Tigers Take Game 3, Defeat Rangers 5-2 Behind Doug Fister

The hit to the knee is the one that appeared to do the most damage. It knocked him to the ground, as you can see in the screengrab from @cjzero on Twitter:

Assuming he’s cleared to play, Beltre will likely continue to be hobbled -- not that he expects that to be a problem. From Ken Rosenthal:

It seemed likely at the time that Martinez would be sidelined for the rest of the game, and perhaps even longer. But he returned for his next at-bat, and vowed after the game that he wouldn’t miss any time.

“The only way that I don’t play tomorrow is if I wake up and I’m dead,” he said, as reported by the Detroit Free Press. “That’s going to be the only way that I don’t play tomorrow.”

Problem: three batters into Tuesday night’s Game 3, the Tigers were already behind by a run, and the Rangers didn’t have any outs. Three consecutive singles - including a weak roller and a blooper - put Texas in the lead, and silenced the Comerica Park crowd before it could even really get energized.

I don’t know if falling behind early in unlucky fashion is more or less inauspicious than falling behind early in convincing fashion, but it was most definitely an inauspicious start, given that the Tigers have had trouble scoring runs all month.

Of all the deadline deals made at July 31st, and after sifting through 35,039 different Carlos Beltran, Hunter Pence, and Michael Bourn rumors, it was Doug Fister who ended up making the biggest difference.

Doug Fister.

When Doug Fister got cuffed around by the Yankees in the rain-suspended Game 1 of their Division Series, it was easy to say, “See, I told you Doug Fister wasn’t really a winner, and that his ERA and strikeout-to-walk ratio this season were just flukes. Also, if you’d bought gold three years ago when I told you, you’d be living in Monaco right now.”

There’s a pitching change in the bottom of the seventh, and it’s now Tigers 5, Rangers 1.

That doubled the Tigers’ lead, and if you’re a fan of Win Expectancy, it improved the Tigers’ chances of winning this game from 74 percent to 84 percent. Maybe that seems underwhelming to you, but trust me, ten percentage points is a pretty big deal.

That’s where the damage stopped, but 4-1 is a hell of a lot better than 2-1 going into the seventh, and Fister’s thrown just 76 pitches. It’s beginning to look like we might have a series.

Colby Lewis was rolling along.

He gave up that game-tying home run to Victor Martinez in the fourth, but everything seemed copacetic again as Lewis got Ryan Raburn on a long foul and Andy Dirks on a short fly. But then Austin Jackson singled, and so did Ramon Santiago, with Jackson scooting to third base.

Then Martinez left the game and walked down the clubhouse steps because he hurt himself on the home run swing.

...

It’s worth noting now that Beltre once finished a game despite sustaining a damaged testicle earlier on. It’s not that Adrian Beltre lacks pain receptors. It’s that Adrian Beltre does his best to ignore what his pain receptors try to tell him. Shut up and mind your own business, pain receptors!

We know this because Tim McCarver, in his first action this postseason, said deep slider four times in the first two innings.

Now, I have to admit that I don’t know what deep slider means.

So that’s how we got to the oh would you look at that, Doug Fister just navigated through the top of the third. Weak single, double play, strikeout. Live-blogging is hard when the pitching is good and/or the hitting is not good. To the bottom of the third we go! Lewis has thrown 41 pitches. An unsurprising number of them have been strikes.

As Al Yellon wrote earlier today, this is nothing new for Lewis, who entered tonight’s start with four wins and a 1.67 ERA in five postseason starts.

The first four of those came last October, when he

Sorry about that. Let me catch you up. Ian Kinsler led the game off with a single on the first pitch from Doug Fister. Elvis Andrus then chopped the third pitch of his at-bat just through the right side. Josh Hamilton got jammed and, uh, fisted a pitch just over the reach of Jhonny Peralta to score Kinsler. Just a few minutes after the game started, seven pitches in, the Rangers were up 1-0 and threatening to score more.

Fister did some exemplary damage control, though, getting Michael Young to ground into a double play, and striking out Adrian Beltre. Still, the early scoring really did a lot to quiet the raucous Detroit crowd.

But Young did not look good - even for him - and while he got himself into Jim Leyland’s original starting lineup for Game 3, he’s been scratched. The injury is still bothering him, and he’s too sore to play.

Leyland doesn’t know about Young’s availability going forward, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that Young aggravated the injury by playing. But that’s me trying to pass off speculation as insight. It might have happened, or it might not have happened!

Chavez is in there because he bats left-handed and hey, why not?

If the Tigers had been prescient, they’d have figured out what Marc Normandin did in his profile of Lewis last year -- that he had begun to come back from all the surgeries. Instead, they unceremoniously dumped him at the end of the 2006 season, and within a year he had bounced through three more organizations before being released in December 2007.

At 28 and with his MLB career apparently over, Lewis signed with the Hiroshima Carp of Nippon Professional Baseball, the Japanese major leagues. There, he resurrected his baseball life with two good years with the Carp, including leading his league in strikeouts in both 2008 and 2009. This got the attention of the Rangers, who signed him to a two-year, $5 million contract with a $3.25 million option for 201.