NEW YORK — While winning the past four American League Central titles, the Tigers have been able to rely on excellent starting pitching as the foundation of their success. Detroit fell to .500 on Saturday night with a 14-3 loss to the Yankees that was so bad Detroit ended up using infielder Josh Wilson to pitch the last inning, and it is clearer than ever that this is no longer the case.
Alfredo Simon got roughed up for seven earned runs in 2.2 innings, the 33rd time in 68 games that Detroit has not recorded a quality start. Last year, the Tigers had 90 after posting a major league-best 108 quality starts in 2013.
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What has changed is obvious, and never more so than it was on Saturday, when Max Scherzer came one pitch from throwing a perfect game for the Nationals before plunking Jose Tabata and settling for a no-hitter against the Pirates. That’s the same Scherzer who had 25 quality starts in 2013, when he won the Cy Young, and 22 more last year.
It isn’t like the Tigers didn’t make an effort to keep Scherzer. They offered the right-hander a reported six-year, $144 million deal before last season. Scherzer decided to take his chances playing through his walk year, and he wound up getting $210 million over seven years from Washington.
The Tigers had to go with a backup plan, which was David Price fronting their rotation, followed by Anibal Sanchez and hopefully a rejuvenated Justin Verlander, then new additions Simon and Shane Greene.
Price has lived up to his end of the bargain, going 6-2 with a 2.50 ERA. Sanchez, though, has given up 13 homers in 91 innings, and his 4.65 ERA isn’t exactly belied by his 4.00 FIP. Verlander spent two and a half months on the disabled list and has had two lousy starts since returning. Greene took his 5.82 ERA to Triple-A last week. And then there’s Simon.
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Before Saturday, Simon was having a nice season, 7-3 with a 2.58 ERA. His ERA jumped up to 3.29 with his flop in the Bronx, and while that might not seem like cause for alarm, there’s the story of Simon’s 2014 season, when he was an All-Star for the Reds. Simon was 12-3 with a 2.70 ERA at the break last year, then 3-7 with a 4.52 ERA the rest of the way.
Having hit the showers so quickly, Simon beat a hasty retreat from the ballpark so as not to have to discuss his ignominious start with reporters. Instead of the starting pitcher dissecting his failure, the finishing pitcher tried to apply lipstick to a pig.
“We’ve got a whole lot of guys in our rotation that give our team confidence,” said Wilson, probably meaning it.
“When I look around this room, I don’t see a whole lot of guys that are having bad years or down years,” Wilson continued, far less believably unless when he looks around the room, he only sees Miguel Cabrera, Yoenis Cespedes, Jose Iglesias, Joakim Soria, Price and until his disappearance, Simon. “Guys are doing their jobs. Guys are swinging the bats. Baseball’s a long season and you’re not going to win them all. Not every hard hit ball is gonna fall in and sometimes it goes the other way against you. Some guys get some things to go their way and it kind of seems to snowball. It’s certainly happened a little bit here lately. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen two check-swing base hits in a game, let alone in an inning.”
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Check-swing hits or not, the Yankees pounded Tigers pitchers for four homers, plus one off a position player, a night after tagging Verlander for three dingers.
Manager Brad Ausmus, who held a team meeting after his club’s fourth consecutive defeat, bristled at the notion that his starters are a problem area.
“No,” the skipper said when asked flatly if the rotation has become a concern. “Simon’s pitched great for us. He had a bad night.”
That, however, was not the question. Even if Simon’s disaster start is taken as a one-off event, there’s the matter of Verlander and the rotation spot that Greene has turned over to rookie Kyle Ryan. Sanchez has had back-to-back good starts to take his ERA down by more than a run, but that does not prove his troubles are over.
For Detroit, a team on pace to score only 669 runs this year, which would be the Tigers’ lowest output since scoring 591 times during the 119-loss campaign of 2003, the troubles may just be beginning.