Eduardo Valencia turned his return into an immediate jolt for the Detroit Tigers, launching a Dean Kremer sinker 416 feet into left field on his first swing after being called up from Triple-A Toledo. The home run came in a 14-0 win over the Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday at Comerica Park, and Valencia finished 4-for-5 with four RBIs in a game that never stayed close.
The blast was Valencia's third home run in his first 13 MLB at-bats, but the bigger story was how quickly he fit back in after rejoining the Tigers on Monday as a replacement for Kerry Carpenter. A.J. Hinch said before the game that the club loved what Valencia did when he was up here, and by night’s end that looked less like praise than a simple fact. Valencia also had three hits in his first three at-bats back with Detroit, and his 105.7 mph shot set the tone for an offense that kept stacking traffic and damage.
The Tigers did not just win by volume. They scored at least one run in all eight innings, a feat that has happened only 22 times in MLB history and only three times in franchise history, with the earlier Tigers examples coming in 1912 and 2014. Detroit put up nine runs in five innings and finished with 19 hits, including seven for extra bases, while Colt Keith added a two-run triple and Gleyber Torres had a home run and a two-run double. Keith, Torres, Kevin McGonigle, Ben Malgeri and Javier Báez all posted multi-hit games.
Dean Kremer still took the loss, even though Baltimore reached base only five times against Troy Melton. Valencia punished the sinker on the first swing, and the Orioles never had more than two runners on in an inning while Melton was on the mound. That was the kind of night that leaves a line score looking simple and a box score doing the real work underneath it.
Melton gave the Tigers seven scoreless innings, allowed three hits, struck out five and improved to 6-1 while lowering his ERA to 1.75. It was his third shutout start and the 10th time in 11 starts this season that he allowed two earned runs or fewer. He needed 92 pitches, 58 of them strikes, and generated 11 whiffs on 42 Baltimore swings. The cutter produced four whiffs and the slider three. Detroit snapped a three-game losing streak and did it while coming in six games back of the Chicago White Sox in the AL Central and 4½ games behind the Cleveland Guardians for the final wild-card spot. Valencia is now the team's backup catcher after the release of Jake Rogers on Tuesday, and the next question is whether this return is just a hot night or the start of another long run in the middle of a crowded chase.
