DETROIT — The Tigers were on their way to another struggle against White Sox pitching Saturday. Then Eric Haase’s line drive bounced past Billy Hamilton in shallow center and rolled towards Comerica Park’s deep center-field wall.
By the time Haase was done running, he’d added a go-ahead, three-run inside-the-park homer to his list of feats this season. He wasn’t done hitting, later adding a more traditional three-run homer into the right-field seats. The Tigers and White Sox, meanwhile, were adding another back-and-forth battle to the long history of their less-than-neighborly rivalry, this one an 11-5 Detroit victory.
The latest chapter of Haase’s turn as hometown hero was arguably the craziest. He already had three two-homer games this season, but all were on the road, including one against the White Sox in Chicago four weeks ago. Until Saturday, his only home run at Comerica Park was a June 8 drive off Seattle’s Marco Gonzales.
Leury García’s 415-foot drive into the left-field seats put the White Sox back in front, but the Tigers assembled a four-run rally in the bottom of the inning on four singles and three walks, including back-to-back 3-2 pitches that just missed the corners to load the bases and then score an insurance run.
Haase came back up in the seventh against lefty reliever Jace Fry, who walked Jeimer Candelario to lead off the inning and gave up a Miguel Cabrera infield single up the middle. Fry tried to catch the outside corner on a 1-1 breaking ball, but Haase hammered it to right for his 11th homer of the season.
The Tigers rally made a winner of starter Tarik Skubal, who yielded five runs in as many innings on eight hits but struck out six to improve to 4-0 over his last seven starts.