DETROIT — The sense of relief was palpable. The high-five line at the end of the game was joyous. The music was blaring again in the clubhouse. Nothing was going to dampen this moment. Not even a wonky top of the ninth inning.

"It's a sense of accomplishment," manager AJ Hinch said after the Detroit Tigers snapped a six-game losing streak with a 10-4 win over the Toronto Blue Jays Sunday before 36,053 at Comerica Park. "Obviously, we need a good feeling at the end of the day, we needed it all week. It's a fun win, it's a good win. I thought our crowd was incredible sticking behind these guys.

"Obviously not the clean win at the end, but who cares? You end the day happy."

The final score distorts the kind of game this was. The Tigers unleashed two weeks of pent-up frustration with a seven-run outburst in the bottom of the eighth. The Blue Jays took advantage of three walks by the newest Tigers reliever, Luke Jackson, to score four in the top of the ninth before leaving town.

In between was another tightly-played, competitive baseball game between two division leaders.

"It's not quite a weight lifted off the shoulders because we still have to go out and perform," catcher Dillon Dingler said. "But we're a winning team and we're going to strive for that every day. Obviously it was great to break the streak. But now we move forward."

The Tigers had lost 12 of their previous13 games, a confounding mix of impotent offense and uncharacteristically sloppy defense and late-inning bullpen blowups. For most of the last two weeks, they've been playing either uphill or with virtually no margin for error.

What had been missing – that spark, that ignitor, that one big, scoreboard-changing swing that might lift them out of this recent morass – showed up early Sunday.

It came in the third inning and it came off future Hall-of-Famer Max Scherzer and it was struck by a hitter stuck in a 0 for 16 skid at a time when it looked for all the world like they were going to squander another golden scoring opportunity.

Not this time.

With two on and two out, Gleyber Torres sent an elevated fastball 403 feet over the wall in right-center.

"Huge," Spencer Torkelson said. "Especially we had two out. Colt (Keith) almost got a bloop single. Javy (Baez) was like 10 feet short of getting a sacrifice fly. Not coming through is painful and for Gleyber to pick us up was huge."

It was the only damage they mustered off Scherzer, who celebrated his 41st birthday with a throwback quality start. Besides those three hits in the third, Scherzer dispatched 18 hitters without allowing a runner.

The former Tiger struck out a season-high 11 in his seven innings.

Between Torres' 10th homer and the Tigers batting around in the eighth, the burden fell on the capable shoulders of Jack Flaherty to hold the red-hot Blue Jays offense in check. He was more than up to the challenge, posting six clutch, shutout innings. He allowed just five hits, all singles and three of them by Bo Bichette, and struck out seven.

Bichette ended up with five hits in the game.

"You need to talk about the six scoreless inning first," Hinch said. "That's a great accomplishment. That's putting a team on your back and getting you to the seventh with a lead. But the way he did it. The way he stayed composed and won the big at-bats, especially at the end. He's fatigued and we really don't want to go to our bullpen in the sixth.

"It's the third time through the order with the weight of the world on his shoulders and he stayed calm and competed and won the battles."

Coming off a short, three-inning outing in Pittsburgh, Flaherty established his four-seam fastball early and kept the hot Blue Jays hitters off-balance with a deft mix of knuckle-curveballs, sliders and changeups.

"Our guys battled a lot yesterday," Flaherty said. "Skub (Tarik Skubal) always brings that fight and energy and I felt like a little more of that was needed today."

Credit catcher Dingler for making an early adjustment, too.

It seemed like the Blue Jays were hunting Flaherty’s slider and curve, especially with two strikes. Dingler flipped the script, calling for more heaters in those counts. He stranded two runners in the first by getting a called third strike on a heater to Addison Barger.

He struck out Joey Lopefido with a fastball in the second and got Valdimir Guerrero Jr. to take fastballs on both a 3-1 and 3-2 count in the third inning.

Flaherty finished his outing with a pair of strikeouts, the last, against Ernie Clement, with a 96-mph heater, tied for his fastest pitch of the season.

"With their lineup the past few days, I felt like they started to be on things, especially the second and third time through the order," Dingler said. "Just tried to be a little more unpredictable and Jack had a good fastball today. He was working it really well at the top of the zone and we were going to it.

"It kind of became part of the game plan. We went in talking about it but he did a great job executing all game."

Flaherty had talked in Pittsburgh about being less analytical and more competitive on the mound. He talked about going back to a more attack mentality. That certainly manifested itself the way he ended his innings – four of the six with punchouts, all four with men on base.

"Sometimes you have to figure out what you need a little more of," Flaherty said. "Last year was one thing. This year, I feel like, maybe I took a little more after Skub. I felt like that was something that was needed."

The Tigers sent 11 batters to the plate in the eighth, stringing together six singles and a double with a walk mixed in.

"It felt like we haven't seen that in a while, right?" Hinch said. "We've had a hard time showing our identity or what we're about when we're not collecting hits."

Torres picked up his fourth RBI in that inning. Baez doubled in a run and stole third base. Riley Greene, who had been 0 for 10 in the series, ripped an RBI single, as did Torkelson.

"It's not like the end of things," Torkelson said. "It's not like it's all good now. We needed to play a clean, good baseball game. But seeing a W in the win column is definitely refreshing. It's like when you haven't got a hit in a while and seeing one fall. Sometimes that's all it takes."

Hinch was mindful of not pouring any cold water on the win. But he didn't want to make too big a spectacle of it, either.

"It's not our first win," he said. "We obviously haven't had a good two weeks. But we've won before. It's the same song, the same celebration. Our guys believe we can win. No two weeks is going to take that away from us. Let's not make it any more theatrical than it needs to be.

"It's going to be a fun night at home with our families and then we're going to come ready to play like we have for 100-plus games. This team has been really good about changing gears and going into the next series."

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