DETROIT >> Balls in play are your friend.

Tigers manager AJ Hinch has preached that the last three years and the Milwaukee Brewers validated his mantra Saturday.

They didn’t necessarily hit the ball hard, but they moved it forward a lot, finding just enough holes and putting enough pressure on the Tigers’ defense to force some critical mistakes in a 5-4 win before 32,333 at Comerica Park on Breast Cancer Awareness day.

Frustrating game all the way around for the Tigers, who fall two games under .500 (31-33).

Starter Casey Mize gutted out 5-1/2 innings, despite getting one strike out and one swing and miss on 36 swings. He gave up eight hits, three of them infield hits. The 22 balls the Brewers put in play against him had an average exit velocity of 86.7 mph.

The Tigers, though, made two errors behind him and the final ledger will show he allowed five runs, three of them earned.

He left the game with one out and two on in the sixth inning and the Tigers clinging to a 4-3 lead.Right-hander Shelby Miller got the second out, but with runners at first and third, Brewers rookie Jackson Chourio hit a bullet into the left-center gap. Rookie left fielder Justyn-Henry Malloy, making his first big-league start in left field, cut the ball off but had a hard time stopping his momentum and getting the ball back into the infield.

The runner from third scored easily to tie the game and Blake Perkins was able to come all the way around from first base to score the go-ahead run.

The Tigers made a total mess of the top of third inning and Malloy played a role in that inning, as well.

They had just taken a 4-1 lead and gifted, painfully so, two unearned runs to bring the Brewers back in the game.

The inning started with an infield single by Chourio and a ground ball single by Brice Turang. Mize then got William Contreras to hit a fly ball behind first base into shallow right field.

Right fielder Akil Baddoo called for the ball and was settling under it when second baseman Colt Keith ran him over. Keith never slowed down and collided with Baddoo at full speed. The ball dropped out of Keith’s glove and both players went down. Keith stayed down and eventually left the game.

Keith ended up banging his left knee on the collision which is what forced him out of the game.

With the bases loaded and no outs, Mize got Christian Yelich to hit a fly ball to medium depth left field. Chourio tagged and scored, but there was a cross-up on the throw in from Malloy. Either he overthrew the cutoff man or the cutoff man was in the wrong spot.

The result, the other two runners were able to advance. Third baseman Matt Vierling caught Malloy’s throw on the infield grass and couldn’t beat Turang back to the base.

The misplay allowed Turang to score on the subsequent ground out by Willy Adames.

The ugliness of that half inning put a damper on what had been an encouraging start for the Tigers.

Showing great patience and discipline, Tigers hitters forced Brewers starter Freddy Peralta to throw 60 pitches in the first two innings.

Riley Greene and Mark Canha walked in the first inning with Greene scoring on a base hit by Gio Urshela.

In the second, Baddoo walked and then scooted to third base on a hit-and-run single by Javier Báez. Carson Kelly delivered an RBI single and a ground by Vierling moved the runners to second and third with one out.

Báez, going on contact, was thrown out at the plate on a grounder to third by Greene.

Canha, though, rescued the inning with a two-strike, two-out single to right. Greene aggressively went first to third and scored when the throw from right-fielder Sal Frelick sailed into the Tigers’ dugout.

The Tigers knocked Peralta out of the game with one out in the fourth. He was at 94 pitches. A double-edged sword, as it turned out. They weren’t able to generate anything against the Brewers’ bullpen, one hit after the second inning.

While Brewers hitters struck out just three times, Tigers hitters were punched 11 times, four on called third strikes.