CINCINNATI -- Long before the Tigers walked out of Great American Ball Park late Sunday afternoon with a series win, capped by Sunday’s 4-1 victory,
“We won a series against a team that's fighting for their life in the playoffs,” Hinch said Sunday. “And the first hitter of the entire series was Akil Baddoo hitting a routine ground ball to short, and he put pressure on them. I can't guarantee that that mattered, but that set an incredible tone for our team and certainly for our style of play.”
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Turned out, it wasn’t Detroit's style Friday night, not when backup catcher
The Reds are where the Tigers want to be. The Tigers are catching up quickly.\n\n“These guys would homer every day if they could just draw it up and say, 'We're going to go up and hit four and five homers a game.' I mean, that's a fun brand of baseball,” Hinch said. “But you have to find other ways to do it against other style pitchers. It's not just a simple turnkey; this is our game plan and we go execute it. It takes some adjustments. It takes a mentality that really starts at the top.”
Castillo allowed just two walks and two singles over the first five innings. One was a third-inning liner from Baddoo after he ducked away from a fastball just under his armpit. He was erased on a Jonathan Schoop double play, but he wasn’t done.\n\nCastillo had fanned four of his last seven batters and put Baddoo in an 0-2 count leading off the sixth. Baddoo chased a 98 mph fastball off the plate and got enough to poke it inside the left-field line, turning it into a double when he barely beat the throw to second. That extra base loomed large when
After a Joey Votto error put runners at the corners,
“We’re always looking for the extra base,” Candelario said of his third triple of the year. “Everything we can to get close to home plate, we will do it.”\n\nTwo innings later, Baddoo turned a leadoff walk against Brad Brach into an insurance run. Baddoo was trying to steal second on an 0-2 pitch when Schoop hit a soft line drive into shallow center field. Baddoo kept going, rounding third so quickly that the throw home was cut off to throw out Schoop at second.\n\nOnce