The 27-year-old southpaw has emerged as the best pitcher in the game. Now he’s trying to carry his team to the World Series.
By Alex Kirshner
The Detroit Tigers are the best underdog story in Major League Baseball’s postseason. As they return home in a tied-at-one American League Divisional Series with the Cleveland Guardians, it is justified to focus on the cardiac-kids nature of these Tigers—the Gritty Tigs, they’re being called now.
Like many playoff teams over the years, they were involved in a late-July trade for the best player moved at the deadline. Unlike other teams, the Tigers were trading that player, not acquiring him, when they sent pitcher Jack Flaherty to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Detroit was nine games out of a playoff spot in early August. The front office had conceded the season. The players stubbornly caught fire after that, and now they’ve already dispatched the evil Houston Astros in a Wild Card series. They’re two wins from the ALCS.
All of that is cool, but the coolest thing about the Tigers is also the least underdog-ish thing about them. Tarik Skubal has emerged this year as the best pitcher in the world, winning the pitching triple crown by posting the most wins, the most strikeouts, and the lowest earned-run average in the American League. The big left-hander is as elite as they come. But in this baseball moment, Skubal is more than that: He’s a throwback to old-fashioned American baseball values, from a time when a workhorse ace was the most valuable thing a team could have, and the job of that ace was to pitch deep into games and put his team on his back. Skubal is the Tigers’ best player, and right now, he means more to them than Shohei Ohtani means to the Dodgers or Aaron Judge means to the New York Yankees.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Skubal, 27, is in his fourth full big league season. He was a useful pitcher the past few years, with clear talent. But he was also a pitcher of his era, which is to say he didn’t pitch that much. He missed time with injuries two years in a row. He averaged about 115 innings per season across 22 starts. He threw hard, with a mid- to-upper-90s fastball. But until this season, Skubal averaged 85 pitches and five-and-a-third innings per start. (Both figures would have been an exact match for league average this year, and very close to exactly average in the years Skubal was pitching in this fashion.) He was a modern creation, the kind of live arm every team now cultivates: Get a few innings of hard throwing out of him, and get him out of there by the time the lineup is turning over for a third trip through the order.
Advertisement
That was Skubal then. But now, he’s the best pitcher in baseball and also a hurler from the old days. On Monday, he delivered as big-time a performance as any pitcher will offer all year. With the Tigers down 1–0 to Cleveland in the ALDS, Skubal took the bump and allowed three hits over seven shutout innings, on the road, with eight strikeouts and no walks. Everyone alive knew before the series that the Tigers’ best hope was to win Skubal’s starts in Game 2 and Game 5, when he could pitch on regular rest, and pray for a 1–2 showing in the other three games. Skubal, as he always does, has so far delivered.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Skubal threw 92 pitches on Monday. Only four times in 31 starts this year did he touch 100. But Skubal has mastered efficiency, and his average regular season start jumped to six-and-two-thirds innings. He threw 192 innings in the regular season, an amount that now qualifies as a ton and placed him eighth in the majors. The marker of a good, durable pitcher used to be hitting the 200-inning mark over a season. In 1974, 64 pitchers met that threshold. The past four years, for the first time in modern history, no more than eight did in any given season.
Advertisement
The southpaw has not quite returned us to the before times of stalwart pitchers going deep into games. For those days to return, there would need to be more pitchers like Skubal, and they just aren’t. But he has been dominant, and his durability thus stands in contrast not just to the rest of the league but to his own team in particular. The Tigers have fallen in love with the deployment of the opener, a relief pitcher who makes a short outing to open a game. They’ve done that because they do not have five starting pitchers who could get them through any extended stretch of time. But they do have one trump card: Skubal, who takes the ball reliably every fifth day and provides what the team needs.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Evaluating a pitcher based on his team’s win total when he starts is a good way to reach a bad conclusion, as so much other noise can change the result of a game. But in the Tigers’ case, this exercise provides a good sense of things: They were 21–10 this season when Skubal started, 65–66 when he didn’t. Naturally, their clearest path in the ALDS is to win exactly one game out of three when Skubal isn’t on the mound and sweep the two games he starts. Few and far between are the starts in which he does not make opposing lineups look like small children. The Guardians couldn’t touch him for most of Monday, and when they did briefly threaten him, Skubal responded in the ideal fashion. With runners on the corners and one out in the sixth inning, he induced a routine double play to get himself out of trouble. Most starters, by that point, would’ve been yanked.
Advertisement
One reason to root for the Tigers for the rest of the postseason is that they are a fun story, a team with a rabid fanbase that deserves some joy. The Tigers lost the World Series in 2006, then had four straight playoff exits between 2011 and 2014, all with fun teams full of great players. (Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Max Scherzer were among them.) It would be nice to see their fans have more joy in a year where few expected it.
Advertisement
But even if you are coldhearted, or you just really hate Michigan, you may find the Tigers worth rooting for on grounds of Skubal and Skubal alone. That’s because there is nothing in baseball quite like watching a pitcher at the height of his powers the way the southpaw is now. He has gone 13 shutout innings in his two postseason starts, the first a wild-card win over the Astros. If the Tigers hit enough, Skubal could have the kind of rare playoff run that comes around, oh, every 10-ish years. Think Madison Bumgarner for the San Francisco Giants in 2014 (a 1.03 postseason ERA across 52 innings) or Curt Schilling for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001 (1.12 across 48, before Schilling revealed to the world that he was a despicable person). Skubal is good enough to mount the kind of run that baseball fans remember forever.
Advertisement
Skubal is not the whole Tigers operation. His brilliance on Monday merely set the stage for a three-run winning outburst against Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase, the sport’s best reliever, in the ninth inning. Left fielder Riley Greene is an excellent young hitter, and the rest of the lineup has enough useful supporting cast members to keep the team afloat. Manager A.J. Hinch has pushed a lot of ideal buttons during the Tigers’ run. But it is a lot easier to make the right decisions when, every five days, a manager can hand the ball to Skubal and trust that his team will have a chance no matter what else happens. The Tigers’ entire method of attack is to tread water and wait for the days on which Skubal can pitch. There have been worse strategies to win a World Series.
- Baseball
- Sports
Advertisement