Skubal stepped up with Detroit trying for the franchise\u2019s first appearance in the AL Championship Series since 2013. He struck out 13 while allowing one run and two hits.<\/p>\n
Kerry Carpenter hit a two-run homer for the Tigers in the sixth, but Leo Rivas tied it at 2 with a pinch-hit RBI single for the Mariners in the seventh.<\/p>\n
Skubal, who won the AL Cy Young Award last year, also started Detroit’s 3-2 loss in Game 2. He struck out nine in seven innings, but he surrendered two runs on a pair of solo homers by Jorge Polanco.<\/p>\n
He was even better in the series finale.<\/p>\n
Seattle jumped in front when Josh Naylor doubled, stole third and scored on Mitch Garver’s sacrifice fly in the second. But Skubal took over from there.<\/p>\n
He had a streak of seven consecutive strikeouts, setting a post-season record for a single game. The streak ended when Naylor lined to centre for the first out of the fifth.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old Skubal struck out Cal Raleigh on a 100.9 m.p.h. fastball on his 99th and final pitch of the night.<\/p>\n
It was reminiscent of Skubal’s performance during the AL Wild Card Series at Cleveland, when he struck out 14 while pitching 7 2\/3 innings of one-run ball in the Tigers’ 2-1 victory in Game 1.<\/p>\n
Skubal went 13-6 during the regular season with an AL-low 2.21 ERA. He ranked second in strikeouts with 241.<\/p>\n
Skubal was in the same position a year ago, with a chance to pitch the Tigers into the ALCS by winning Game 5 of the Division Series. But he gave up a tiebreaking grand slam to Lane Thomas in the fifth inning of a 7-3 loss at Cleveland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Skubal stepped up with Detroit trying for the franchise\u2019s first appearance in the AL Championship Series since 2013.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-204269","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\/204269","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=204269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}