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Tuesday was Skub day for the Detroit Tigers as they had ace Tarik Skubal on the mound against the St. Louis Cardinals. Skubal won the American League Cy Young last year as there are very few things that he doesn't do well. In fact, he had never been called for a balk in his entire career coming into Tuesday's game. That changed in the midst of Detroit's 5-4 win over the Cardinals.
Tarik Skubal brought out the good stuff against the Cardinals on Tuesday as he didn't give up a run until the fifth inning. He ended up lasting 5.2 innings, and he gave up three runs while striking out eight and walking just one. In the sixth inning, Skubal got called for his first ever balk.
“What confused me was [Willson Contreras] looked at me like he was ready to hit, and then put his head back down, and then I started coming set,” Skubal said, according to an article from MLB.com. “So I just thought they were going to do that little let-him-look-at-you thing, but he looked twice at me, so I don't really understand. I mean, it is what it is, whatever. I mean, technically it is a balk, but with the pitch clock rules, and you have to look at him, and you have all the seconds, it's a bunch of stupid stuff that happens.”
Skubal knew that it was a balk, but he clearly doesn't like some of the rules that resulted in it being called. Tigers catcher Jake Rogers is in the same boat.
“He called it, like it had to have been 20 seconds after he did it, which is why I was like, ‘Why?'” Jake Rogers said. “But again, he did balk.”
The call happened, and once it did, it was out of Skubal's control. He just tries to focus on executing every single pitch, and if he does that, good things will happen.
“What I have in control is the ball in my hand and trying to execute a pitch,” Skubal said. “At the end of the day, that's all I really have control of. And I thought I did a good job of that today, just trying to execute pitch after pitch, regardless of result or kind of what was going on.”
Skubal was dominant during the first four innings, but the Cardinals started to get to him in the fifth and sixth innings. St. Louis didn't make things easy on him.
“He's just really good at competing, and he had to today,” Tigers manager AJ Hinch said. “They didn't let him off the hook very often. Even their at-bats where he found some punchouts, they were long. So if anything, the best thing he did today was staying committed and staying aggressive. And even when they put a couple of bats in a row together that went for them, he didn't back down.”
The balk happened, and the fifth and sixth innings were a little rough, but the Tigers got the win nonetheless. The victory probably doesn't happen without Riley Greene, who knocked in four out of five runs, and that included the game-winning RBI in the ninth inning.
“[Greene is] literally the hardest guy to give a day off to on our team,” AJ Hinch said. “He always seems to come up with big games and big moments. And he and Z-Mac (Zach McKinstry) today teamed up in the middle of the order to handle their at-bats really well and put us in a position to score just enough. So, Riley Greene, I mean, who doesn't want him up to bat?”
The Cardinals won Game 1 of the series, and the Tigers took Game 2. The two teams are going at it in the rubber match on Wednesday.
