Tampa — The baseball part is chafing him, for sure. But he’s dealt with these rough stretches before. Letting his teammates down, though, that’s what Jack Flaherty can’t abide.
“These guys deserved a lot better out of me tonight,” said Flaherty, who was KO’d in the third inning by a hot Tampa Bay Rays team that pounded the Tigers 14-8 Friday night at George Steinbrenner Field. “Especially with the doubleheader yesterday and the way they went out and competed tonight and made a game out if it.
“They deserved better.”
Flaherty was charged with eight runs in just 2.1 innings. After a string of five strong starts, he’s been chased early in his last two with his ERA ballooning to 4.83.
“Just move on,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. Just move on to the next one.”
He never seemed to get settled in this one, though, command-wise or stuff-wise. He walked three, hit another and struggled to put hitters away even when he got ahead in counts. The 10 balls the Rays put in play against him had an average exit velocity of 99.5 mph.
Just as damning, the 17 hitters he faced fouled off 19 pitches.
“Execution is what I go to first,” manager AJ Hinch said. “There were a lot of pitches in the middle and they did foul off a lot of balls. But execution, execution, execution. You’ve got to get into counts with well-placed pitches. Not just strikes, not just big strikes. Not just in the box but where you intended.
“He had a hard time ending at-bats in his favor when the execution slips.”
Yandy Diaz set the tone. He hit the first of his two home runs leading off the bottom of the first inning, sending a 93-mph four-seamer 409-foot over the wall in right-center. After Flaherty had fallen behind 3-0.
He needed 32 pitches to get through the first inning and when he finally got the final out, the Tigers were in a 4-0 hole.
After Riley Greene’s 432-foot, three-run homer to center brought the Tigers within a run in the top of the third, Flaherty could only get one out in the bottom of the inning.
A pair of walks contributed to his demise in the third, setting up a three-run double by Taylor Walls.
“He’s fighting, he’s trying to find it,” Hinch said. “I know he’s frustrated. Of course I see him grinding through it quite a bit, trying to last deep in the game and give us a chance to win.”
The concern, though, is that this was the ugliest manifestation of something Flaherty has wrestled with for most of the season. He’s being hit harder than he ever has in his career.
This was his 15th start — which, ironically, triggered a $10 million bonus, doubling his salary for 2026 — and these were all career worsts coming into the game:
▶ Hard-hit rate (42.6%).
▶ Exit velocity (89.7 mph).
▶ Barrel percentage (11.1%).
▶ Sweet spot (41.6%).
▶ Balls in the air (64.7%).
▶ Balls pulled in the air (24.7%).
Only one of his pitches has a plus run value (slider), per Statcast.
“I don’t care about the numbers,” Flaherty said. “I just need to go out and do better.”
Flaherty has been able to mitigate damage for the most part with a high strikeout rate (29%) and an uncanny ability to make big pitches in clutch moments. Before Friday, he’d held opponents to a .152 batting average and .484 OPS and 18 strikeouts with runners in scoring position, 2-for-19 with two outs and runners in scoring position.
The damn broke on Friday.
It was the most runs he’s allowed since he was tagged for 10 runs in 2.1 innings when he was pitching for the Cardinals on May 4, 2023.
“He will figure it out,” Hinch said. “He will get to his bullpen work and they will break things down.”
The Tigers, as Flaherty said, tried to make a game of it.
It was a huge night for Greene. He hit both his 16th and, in the eighth inning, 17th homers. In addition to the four RBI (59 on the season, 29 in his last 29 games), he also doubled, walked and scored three times. He also made a sensational diving catch, stealing extra bases from Diaz in that four-run third inning.
An RBI double by Parker Meadows and a sacrifice fly by Javier Báez in the sixth inning, got the Tigers within four, briefly.
Colt Keith lined a two-run homer to right field in the ninth, his sixth on the season and second in two games.
“This one was less tough than some others just because it’s such a small ballpark,” Keith said when asked about the Tigers’ staying in the fight. “You get a bloop and a bloop and a homer and you’re right back in this thing. That’s something we talked about, just how the Rays have come back in games like that and teams they’ve played have come back on them in this park.
“But in any situation, we’re not trying to give away at-bats.”
The Tigers (48-29), who gave up 16 hits, issued six walks and were charged with two errors, used four relievers to finish the game, which, after playing a double-header on Thursday, further strains an already weary bullpen.
“Not great,” Hinch said. “We’re not in a great spot. But we’ll be fine. We have an off day Monday. We’re just going to grind through these next two games and try to win the series. We’ve got guys who will step up and we need a good outing in the beginning of the game.”
That will fall to Sawyer Gipson-Long Saturday and Casey Mize on Sunday.
@cmccosky
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