The Tigers have been known since this time last season for running the bases with reckless abandon. It is somewhat fitting, then, that the Tigers wasted a scoring opportunity that potentially cost them the game with overly cautious baserunning. But we’ll come back to that.

First, we have to talk about Stephen Kolek. As noted in the gamethread, Kolek was mediocre with poor strikeout numbers in San Diego. He was bad in Omaha (though, if you could remove one start, he’d look much better). So expectations were pretty low for him. Naturally, he pitched six innings and allowed only a single run on four hits, no walks, and three strikeouts. It wasn’t perfect – he only had a 14% whiff rate, which you wouldn’t imagine would get the job done most nights, but it was plenty tonight and significantly

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