The Launch Angle

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Blue and Orange vs. Blue and Orange 2: Electric Bugaloo

The Astros last played the Tigers just 8 days ago. They took 2 of 3 games. They’ve now taken 2 of 3 games in 4 straight series. It’s actually been a pretty good June for the Astros. They’re 12-9 on the month, which is 3rd best in the AL.

Two teams are tied for the best record in the AL in June, 12-8. One of them is the Yankees. That’s not too surprising; the Yankees have the best record in the AL for the whole season. What may be surprising is that the Tigers are the other team.

The Astros’ successful June has pulled them into 2nd place (breaking a 3 way tie with the A’s and Rangers by a tenth of a percentage point), and just 2.5 games back from the division-leading Mariners.

The Tigers have a much deeper hole to climb from. Despite their league best June record, they’re still 12 games below .500 at 34-46 and 7.5 games behind both the Guardians and White Sox in the AL Central. Tigers fans had high expectations for this season, with the Tigers coming off two consecutive postseason appearances, making it to the ALDS both years.

Evaluating a Manager

When a team doesn’t perform to expectations, all eyes turn to the manager. We see it in Houston, with criticisms of Joe Espada. The Tigers manager has also been subject to it: old friend A.J. Hinch, who managed the Astros from 2015-2019.

After the last Astros-Tigers series, Tigers fans pointed to a metric an X account @TigersData developed rating manager decision success rate by outcomes of their pinching hitting and bullpen decisions. Hinch rated dead last.

The methodology of this system is flawed in numerous ways. It rates a decision a success if the pinch hitter reaches, moves a runner, or scores a runner. It rates mid-inning pitching changes with RISP or runners on with less than 2 outs a success if the pitcher escapes the inning without letting a runner score. Well, your pinch hitting is only going to be as good as your bench is. Your relief pitching is only going to be as good as your bullpen is. You can argue that this is as much a referendum on the general manager’s roster construction as it is the manager’s decisions.

Also, who is to say that a negative outcome is a failed decision? The person who was replaced might have failed too. Any decision might have failed. A runner on third with no outs with the top of the order up? Every pitcher in your pen might have ended up letting that run score.

Why is a positive outcome is a successful decision? Maybe the pinch hitter moved the runner over with a groundout. How do we know the the person he replaced wasn’t going to get an outright hit? Or that another pinch hitter wouldn’t have hit a home run instead?

Manager decisions should not be judged just by the outcome. In fact, you can make the argument that outcomes should have no part in the evaluation of a manager’s decision. There is more data than ever now. Once the decision is made, it’s either a good decision or a bad one, regardless of how it turns out. If I need a hit, and I put in Yordan Alavarez to hit for Raynel Delgado, and Yordan flies out, was my decision suddenly bad? Of course not.

The question is not “Did the team win?”. The question is “Did the manager put the team in the best position to win?”. After all, it’s the players who are playing the game, not the manager.

But fans are very reactive, and often blind to anything beyond outcome. I suspect that @TigersData has seen more unsuccessful outcomes than he or she would have liked this 2026 Tigers season, and whether they were aware of it or not, the methodology of their manager rankings were reverse engineered from a decided endpoint of Hinch finishing 30th of 30.

Pitting Hinch Against Pinch Hitting

Many of the poor outcomes for which Tigers fans have blasted Hinch are his pinch hitting decisions. Hinch is aggressive with pinch hitting. The last 4 years, he’s been top 3 in the AL for pinch hitting plate appearances. In 2024 and 2025, he saw pretty good results with it. This year has been a different story.

The Tigers lead the AL in pinch hitting plate appearances, but they’re last in the league in pinch hitting by AVG, OBP, wOBA and wRC+. For many Tigers fans, this is damning.

Looking at AL rank compares a team’s pinch hitters to other teams’ pinch hitters. But if you’re looking at the manager, you ought to be looking at comparing his pinch hitters to the other available options. The White Sox have the best pinch hitting stats in the AL, but it’s not like Hinch can call on a White Sox bench player to bat for him.

Also these are small samples. Even over the course of a full season, all pinch hit plate appearances only add up to about 2 months of an everyday player’s plate appearances.

What was more interesting to me was how much Hinch pinch hits, because I didn’t remember him doing it that much with the Astros. I looked that up too.

My memory was correct… partially. Hinch did not pinch hit much at all from 2017-2019. Those Astros lineups were so incredibly stacked though, you didn’t really need to. You could just make your lineup, set it and forget it. Hinch was much more aggressive about pinch hitting in 2015-2016 when the offensive lineups weren’t as strong.

Hinch didn’t pinch hit that much in his first 2 years with the Tigers. Maybe he had gotten into the habit of keeping a stayed hand, but switched back to being more aggressive when he realized the Tigers rosters’ offensive power measured closer to the 2015-16 Astros than the 2017-19 Astros.

In any case, the 2026 Tigers on the season have a bottom 5 AL offense in wRC+. That the 2026 Tigers pinch hitting offense also rates lowly, honestly, seems consistent. Hinch’s pinch hitting outcomes might be poor, but he’s just using what he’s been given to work with.

The Astros Pinch-Hitting under Espada

Enough about old flames. How are the 2026 Astros doing at pinch hitting? Here’s a look at their pinch hitting numbers over the last 3 years, the Espada era:

Espada has been in the middle of the pack of the league for how often he pinch hits. This year, Astros pinch-hitters have a 78 wRC+ in their 71 plate appearances. This probably seems bad, but consider that only 3 AL teams have a 100 or better wRC+ by their pinch hitters. That should be expected. The league’s best hitters like Yordan Alvarez, Aaron Judge, and Junior Caminero play from the start of games; they aren’t going to factor into pinch hitting stats very much.

Additionally, statistically, pinch hitter suffer about a 10% penalty (about 34 wOBA points) pinch hitting, as opposed to when they’re been engaged the whole game, per The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. (That makes it all the more important to make sure that there is enough of an advantage increase with the change in hitter to offset this penalty.)

Alvarez, Jose Altuve, and Carlos Correa have zero pinch hit plate appearances this season. Here’s who’s been doing the pinch hitting for the 2026 Astros:

I initially wanted to compare how the Astros fared as pinch hitters compared their overall season performances, but the sample sizes for each individual player would make such a comparison meaningless.

I could however, compare the aggregate 71 pinch hitting Astros plate appearances to how their season performances. It wouldn’t be fair to just compare them to the Astros season stats as a whole though. It needs to be proportional to who is taking these pinch hit plate appearance. Based on season numbers, if Brice Matthews were getting 15.5 % (11/71) of the opportunities, and Joey Loperfido were getting 14.1% (10/71) of the opportunities and so on, you’d expect the pinch hitters to have an aggregate OBP of .272 and OPS of .639. In reality, their 2026 pinch hitting OBP is .300 and OPS is .623. Not a whole lot different, but maybe a little more focus on reaching safely. In fact, maybe even better than expected considering the hitters don’t seem to have the 10% dropoff in production that usually comes with pinch hitting.

Really the comparison to make is how the 71 pinch hits performed in aggregate compared to who would have taken to those plate appearances if no substitution were made. That ended up being impractical for a several reasons. First, it wouldn’t consider platoon splits, which is frequently why pinch hit decisions are made. Second, it would include “throwaway” pinch hit decisions, which are not done for any strategic advantage but just to get veterans out of blowout wins or blowout losses. (Or you could actively exclude these, but that would appreciably decrease your sample size). Lastly, figuring out was subbed out for each pinch hitting appearance is a tedious chore and I don’t have any unpaid interns. (Just unpaid me.)

Astros @ Tigers Game Information and Gamethread Details

If the Astros want to make it 5 series wins in a row, they’ll need to win 3 games against the Tigers. This is a 4 game series, but fortunately for the Astros, they’ll miss Tigers ace Tarik Skubal who pitched last night against the Yankees.

Tatsuya Imai starts for the Astros tonight. After lasting less than 1 inning against the Royals, Imai righted the ship and pitched 6 innings with 3 earned runs in a win against the Guardians. The quality start was nice, but what was more encouraging to see was a season- high 11 strikeouts to go along with 0 walks. Imai generated 20 swings and misses. This is the Imai Astros were hoping for when he was signed. This is the Imai they’ll need down the line.

The season stats still look ugly for Imai: a 6.15 ERA, a 1.44 WHIP. We’ve seen the floor and it’s very low, but we’ve also seeing the ceiling and it’s quite high, and apart from the Royals game, Imai has been closer to the ceiling than the floor recently.

Troy Melton pitches for the Tigers. Melton was originally scheduled to pitch the first game of the series against the Astros in Houston, but was scratched at the last minute due to lower back tightness. The Tigers went with a bullpen game, and beat the Astros handily 9-3.

Melton makes his 6th start of the season. A right handed pitcher in his second year, 4 of his 5 starts this year have been great, including 3 starts limiting the opponent to 1 run and another 8 inning start giving up just 2 runs. His most recent outing against the White Sox, he went 6 innings, with 1 earned run, struck out 5 and walked 3. The White Sox managed just 1 hit against Melton, a first inning leadoff home run by Sam Antonacci. After that, Melton was lights out.

Melton has a 2.56 ERA on the season, and is 4-0 in 5 starts. He carries a 0.95 WHIP, 5.4 K/9 and 2.6 BB/9.

I mentioned this in my last preview where Melton was lined up to start, but Melton looks like a pitcher who is due for regression. He’s not been a big strikeout pitcher, despite an above average fastball that averages 95.7 mph. He doesn’t get hitters to chase much, and is 7th percentile in generating swings and misses. While his ERA is 2.56, his FIP, xFIP and SIERA are considerably higher at 5.41, 4.74 and 4.84. Here’s hoping that tonight is the night Troy Melton turns into Troy Meltdown. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Melton throws 6 pitches: a 4 seamer, slider, cutter, splitter, sinker and curve. He pairs his 4 seam fastball primarily with his slider.

This post will be updated with starting lineups as they are made available.

The game will be broadcast at 5:40 p.m. CT on SCHN with radio coverage on KBME 790 AM.

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Feature photo from  @astros on X,  Source Link.