New York — It reaches a point where it’s not really news anymore.
Fifty-three games in and the Tigers are still not hitting the baseball or scoring runs with any regularity. They have been and remain the lowest scoring team in baseball.
So it’s not a breaking story that for the second day in a row in the Bronx they were completely shut down by the Yankees.
“We’re trying not to ride the rollercoaster here, but we got shoved pretty hard here the last couple of games,” manager AJ Hinch said after the 3-0 loss to the Yankees Saturday. “We need to bounce back. Our guys are battling. We’re just getting beat.”
The Tigers mustered two hits off Gerrit Cole and reliever Manny Banuelos on Friday. They only got one hit in seven innings against right-hander Luis Severino on Saturday — a line drive single by Miguel Cabrera in the second inning — and nada off relievers Michael King and Clay Holmes.
Eighteen straight scoreless innings. And a lot of non-competitive at-bats.
“We didn’t do much, obviously,” Hinch said. “One walk, one hit. Severino was very dominant. He got us to chase when he needed us to. He got us off the barrel. We didn’t hit a ton of balls hard. Those guys are rolling out really good pitchers every day and we saw two of their best.
“It’s been tough sledding for us.”
It’s a collective struggle, for sure, but it’s hard to not train the focus on Javier Báez in the middle of the order struggling like he’s never struggled before. Hitting below .200, he struck out three times Saturday, twice against Severino, once on three pitches.
And there is no mystery about how pitchers are attacking him. He’s seeing a steady diet of sliders, the vast majority out of the strike zone. His chase rate is a career-worst 49% and he’s whiffing on more than half the sliders he swings at (53%).
“We are all frustrated,” Hinch said. “The lack of recognition, swinging outside the strike zone, it’s part of what he’s done but it begs for some adjustment. We’re all frustrated, we all want better for him and he wants better for himself.
“We need to get him inside the zone because the league is obviously going to continue to tease him around the strike zone until he adjusts.”
To Báez’s credit, he’s not making excuses. He told reporters after the game the same thing he said last week — that he just has to keep trusting himself.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Báez said postgame. “I’m not following the ball, not keeping my approach. They’re not throwing my pitch. As long as I don’t make them throw my pitch, they’ll throw the slider if I don’t make an adjustment.”
Acknowledgement and acceptance are the first steps toward recovery, right?
There was one ray of light Saturday and it was provided by rookie right-hander Beau Brieske. After the Tigers were pounded for 13 runs Friday night, Brieske shut the Yankees down on two runs and three hits and kept the Tigers in contention for six strong innings.
“I just enjoyed myself out there instead of pressing,” Brieske said. “I wasn’t overthinking things and just allowed the game to come to me.”
Both hits against him left the yard. Solo shots.
BOX SCORE: Yankees 3, Tigers 0
Aaron Judge hit the first pitch of the game, a 95-mph fastball, into the seats in right field. It was the major-league leading 21st home run for Judge.
After that though, Brieske rolled through the Yankees lineup, allowing only a two-out walk in the fourth. But with two outs in the sixth, Anthony Rizzo ambushed another first pitch, this one a slider, and hit it into the second deck in right field.
“With Judge, I’m attacking and I’m trying to get in the strike zone, trying to throw a first-pitch strike and he was just on time with the heater,” Brieske said. “It’s Aaron Judge. He’s going to get you sometimes.”
Brieske got Judge on ground balls to short the next two times up.
“That last homer, we executed the pitch we wanted, he just must have been sitting on it,” Brieske said.
This was by far the best of his six big-league starts and the difference was that he was able to establish his slider, which enhanced the effectiveness of his bread and butter pitches — fastball and change-up.
“It’s like having an extra tool in your bag,” Brieske said. “Especially when you are throwing it for strikes and they have to respect it and can’t really guess what’s coming. Having the slider allowed me to throw the heater in counts where they took it, not expecting it. I think it opened up a lot for me.”
He ended up throwing 28 sliders, getting three swings and misses and eight called strikes.
“I felt like I built off what I did well in my last start and took it into this game and found a nice rhythm after the first inning,” Brieske said. “I felt pretty comfortable out there. I was executing three pitches pretty much the whole game on both sides of the plate.
“It was probably the most like myself I’ve felt all year.”
Well, welcome to The Show, Beau Brieske. Maybe next time you will get some runs to work with.
chris.mccosky@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @cmccosky
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