It was a Battle Of The Left-Handed Aces down at the ol’ corporate-sponsored ball yard on Tuesday night, and the home team touched up a very, very good pitcher for the most runs he’s given up all year in a 4-1 win.
Making the start for the home team was Tarik Skubal, who’d had a couple of rough outings against Houston and Atlanta coming into tonight’s tilt. Notably, and unusually, each of those two starts had five instances of hitter-contact that were classified as line drives; those tend to fall in as hits a lot more often than ground balls or fly balls. But his overall WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched) for the season still came in under 1, which is very good.
For the opposing Philadelphia ball club, Ranger Suárez took the hill. This is Suárez’s third full year in the Phillies’ rotation, and he’s been sensational so far. He came into the game tonight with a 1.75 ERA and a 230 ERA+, both of which led the National League. His WHIP was a stellar .888, he doesn’t walk many, he rarely gives up a home run, and he’ll strike out a guy an inning while getting a bucket-full of ground balls.
In the top of the second the Phillies had runners on second and third with two outs, but Skubal managed to strike out Cristian Pache to end the threat.
Andy Ibáñez made a mighty nice play in the third on a line drive.
That play would come in handy later in the inning, as a hit-by-pitch and a double put runners on second and third again with two outs. But a harmless grounder to, you guessed it, Ibáñez, got the Tigers out of the third.
Both starting pitchers were looking solid through the first few innings. Skubal hit 101 mph on a fastball, and sprinkled three hits amongst the first five innings using a scant 65 pitches. Meanwhile, Suárez relied on excellent control and a variety of cutters, sinkers and changeups to saw through the Tigers’ order early on.
However… a pair of singles got the first two Tiger hitters of the fifth, Justyn-Henry Malloy and Jake Rogers, aboard. Ryan Kreidler hit a tricky grounder to short that ate up Trea Turner to load the bases with none out and the top of the order coming up. A Matt Vierling chopper to short scored Malloy and put the Tigers up 1-0. Ibáñez, who does well against lefties, poked a single up the middle to score Rogers and Kreidler for a 3-0 lead; he took second on the throw. A hot shot to first by Riley Greene got past Bryce Harper and went all the way into the right-field corner; Greene motored around the bases, ending up on third, and just like that it was 4-0 against arguably the toughest pitcher in the Major Leagues to hit.
Skubal followed that eight-men-to-the-plate frame with a nifty 1-2-3 sixth, and at that half-inning’s conclusion he’d thrown 78 pitches, so let’s let him finish it up, I say! (I’m kidding, you’d have better luck finding a three-legged ballerina than seeing a complete game these days.) Of note: the Phillies had five batters in their lineup with OPSes above .800 (the Tigers had, well, uh, Greene) — so it’s not like Skubal was just feasting on a bunch of chumps or anything. That may well be the best team in baseball in the opposing dugout.
The third out of the seventh was a strikeout looking of Pache on a perfectly-placed 98 mph four-seamer on the bottom-outside corner of the plate; Skubal let out a yell of satisfaction, thence proceeded to the dugout and got the ol’ handshake from A.J. Hinch. His final line: 7 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 7 K, and that is some vintage Skubal right there.
Seranthony Domínguez relieved Suárez for the bottom of the seventh and walked Kreidler, the first batter he faced. Kreidler then stole second and third, but he broke for home on a grounder to shortstop on the “contact play” and was thrown out. Look, I get it, you want to force the defence to make a play… but I really don’t know about the efficacy of this strategy. I’d have to see some charts and/or graphs.
Shelby Miller came in for Skubal in the eighth and he buzzed through the inning with a flyout, strikeout and groundout. In seven June outings he’s thrown eight innings, given up three hits and two runs, walked none and struck out eight. He had a lousy outing in Atlanta during which he got tagged for a loss, but aside from that he’s been pretty solid.
Jason Foley was called-upon for the ninth to face the heart of the Phils’ order and he gave up a leadoff, opposite-field home run to Harper on a nasty 0-2 pitch to cut the lead to 4-1; there’s a reason he’s one of the best, folks. The rest of the inning concluded without further incident and the victory was sealed.
Oh, also… if you’re not busy on Wednesday afternoon, you might want to check out that game, as Spencer Turnbull is starting for the visitors. Should be interesting.
Box Score: Tigers 4, Phillies 1
Is this anything?
No, not the game David Letterman used to play on his late-night show…
Intriguing.
Numbers and Whatnot
- From June 12 through 24 (11 games, 45 plate appearances), Colt Keith has been batting/OBPing/slugging at a .349/.378/.558 for a .936 OPS. This includes a pair of four-hit games.
- Should Keith be moved over to first base? For the season, Baseball Reference has his defensive WAR (dWAR) at -0.8, which ain’t great. His Range Factor per 9 Innings (RF9) is 4.35 — that’s the number of putouts and assists combined per nine innings in the field. League average is only 4.09, so he’s getting to a decent number of ground balls.
- However, Keith is second in the American League at errors at second base with nine… and yes, I know, errors are a very unreliable statistic. But it still tells you a little bit, taken with a giant grain of salt of course.
- I was looking at Shelby Miller’s page on B-R and that 2015 season of his in Atlanta is incredibly strange: he had a 6-17 record with a 3.02 ERA, and was an All-Star.
- I’d never heard this song by Haim before today — not that I keep close tabs on ‘em, but they’re interesting — and I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that picked up on the Lou Reed-ish vibe.
- On this day in 1975, Mozambique declared its independence from Portugal; it had been a Portuguese colony since the early 1500s. Things were pretty rough for the first couple of decades of independence, but they have stuff fairly well smoothed-out now.