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DETROIT FREE PRESS | Thursday, May 12, 1977 — For a team that is supposedly tailor-made for Tiger Stadium, it certainly took the Tigers a long time to show it.
But they finally looked right at home Wednesday evening as Ben Oglivie, Phil Mankowski, Mark Wagner and Milt May all smashed home runs to help maul the Minnesota Twins, 8-3.
With all that support, it was easy for Dave Roberts to go all the way, limiting the Twins to five hits to claim his third victory of the season.
Watching the Tigers whack the ball into the seats with such authority, one could only wonder what took them so long.
Going into the game the Tigers had hammered the grand total of seven home runs in their first 11 games at Michigan and Trumbull. Wednesday they hit four in eight innings, including three off Jeff Zahn, previously undefeated and the American League’s lead-leading winner at 5-0.
It was awesome, to say the least, and long overdue.
In their first 11 games at home, in spite of a lineup loaded nightly loaded with left-handed hitters, the Tigers were out-homered by the opposition, 23 to 7 . . . hardly the sort of situation Ralph Houk envisioned when he put together this team together in the spring.
Wednesday’s performance was what the manager had in mind.
Roberts, who had won two in a row after watching his record fall to 1-4, struck out four Twins and walked only one in his best showing since he beat Toronto a month ago.
In addition, the veteran left hander gained some measure of revenge for the pounding he took in Minnesota 11 days earlier when Rod Carew attacked him on the mound at the Twins knocked him out of the game in the second inning.
Roberts never trailed as the Tigers came to his defense with a dozen hits, including 10 in the first four innings off Zahn.
Zahn found himself three runs behind by the time the Tigers finished batting in the bottom of the first, even though they only hit one ball beyond the infield. (See article below for more; click on, tap or stretch article for larger detailed read).
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Detroit Free Press, 05/11/1977 | Copyright 2022. Newspapers.com
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BASEBALL REFERENCE: For the complete Minnesota Twins vs. Detroit Tigers May 11, 1977 game-day box score and stats — click HERE
