Daz shushes heckler (his dad) with clutch hit

Daz Cameron made a quick impression on his manager with his ability to put tough moments behind him. Still, there was one heckler at Angel Stadium the Tigers rookie outfielder won’t soon forget.

“My dad and my family were sitting close to the on-deck circle,” Cameron said. “Before one AB, I was on deck and I was getting ready to go up there swinging. And my dad said, ‘You suck, you suck!’ Just talking, just having fun, just enjoying it. That was definitely something that I will never forget. That was memorable, for sure.”

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His dad, of course, is former All-Star and Gold Glove center fielder Mike Cameron. And after his son completed a special Father’s Day weekend with a go-ahead two-run single in the 10th inning for a 5-3 Tigers win over the Angels, dad is welcome to follow the team back home to Detroit.

“We have tickets for him if he wants to come,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “But we’re going to make sure Daz gets on that plane. That’s the guy we want in the lineup here over the next couple days.

“But yeah, Mike’s welcome anytime he wants to come out. I’ll put that guy in uniform if he wants to.”

Mike Cameron played center field in the first-ever game at Comerica Park, back when the outfield was even bigger, so he knows the territory. But he also knows his son. Between his job with the Mariners and baseball’s empty stadiums for COVID-19 regulations last year, this Father’s Day weekend was fittingly the first time Daz Cameron’s parents and siblings were able to watch him in the Majors. He rewarded them with a home run and RBI single Saturday in a loss, but Sunday was his chance to provide a game-winner and help the Tigers salvage a win from the four-game set and return home with a winning road trip.

Cameron struck out three times Sunday following a second-inning single, leaving the bases loaded in the fifth and a runner in scoring position in the seventh, before he stepped to the plate with the bases loaded in the 10th against Angels closer Raisel Iglesias.

Cameron chased a couple of sliders to fall into a 1-2 count, but he connected with a slider on the outside corner.

“I was just trying to get a pitch that I could put a good swing on,” Daz Cameron said. “The 1-2 pitch was thrown to me somewhere up in the zone where I could hit it and make contact with it, and that was the one that I got the bat head to.”

The resulting ground ball up the middle had just a 71.8 mph exit velocity and a .230 expected batting average, but made it through a drawn-in infield to score Jeimer Candelario and pinch-runner Willi Castro. It was the lone ball the Tigers hit out of the infield in the inning, but it worked.

“Battling there, contact’s your friend,” Hinch said. “It doesn’t always have to be perfect contact or exit velocity and all the important things. Sometimes it’s just [the] right place at the right speed. With the infield drawn in, it was very key.”

It was the kind of pragmatic hitting that could make dad proud. The two talked after Daz’s performance Saturday, but it was as much or more about what he saw from other players than about himself. They talked, among other things, about Shohei Ohtani’s approach at the plate, and about minute details that might otherwise get missed.

“He’s always hard on me about the little details of the game, with trying to get better in any way possible that I can. It’s helped all the way up to this point.”

It’s part of Mike Cameron’s instincts as an instructor and an evaluator. Still, as tough as dads can be on their sons, there’s an obvious sense of pride.

“It’s really like watching my younger self in a sense,” Mike Cameron told MLB Network Radio on Sunday morning. “But he has his own game.”

Fittingly, then, Cameron’s hit broke a game that had been deadlocked since Ohtani’s latest home run off Tigers pitching, this time after two strikeouts against Casey Mize. The two battled for nine pitches in the first inning, including four consecutive foul balls in a 2-2 count -- two fastballs, a splitter and a curve -- before Mize coaxed him to chase a high fastball for the first of four Mize strikeouts on the day.

Mize went back to the high fastball for three consecutive pitches, all swings and misses from Ohtani, for a strikeout in the third en route to escaping a jam with runners at the corners. He changed approach and had Ohtani in a 1-2 count in the fifth before Ohtani connected on a slider at his knees for a 414-foot drive to center field that tied the game at three.

Kyle Funkhouser, whose glove Mize borrowed for a second consecutive start after Mize’s dark gray glove was ruled in violation of MLB code, stranded two runners in the sixth inning, followed by a perfect seventh inning with two strikeouts from Gregory Soto. José Cisnero struck out three batters over two perfect innings to earn the victory before Michael Fulmer finished the bottom of the 10th for his sixth save.