DETROIT -- Tarik Skubal was starting his preparation for his next start this weekend against the Royals, his historic shutout performance already behind him, when A.J. Hinch ran into him Monday morning.
“I asked Skubal this morning if any of the relievers came up and thanked him,” the Tigers manager said. “He said, ‘Not yet.’”
By the end of Monday’s 3-1 win over the Giants, Hinch could’ve doubled back and thanked his ace. Even with a new day and a new opponent, the carryover from Skubal’s gem helped Detroit win another one.
Sometimes, to twist an adage that Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland loved to use, momentum can be as good as the last day’s starting pitcher. That’s the Skubal effect, and it helped the Tigers regain momentum with back-to-back wins following their second three-game losing streak of the season.
It’s a big part of what made Hinch’s pitching chaos strategy so effective down the stretch and into the postseason last year, because it allowed the Tigers to approach the next game with a fairly fresh relief corps. Skubal’s heroics Sunday -- not just in zeros and strikeouts, but in innings -- set up Monday’s plan beyond Keider Montero.
Hinch had no inkling to use an opener in front of Montero, giving the young right-hander his first traditional start since May 8 after two turns as a bulk reliever. But Hinch went into Monday with a plan to give Montero two trips through the Giants' batting order, however deep that got him.
It’s not that Montero can’t go deeper. He had the Tigers’ last complete game before Skubal when he shut out the Rockies on three hits at Comerica Park on Sept. 10 last season, and his numbers in his third trip against a lineup are fairly good. But with an unscheduled day off Sunday and a scheduled day off coming up on Thursday, Hinch didn’t have to.
It wasn’t pitching chaos, more like the kind of orderly bullpen procession that Hinch hasn’t been able to use much lately between a busy May schedule and Cleveland’s prolonged at-bats over the weekend, the latter of which forced Hinch into some difficult bullpen decisions in close games.
Montero (2-1) did his part to set it up, holding the Giants to one hit and two walks. He retired 13 in a row between Jung Hoo Lee’s single to put two on with one out in the opening inning, and Patrick Bailey’s two-out walk in the fifth.
“I had a lot of command of my slider today,” Montero said through interpreter Carlos Guillén, the Tigers' manager of Spanish communications and broadcasting, “and I did what I wanted with it.”
Once Montero retired Luis Matos to strand Bailey and end the fifth, Hinch extended his first handshake for a starting pitcher since Saturday.
“Five scoreless,” Hinch said. “If you had told me at the beginning of the day [that would happen], I would have loved it.”
It wasn’t always smooth. But when Matt Chapman and Lee hit Tyler Holton for back-to-back one-out singles in the sixth, Hinch had right-handed sinkerballer Brenan Hanifee ready for Wilmer Flores and Willy Adames. Flores singled in Chapman for the Giants’ lone run, but Hanifee got the ground ball he needed from Adames to start an inning-ending double play to hold the damage there. Beau Brieske, Tommy Kahnle and Will Vest threw an inning each, culminating in Vest’s sixth save of the season.
“When we have a lead at the time, we’re going into a little bit of a bullpen game toward the back end of the game anyway,” Hinch said. “So getting Holton hot was an easy decision based on how our path was to go get it. It obviously didn’t go perfectly from the sixth inning on, but our guys did a good job of chipping away at outs and coming up with big outs.”
By not having to extend Brieske, Kahnle or Vest beyond an inning, Hinch can use them again on Tuesday or Wednesday, potentially for a different part of the order depending on the situation.
It doesn’t always work this well. The Tigers were 0-5 in games immediately after a Skubal quality start this season. But it worked incredibly well down the stretch last year: Detroit won four of five games after Skubal's quality starts from Aug. 13 to the end of the regular season, at a time when they were leveraging pitching chaos. Don’t expect a reprise of that just yet, but as Detroit tries to get Montero into a groove, it helps.