Tigers Will Steal First Five Innings From Slumping Astros

Astros vs. Tigers, 6:40 ET

There comes a point in each baseball season where you have to put away any preconceived notion from past years or even from the beginning of the season and accept that you were wrong. It is starting to come to that point with one of these teams. The other I think I was probably still wrong… but we will see. Those two teams square off today as the Astros a team I expected to be good face the Tigers, a team I expected to be average at best, but most likely a bad team. 

Much to the delight of baseball purists and Dodgers fans, the Astros are a bad baseball team. They are 12 games under .500 at this point in the season. While they have had some injury issues, and it doesn’t seem any more substantial than any other team. Looking at the stats, I can’t say the offense is the issues as they are hitting .256, but they’ve only scored 158 runs for the season. That is a rather low run total for that batting average which means they are probably not putting hits together, or leaving a lot of runners on base. The pitching has been the real issue for the Astros. As a team, they have a 5.05 ERA and a 1.49 WHIP. Perhaps worst of all, opponents are hitting .262 against the team. It is almost like the opponents have some sort of notification before the pitch is thrown. (Sorry, had to.) Josh Hader signing looks terrible right now, and that might be impacting the bullpen worse than we realize. Tonight, they get a guy who has been reliable for the Astros for years, but he’s been injured this season. He’s allowed 10 earned runs over 22.2 innings. This is his third start since returning from injury and he hasn’t completed six innings (something he is very consistent with usually). Tigers hitters are just 18-for-78 against Valdez and only two of those hits have gone for extra bases.

You know what you'll get from Framber Valdez when he is on the mound. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

The Tigers are the opposite of the Astros in a lot of ways. If the Tigers had the hitting of the Astros, they probably would be about 20 games over .500. As it stands, Detroit is just 19-18 on the season and probably will be average most of the year unless their offense can get going. The Tigers are hitting just .227 and have scored nine fewer runs than the Astros this season. They aren’t playing great baseball right now either as they have lost four of their past five games. In three of them, they’ve scored three or fewer runs. Their pitching has allowed five or more earned runs in four of the games though. In fairness, the Astros are 1-4 in their last five as well and they also have given up at least five runs in four straight. Looking to get them back on track is Casey Mize. Mize had a decent April, turning in 26.1 innings and coming out with a 3.08 ERA, but he struggled in his last outing, a game against the Yankees. He allowed five earned runs over 5.1 innings. It has been a while since he saw them, but the Astros hitters are hitting just .176 against him over 17 innings. 

The total in this one is a bit hard to pick because neither pitcher is great right now. The Tigers offense is trash, so getting them to score a ton of runs is unlikely. The Astros offense is good, but Mize has the ability to stop them from scoring as well. I think the better play here is to take the Tigers at home and hope that Mize can get the job done. Let’s take the Tigers through five. 

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