SEATTLE -- Casey Mize had good reason to be antsy coming into his season debut. The fifth starter in the Tigers¡¯ rotation, he had expected to be the last player on Detroit¡¯s active roster to take the field.
It still meant an opening series in the dugout, a travel day Sunday and another day off Monday in Seattle -- and with Gleyber Torres going to the IL and Justyn-Henry Malloy replacing him Monday, Mize got pushed down another rung on the list.
¡°He reminded me, he¡¯s the 27th player to play,¡± manager A.J. Hinch said with a smile before Tuesday¡¯s game at T-Mobile Park. ¡°He wasn¡¯t even 26th.¡±
Tuesday, Mize finally got to step on the hill. And he made up for the delay, starting the year off on the right foot to lead the Tigers to a 4-1 win over the Mariners.
Mize blew through five innings on 65 pitches before running into some command issues in the sixth. He finished at 5 2/3 innings after a diving double play by Spencer Torkelson at first base, totaling six strikeouts and giving up just one hit -- to the Mariners¡¯ first batter of the night.
It was a promising start for the former first overall pick, who used his first real normal offseason since the winter of 2021-22 -- after UCL and back surgeries kept him out most of ¡®22 and all of ¡®23 -- to change the look of his arsenal.
¡°I just saw him use his whole repertoire and really get after it,¡± Hinch said. ¡°He got himself out of the first inning, where he was really spraying the ball a little bit, had a little bit of a hard time getting into the game, and then he fell into an incredible rhythm.
"He pounded the strike zone, he had the split going, he had both variations of the slider, the fastball got pretty good and he was pretty pitch efficient. You throw all of that together in the same game, and you get this kind of performance.¡±
A large part of Mize¡¯s success came with his new, faster splitter, which averaged 88.5 mph, a 2.3 mph increase from 2024. He threw 15 splitters on the night, and it generated five whiffs on the seven swings the Mariners took against it.
¡°It was good,¡± Mize said. ¡°It was better to the lefties than it was to the righties today; it was a bit outside to the righties. That¡¯s something I¡¯m going to have to work on between starts. But I really liked it to the lefties.¡±
Mize also got five swings-and-misses with his four-seam fastball and four with his slider, the latter of which is another pitch he¡¯s tinkered with, turning it into an arsenal of its own with multiple different breaks.
The balance in results mirrored a balance in usage across the night, which, according to Hinch, is one of the biggest goals going into ¡®25.
In years and outings past, Mize fell back into a one-two punch of the fastball and slider. For a moment Tuesday, it looked like that may happen again.
After the Tigers spotted Mize an immediate 2-0 lead in the top of the first, Victor Robles tagged Mize¡¯s second pitch of the night -- a slider -- into right field for a hit. Julio Rodr¨ªguez struck out on a sinker and two sliders. Mize threw his first splitter to Cal Raleigh, but it went in the dirt, and his next seven pitches were either fastballs or sliders.
¡°The first few sliders I threw were the old slider, and I kept missing above the zone,¡± Mize said. ¡°I kind of had to resort to the other stuff.¡±
So he did. Randy Arozarena drove a 1-2 splitter into the dirt for a groundout, and Luke Raley swung through back-to-back splitters for Mize¡¯s first strikeout of the year.
¡°It feels good to be able to go to other stuff and execute and get some results from it,¡± Mize said. ¡°A.J.¡¯s right, I can¡¯t fall back into patterns of what¡¯s comfortable; I¡¯ve got to be able to continue to go to the stuff I worked on. I was able to do that tonight and get some results.¡±
From there, he cruised, retiring the side in order in the next three innings before ending his streak of consecutive outs at 14 with a leadoff walk to JP Crawford in the sixth.
¡°When we got the lead, we felt like we had a bigger lead just because of the way Casey was throwing,¡± Hinch said. ¡°A different part of the season and he¡¯s probably going to cruise a little bit longer.¡±