning,” Torres said of the nine-run outburst, tying the Tigers’ largest inning of the season.
If it sounds easy, consider how Mize kept the game tied after the Yankees posted back-to-back singles to begin the fifth inning. Anthony Volpe tried to bunt the runners over and popped a fly to Keith in front of third base. Ryan McMahon struck out on a splitter.
Trent Grisham was a pitch away from bringing up Judge with the bases loaded, but swung at Mize’s 3-0 pitch and flew out to shallow center to end the inning.
“What I was actually thinking when I got out of that inning,” Mize (14-5) said, “was it’s a reminder that this team does the little things really well. When you kind of see that in other teams sometimes where they don’t do that -- they’re a very good team and have a lot of strengths, but they didn’t do the little things well that inning -- it’s a testament to what we do and how we can drive some runs across.”