Watching the game last night, I noticed that Tiger hitters were bashing quite a few extra base hits. Craig Monroe had a double in the first. Brandon Inge, Omar Infante, and Carlos Guillen all tripled. And of course Carlos Pena had two dingers. While I know that the above sample has a mix of lefties and righties, what really struck me was the right hand hitters going up-the-middle or to the opposite field.

Monroe’s double was down the right field line into the corner, and Inge and Infante both drove the ball deep into the gap in right centerfield. In fact, from watching Inge it seems like most of his success this season has come from driving the ball up the middle or over the second baseman’s head. I took a look at his Hit Chart from MLB.com. Below is a cropped screenshot:

I wish that MLB.com would let you combine the results of all parks, but they make you pick a park so I went with Comerica. You can see that Inge isn’t really trying to pull the ball this year, and he’s had great success. He also hasn’t sacrificed power in not pulling. He’s still accumulated extra base hits, but he’s getting them in the right-center gap.

Now let’s contrast this with Omar Infante who’s numbers have been down this year (although not significantly). Below are Omar’s hit charts from
last year and this year.

While Infante has several ground balls to second, he hasn’t driven the ball to rightfield with any regularity. Last year he accumulated more hits pulling the ball, but he did a better job using the whole field. Hopefully last night’s triple (and his double to left center) will be a sign of things to come.

Other Stuff
Jeremy Bonderman looked tremendous in the first inning, but he followed the trap of other Tigers’ pitchers recently and allowed 5 walks in 6 innings. The difference is Bonderman is good enough to get guys to swing and miss on occasion.