DETROIT — When a pitcher is in command, the mound can become a bully pulpit, a place where the best dictate the action, toy with their prey and bend the game to their will.
When a pitcher is struggling, the mound can feel more like a glass house of sorrow, tens of thousands of people peering in and sneering, mocking your pain.
These are the extremes of pitching at the highest level in the world. The adrenaline is unmatched when you’re right. There is no hiding when you’re not. Sometimes, trying to decipher the difference between those outcomes and what creates those feelings is not as easy as one might believe.
Right now, Jack Flaherty is in the latter stage. He has made seven starts this season. In five of them, he has failed to reach the fifth inning. In each of his past three starts, he has not made it to the fourth. Another game unraveled in a blink on Friday night in a 5-4 loss to the Texas Rangers. Flaherty went 3 2/3 innings. He surrendered four earned runs on five hits and three walks. His season ERA bubbled to 5.90.
Flaherty is the type who can be terse after games like these. His answers are often short. After one start this year, he repeated a few lines praising his teammates for battling, regardless of the question he was asked. Friday night, it seemed Flaherty’s postgame media session would be another one of those. His answer to the first question, about what he was feeling and searching for, amounted to three words, repeated.
“Just keep working,” he said. “Just keep working.”
But by the end, Flaherty’s interview became deeper. It created room for empathy. And it served as a window into the psychological battles fought by those who aspire to throw a round ball over a white plate. It’s an art that can sometimes feel so simple. Other times, it can feel like a riddle with no answer.
“It happened a couple times last year, where I felt like I kind of lose the zone for three or four hitters in a row, out of the middle of nowhere,” Flaherty said. “Today I was on the attack and really good for the first two innings. And then after the third inning right there, you just lose it for three hitters, and it’s agonizing. It’s frustrating. It pisses you off. I’m losing sleep over it every single day trying to figure out what goes on in that little bit right there.”
For the record, Flaherty surrendered a run in the first inning. Brandon Nimmo and Josh Jung each recorded hits. The damage might have been worse had Wenceel Pérez not made a stellar catch at the right-field wall, perhaps robbing Evan Carter of a home run. But as Flaherty explained, he can live with those sorts of innings. He can accept the fact that sometimes he will surrender hits.
He went one-two-three in the second inning but gave up a leadoff home run to catcher Danny Jansen in the third. Even that one he can reconcile in his mind. He left a slider over the plate. The problem is clear and easy to diagnose.
“If I’m getting hit around and making mistakes, then it comes down to you threw the ball over the middle, and you can easily dissect that,” Flaherty said. “You can break that down. ‘Hey, where were the misses? Middle of the plate. How high? This and that. OK. Great.’”
But Flaherty then walked three consecutive batters, losing all feel for the strike zone. He bobbed and weaved and somehow surrendered only two more runs in the inning. But the damage was done, his pitch count was elevated and his team was in a four-run hole.
“I don’t know if it’s about what’s going right (in the first two innings),” Flaherty said. “It’s about figuring out what’s going on in those 15-20 pitches.”
In many of Flaherty’s starts, there have been head-scratching sequences like that. In his first outing against the San Diego Padres, he appeared to be opening up his front side, leading to repeated gloveside misses. But it’s not always simple mechanics getting out of whack.
“Maybe it’s a little bit of everything,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “This is unforeseen and also just not common for him. He doesn’t lose the zone. He’s competitive over the zone.”
For most of the past two seasons and beyond, Flaherty has encountered difficulty going multiple times through opposing orders. Sometimes the caliber of his stuff deteriorates deeper into outings. Sometimes, hitters adjust and time him up. It’s not fun, but at least it’s logical.
“You can handle the hits,” Flaherty said. “You can handle guys putting barrels on the ball if that comes down to missing pitches over the middle. But just giving guys free passes and walking guys, that’s where it gets frustrating.”
At least in Flaherty’s mind, what he’s been dealing with recently is a different kind of confounding. There’s not one clear problem. And that makes the search for solutions all the more difficult.
He has tried tinkering with the mechanics. He has adjusted his sights from the mound and resorted to all the trusty cues. A pitcher who, when at his best, can dot the bottom of the strike zone, exhaust hitters with count leverage and fool them with spin, Flaherty is currently averaging 7.76 walks per nine innings.
“I don’t think I’ve ever walked guys like that in my career,” he said. “It’s one of those things that is going to be frustrating until we totally figure it out. And then it’s going to be frustrating. It’s not something I really did in spring training. It’s not something I’ve done ever. … You have a game here and there where that might happen, but for it to continue to happen, I mean, it’s frustrating.”
An MLB.com reporter asked Flaherty on Friday about how difficult this makes his work between starts. How exactly can you account for a 15-20 pitch stretch where things go awry?
Flaherty bristled at the question at first.
“Hard to work on?” he said. “Everything you do in between starts is working to get better and working on figuring things out and working on this. That’s why it’s a frustrating question.”
In the team kitchen, Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler watched the feed of Flaherty’s interview.
“You just try to get him back in the zone,” Dingler said a few minutes later at his locker. “Obviously, you can’t just come inside there to a good-hitting team, so you’re just battling that, trying to find the right (spots) to get back into good counts, and it’s hard. It’s hard, especially if you lose a little bit of feel for certain pitches, too. It’s just something we have to work through.”
The Tigers, of course, need Flaherty to be better. Tarik Skubal and Framber Valdez are atop the rotation. But the three other spots have quickly been cast into uncertainty. Casey Mize was terrific in four of his first five starts, but is now on the injured list with an adductor strain. Justin Verlander remains on the injured list with a hip issue, working his way back slowly, while Keider Montero has pitched admirably in his place.
Flaherty, a pitcher who revived his career when he posted a 2.95 ERA for the Tigers before the 2024 trade deadline, has looked less like a legitimate frontline threat and more like an enigma. He is making $20 million this season, so there is no realistic recourse. The Tigers as a team are 16-17, struggling with uncharacteristically poor defense and a thin bullpen.
For the Tigers to play their best baseball as the season heats up, they need players like Flaherty to find it.
“We got to stay with him,” Hinch said. “We’re behind him. We’re with him. We know he’s been good before. He’s going to be good for us.”
Two minutes and 20 seconds after Flaherty began addressing the query he found frustrating, he was still answering the question, still mining his own thoughts. What might have been an awkward interview turned into a revealing glimpse into the soul of a competitor when things aren’t going right.
“There’s only so many holes you can dig yourself out of,” Flaherty said. “I’m doing a lot of digging deeper and deeper and deeper instead of making pitches early on and trying to get some quick outs and getting ahead of guys and staying ahead. I’m working, and (pitching coach Chris Fetter) is working. Robin (Lund) is working. A.J., Ding, we’ve got everybody in there trying to work at it.
“I understand your question. I’m sorry. I’m frustrated. I’ll figure it out.”