The thing about baseball is, it’s dumb.
After a brutal stretch that saw the Detroit Tigers lose 12 of 13 games and score three runs in four games coming out of the All-Star Break, the team exploded Sunday against the Blue Jays for 10 runs before outscoring the Diamondbacks 24-5 in a three-game sweep with the trade deadline approaching.
Is it platoon masher Kerry Carpenter’s return to the lineup? Is it the Tigers’ eight home runs in their last four games after hitting six in their previous nine? In a sport full of superstition, the Tigers’ clubhouse is looking behind Door No. 3: Riley Greene’s new facial hair.
When Greene debuted his mustache-only look Sunday against the Blue Jays, Tigers commentator Jason Benetti took a moment to admire the newly beardless Tigers slugger’s old-school look.
‘Walked by in the clubhouse and was like ‘hey Riley – whoa! What? What’s going on?” Benetti said of Riley’s new look on Sunday’s Detroit broadcast. ‘He’s gone full 1980s New York Yankees, the Chris Chambliss look for Riley Greene. Just change it up. Anything to win a ballgame.’
The Tigers have since won four ballgames, and some of them are crediting Greene’s look with the streak.
‘We’ve all touched it,’ manager A.J. Hinch said of Greene’s mustache after July 29’s 12-2 win over the Diamondbacks, per the Detroit Free Press. ‘I’m not sure how that’s going to go with quotes around it. In the handshake line, he said, ‘We’re 3-0 with the mustache.’ There’s a little bit of belief in there.’
Greene, for his part, has kept the mustache but is saying the Tigers’ recent turnaround as more to do with the ebbs and flows of the sport.
‘It’s the game of baseball,’ he said. ‘I feel like every good team goes through something like this. Look at all the teams. They’ve gone through some touch stretches. It is what it is. I think it showed that, us as a team, we stayed confident, and we got out of it. We’ve only won three games, so we got to keep going and make things happen.’
Carpenter, meanwhile, is not crediting superstition for the team’s recent successes.
‘That’s fake news,’ he said July 29. ‘No superstitions.’
Indeed, the Tigers’ social media team has become a bit obsessed with staches in recent days, going beyond Greene’s facial hair and implying Jake Rogers, who has been covering his top lip far longer than Greene has, is benefitting.
Greene himself admitted the obsession with touching it is ‘getting kind of weird.’
With the trade deadline approaching, the Tigers are playing like buyers again after consternation about how serious they were coming out of the All-Star break. Did Riley Greene’s mustache save the season? Probably not. But in baseball, there’s always that little ‘what if?’