Skubal wins No. 15 in blowout as Tigers buying in to organizational vision

CHICAGO -- It’s tough to upstage Tarik Skubal on a night that he starts, but for the second night in a row, the Tigers’ offense was productive from top to bottom. In Saturday’s 13-4 win over the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field, every member of manager A.J. Hinch’s starting lineup had a hit or reached base safely.

That result is the product of an organizational philosophy that Hinch and the coaching staff are working to instill, one where they optimize matchups and in-game decisions with an eye toward putting hitters in the best possible position to succeed.

“One of the goals is to create an offense where one through nine we feel pretty good about what we can do to put up good at-bats,” Hinch said. “The results will follow, and sometimes they’ll be good nights, sometimes they won’t. But the buy-in from the players and the work done behind the scenes with the coaches is [something] I’m very, very proud of.”

For example, Hinch said he expected that both of Chicago’s left-handed relievers would be down for Saturday’s game because both pitched the night before, so he went with a lefty-heavy lineup against left-handed starter Ky Bush knowing that whenever he left the game, they’d be facing only right-handed pitchers.

“There’s decisions at the beginning of the game and there’s decisions you’re anticipating for later in the game,” Hinch said. “It’s nice to have guys to deploy when we feel like we have the advantage.

These decisions helped translate into 13 runs, a chunk of them driven in by Jake Rogers, who went 3-for-5 with two doubles and three runs batted in. Rogers had been hitless since going 3-for-5 against the Mariners on Aug. 13, and he attributed his return to form at the plate to taming a leg kick that had become too exaggerated over the last couple of weeks.

“I started to kind of squeeze and crunch,” Rogers said of the impact of the leg kick on his swing. “So I did a smaller leg kick to calm down my upper body and it felt good in the pregame. I think it translated a little bit into the game today.”

Matt Vierling, hitting from the leadoff spot, opened up the game with a double. He scored the Tigers’ first run a batter later on a single from Andy Ibáñez. In the top of the third, Vierling led off with a home run, the first of four runs Detroit scored in the frame.

Those runs provided a buffer for Skubal, who cruised pretty easily through the first two innings, but then gave up three runs on five hits in the third inning. In all, Skubal tossed five innings, allowing just the three runs while striking out eight. The eight hits he allowed were the most since the Guardians touched him up for 10 hits on July 22.

Hinch, Rogers and Skubal each said that the balls were not to Skubal’s liking, which may have played a role in an outing not up to his usual standard. Skubal said he had some difficulty getting enough grip on the balls, which affected his velocity and command, but he downplayed any possibility of that being the reason for his inflated totals.

“I don’t know what was going on with the balls today, but I wasn’t a fan of them. I’ve never thrown out that many balls before,” Skubal said. “I’m not selling an excuse or anything, it is what it is. It happens. You’ve got to learn to pitch around some things and deal with it.”

Skubal sat the Sox down in order in the fourth and worked around a leadoff single in the next inning. Of the eight hits the Sox had against Skubal, seven of them were singles, and only three of the hits had exit velocities over 100 miles per hour.

“Everything else was through holes, found holes,” Skubal said. “That’s the game of baseball. You’ve got to understand that. You can let the three runs or the five hits dictate your next inning, or you can just flush it and get back to getting zeros.”

Skubal is putting together a Cy Young-caliber season. He leads the American League in ERA (2.58) and with Saturday’s outcome, Skubal has 15 wins, also tops in the league. But it’s also a year in which he has pitched 160 1/3 innings -- the highest total of his career so far -- which may mean the Tigers exhibit some caution with his innings load in the final weeks of the season.

That said, Hinch’s Tigers are working toward .500, and Skubal’s outings do a lot to help get them there -- given that Detroit has relied on openers and bullpen games more of late. Sure, 13-run games help, too, and Hinch and the Tigers showed how they can pull some of the right levers to get all parts of his lineup going.