Box scores lie sometimes, but this one tells a pretty specific truth: the Tigers beat themselves on Friday night.
Detroit put together 11 hits against the Giants. Eleven. San Francisco managed five. And yet the Tigers lost 5-2, because a team that came in 19 games under .500 for the first time in years found three swings that mattered more than Detroit's entire night at the plate.
The first one came fast. After Detroit scratched across a run in the top of the first on a Dillon Dingler fielder's choice, Rafael Devers answered in the bottom half with a two-run homer, his 24th of the season, and the Giants never trailed again. Jung Hoo Lee turned a two-out, bases-loaded chance into a two-run single the next inning to make it a two-run cushion, and Willy Adames added a solo shot in the fifth, his 19th, just to make sure nobody got any ideas. Three swings, five runs, game.
Meanwhile Detroit was doing the hard part of hitting and failing at the easy part of scoring. The Tigers went 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position and left 12 men on base. That's not a fluky bad night, that's a lineup that kept setting the table and kept forgetting to eat. In my book, that's the real story here, more than any single Giants hitter: San Francisco won this game by doing damage in three at-bats, and Detroit lost it by failing to do damage in twelve.
I won't pile onto Keider Montero for the loss, either. He got hung with the L after allowing all five runs, but he settled in after a rough middle stretch and held San Francisco to two hits over his final four innings, Adames' homer included. That's a starter fighting through a shaky start, not one who got run out of the building. If Detroit's offense cashes even a third of those scoring chances, Montero's final line looks like a quality start that earns him a no-decision or a win.
Context matters here too, and it cuts in Detroit's favor. The Tigers came into this series having won five of six on their West Coast trip and had been scoring in bunches for more than a week. This was, by their own recent standard, a speed bump, not a collapse. San Francisco, on the other hand, was in the middle of a genuinely bad stretch, and this win only pulled them one game out of a real hole, not out of it. I'd be careful reading too much into a team that had won once in its previous six games suddenly finding the formula. They found three good swings on one Friday night, and that's real, but it's not proof the Giants have turned anything around.
The lesson for Detroit is the more durable one. This is a team that's shown it can score in bunches on this trip. When it doesn't, the problem isn't power, it's what happens with two outs and runners in scoring position. Until that gets fixed, a night like this can happen against just about anyone.
