After a disappointing loss on Friday night, the Tigers looked to start a new winning streak on Saturday afternoon with their ace on the mound. That they did with a 7-5 win, with home runs flying out of the yard everywhere.
If you look at Tarik Skubal’s page on Baseball Reference, you see a lot of bold, black ink in the stats: leading the American League in WAR (well, at least B-R’s version of it), won-loss percentage (if you like pitcher-wins), ERA, ERA+ and FIP, and WHIP. If there was a statistic
called BLORP and it was a good thing, he’d probably be leading the league in that, too. Skubal made his twenty-second start of the year.
Facing the Tigers was Zack Wheeler, the 11-year veteran who started with the Mets and has been with the Phillies since 2020. He’s also leading his league in WHIP and in strikeouts, and coming into today struck out 11.6 batters per nine innings, which is obviously nothing at which to turn up one’s nose. He’s been solid and reliable and excellent for his entire tenure in Philadelphia, and while I don’t think he’s a Hall of Famer, he would definitely fit nicely in the Hall of Very Good.
Both pitchers’ first innings were similar: three strikeouts, but a meaningless hit surrendered. The movement on Wheeler’s pitches was sensational, and Skubal’s second inning featured another three strikeouts. Were we going to be in for a pitching master-class? Sort-of.
With one out in the third Colt Keith, who’d singled in the first, attacked a first-pitch fastball in the strike zone and it ended up in the right-field seats for a 1-0 Tigers lead.
One out later Kerry Carpenter strode to the plate, thought what Keith did looked pretty fun, and did the same for a 2-0 lead.
In the fifth, a pair of singles put runners on first and second with one out, but then Carpenter struck out and Riley Greene hit a dribbler to first and that was that.
Through five innings Skubal was looking great: one hit, no runs, no walks, nine strikeouts (and plenty of those swinging). More importantly, he’d only thrown 59 pitches. How long would he be able to last in this one? Read on to find out, friend.
With one out in the bottom of the sixth, nine-hole hitter Weston Wilson got within about a foot of hitting a home run; it clanked off the wall for a double. After Trea Turner grounded out, Dillon Dingler went out to the mound to have a chat with Skubal; no word on whether or not they were talking about Skubal’s brand-new baby. Whatever Dingler told Skubal worked; the dangerous Kyle Schwarber popped a foul ball down the left-field line on which Greene made a sensational sliding catch after running a long, long way.
Leading off the seventh, Dingler reached base on a grounder to third that ate up Otto Kemp, and Javier Báez made the Phillies pay with a two-run dinger, knocking Wheeler out of the game.
That was the ninth hit off Wheeler, the most he’d given up all season; Wenceel Pérez and Keith had three each. With one out in the seventh off reliever Tanner Banks, Gleyber Torres smashed a 424-foot (129-m) solo shot to centre for a 5-0 lead.
The top of the seventh lasted a while; would that extended break mess with Skubal’s rhythm?
I’m no expert, but... possibly? If you get into a nice rhythm as a pitcher, I can see how a long half-inning could throw you for a bit of a loop.
Bryce Harper led off the bottom of the seventh with a single; JT Realmuto doubled, driving in Harper. Then, Nick Castellanos jumped on a first-pitch changeup and hit a homer to left, narrowing the lead to 5-3. Skubal bore down and got the next three batters on a pair of flyouts and a groundout, but that inning ended Skubal’s day. His final line: 7 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 0 BB, 10 K. It’s lovely, but how much lovelier would it have been if that seventh inning hadn’t happened? That’s baseball for ya.
With two outs in the eighth off long-haired, funky-delivery-master Matt Strahm, Zach McKinstry worked a walk and stole second base. Dingler gave Strahm a 10-pitch battle and walked as well, putting two runners on for Báez. On a 2-2 pitch he threaded a ground ball down the third-base line all the way into the corner, scoring both McKinstry and Dingler, and some very lusty boos were heard from those tough Philly fans afterwards.
Will Vest relieved Skubal to start the eighth, and Harper got into a slider and hit a two-run homer to centre to get those two runs back and make it a 7-5 game. After another sharp single by Realmuto, Vest was yanked with two outs in favour of new acquisition Kyle Finnegan to face Castellanos. Well, Finnegan managed to get Castellanos to ground out harmlessly to third, so... cautious optimism?
After a 1-2-3 top of the ninth, Finnegan carried on to the bottom of the ninth to get the final three outs... which he did with a groundout, a strikeout and a flyout for the four-out save. We might have another good late-inning option in the bullpen, folks.
The finale of the three-game series is a Sunday-night ESPN game at 7:10 pm EDT.
Final score: Tigers 7, Phillies 5
Notes and Observances
- Coming into today, Colt Keith had made 21 starts at second base, 17 at first base and 13 at third base. Aside from someone like Tony Phillips, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone in Detroit make starts at all three of those positions in the same season.
- This just in, Phillips never played first base for the Tigers; he only made five appearances there in his career, and none of those were (a.) in Detroit, or (b.) starts.
- Phillips’ actual first name: Keith. Whoa.
- On this day in 1932, positrons were discovered by Carl Anderson, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for the accomplishment. Positrons are the antimatter equivalent to electrons: they have the same mass, but opposite electric charge (positive, instead of the electrons’ negative). They’re neat, but there’s a problem: if a positron were to touch an electron, both particles would disappear in a flash of gamma rays with an energy of E = mc², where m is the combined mass of both particles. Whoops!
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