DETROIT (AP) \u2014 Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal returned from an injury scare and gave up one run over six innings against the Cleveland Guardians on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Skubal, who had tightness on his left side during his previous start, allowed seven hits, struck out nine and walked two in a 102-pitch outing.<\/p>\n
The reigning AL Cy Young Award and pitching Triple Crown winner was replaced by right-hander Troy Melton in the seventh in a 1-all game. Nine pitches later, Jose Ramirez hit a go-ahead, two-run homer to give the Guardians a 3-1 lead.<\/p>\n
The AL Central-leading Tigers were desperately hoping to win the series finale against the second-place Guardians, whose recent rally coupled with Detroit\u2019s slump has made the division race competitive with a little more than a week left in the regular season.<\/p>\n
Cleveland made the most of Skubal\u2019s mistake in the fourth, taking advantage of an 0-2 changeup he threw over the plate with Jhonkensy Noel\u2019s game-tying solo homer. In the same inning, the 28-year-old Skubal struck out Brayan Rocchio to set a single-season career high with 229 strikeouts.<\/p>\n
The hard-throwing lefty was more effective later in the game, striking out David Fry with a 101.5-mph pitch to end the top of the fifth inning.<\/p>\n
He started the sixth inning with 82 pitches and struck out Gabriel Arias on four pitches and Noel on four more pitches. With a chance to get out of the sixth, Rocchio hit a triple that right fielder Wenceel P\u00e9rez had a chance to catch but could not snag.<\/p>\n
The Guardians extended the inning with Austin Hedges\u2019 walk on a pitch Skubal thought was a strike as he squatted in disbelief that he threw a ball.<\/p>\n
Skubal responded by striking out Nolan Jones with a 99.5-mph pitch to end the sixth in his start that showed he\u2019s healthy. He threw 100 pitches for the third time, two shy of a season-high 105 in July against Texas.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP MLB: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/mlb<\/p>\n
Larry Lage, The Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT (AP) \u2014 Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal returned from an injury scare and gave up one run…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-153263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}