Pittsburgh — With another pitcher, they might call it pitching backwards. But with reliever Alex Lange, good luck trying to figure out the back from the front.
“I just pitch,” said Lange, who has emerged as the Tigers’ primary set-up man. “That’s all I do. I just go out and pitch, get outs, execute, throw stuff in the zone that we’re going to get outs on, and trust my catcher.”
Except he goes about it in a most atypical way. Your typical late-inning leverage reliever with upper-90s heat will pitch off the fastball. But with Lange, the heater is a secondary pitch.