DETROIT - Framber Valdez put together a start that looked sturdy on paper and strange in every other way.
In the Tigers’ 4-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday, Aug. 24, the left-hander worked six innings, allowed eight hits, walked two and was tagged for four runs. He also did something almost hard to believe: not one of the 41 swings the Rays took against him produced a miss.
That meant no strikeouts, just the second time that has happened in Valdez’s major-league career. It also meant every swing the Rays put on one of his pitches resulted in contact, even as Valdez kept trying to turn the game into a ground-ball contest.
“Yeah, no strikeouts, but it doesn't mean I wasn't effective,” Valdez said in a stone-cold-silent clubhouse after the Tigers' sixth straight loss, as team PR man Carlos Guillen translated the veteran left-hander's postgame interview. “I just did my best to get them to hit groundballs.
They're very aggressive. They're very fast.
So I do my best to have them hit groundballs as much as they could.
“Yes, they got their base hits and stuff, but in this situation, I just switched from swing-and-miss to get them to hit groundballs to the infield.”
The Rays jumped on Valdez right away with two runs in the first inning. The frame started with back-to-back sharp singles, including a 114 mph shot by former Tiger Ryan Vilade that seemed to freeze Brett Callahan in left field.
Callahan’s indecision turned the play into an error, and instead of first and second with nobody out, the Tigers had runners on second and third with nobody out. Two ground balls followed, and both brought in runs.
Without the error, one of those grounders might have become a double play, and Valdez may have escaped with one fewer run on his line.
Tampa Bay added another run in the fourth after a leadoff double, a sacrifice bunt and a squeeze bunt. Jonathan Aranda then provided one of the few balls lifted in the air all night, launching a towering homer to right-center in the sixth for the final Rays run.
Valdez’s outing still qualified as a quality start because of the error, and because the Tigers got some clean defense behind him, especially from third baseman Kevin McGonigle and right fielder Zach McKnistry. It was his 13th quality start in 26 starts for Detroit since he signed a three-year, $115-million deal this offseason.
Still, the headline was the total lack of swing-and-miss. The Rays entered the game with the fewest strikeouts in Major League Baseball, but Valdez had still managed to punch out at least one batter in every Tigers start before Monday, including the outing in July when he lasted just two-thirds of an inning against the Chicago Cubs. The only other time he failed to record a strikeout in a start came in 2019 with Houston.
MLB.com's Jason Beck noted that Valdez’s 41 swings without a miss were the most by a Tigers pitcher in the Statcast era, which began in 2008. The last pitcher in baseball to exceed that number was St. Louis’ Genesis Cabrera, who got 44 swings without a miss in 2019.
Tigers manager AJ Hinch said Valdez deserves credit for limiting the damage in the first inning, but also pointed to the lack of pitches thrown ahead in the count. Valdez opened with first-pitch strikes to 16 of 26 batters.
“They're a good offense, and they make a ton of contact. They're one of the harder teams to strike out in general, and so you don't really come into the game looking for strikeouts,” Hinch said.
“You've got to get ahead. I don't think we did a great job of pitching ahead.
“The best way to create any sort of leverage where you can get a little bit of miss or a little bit of chase or a little bit of, you know, force him up and maybe get a miss is to get ahead and get to two strikes quickly. Maybe you can, you know, create that. They're not impossible to punch.
“I mean, Jackson (Jobe's) going to miss a few bats, and I'm sure (Troy) Melton will attack them, as well. But tonight, it never felt like we were in command of longer at-bats.”
The rough first inning also pushed Valdez’s season numbers in that frame to 20 earned runs and a 7.01 ERA, his worst inning by far. Over his career, his first-inning ERA is 3.88, which is his second-worst inning. Monday was the 192nd start of his career.
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