A matchup of two of the best left-handed pitchers in baseball turned into a rout for Cole Ragans and the Royals. Kansas City dealt Tarik Skubal his first loss of the season and swept the Tigers with an 8-3 win on Wednesday.
Ragans racked up a career-high 12 strikeouts and allowed just one hit over six innings, flummoxing the Tigers from his first pitch to his last. The Royals knocked Skubal around for six hits and four runs in five innings, led by RBI doubles by Freddy Fermin and Garrett Hampson in the second and a 430-foot homer by Nelson Velázquez in the fourth.
It was a fitting end to a dominant series for Kansas City, which also won 10-3 on Tuesday and 8-3 on Monday.
"He’s really good," A.J. Hinch said of Ragans, the former first-round pick who's enjoying a breakout year in his first full season with the Royals. "He comes right at you and challenges you. And just when you get into swing mode, the changeup comes. He threw a couple sliders, curveballs, but he has a miss fastball and we missed it a lot. And the changeup was really effective. He proved to be as difficult as we thought he would be."
Skubal appeared to be dealing with a finger issue on his throwing hand early in the game, but shot that down as an excuse: "That’s not the reason the performance was the way it was." He also denied having a blister.
"They had some really good at-bats, fouled off some really good pitches," he said. "Too many pitcher’s counts led to 3-2 counts, and that’s a credit to their hitters. I gotta be better at finishing those at-bats."
Kansas City, a year after losing 106 games, moves to 32-19 on the season. Detroit falls to 23-26 and 9.5 games behind the first-place Guardians in the AL Central. It's the first time the Tigers have been three games below .500 this year, and the first time they've lost three straight games by at least five runs. The first time, really, that they haven't looked competitive.
"I take exception to the competitive part," said Hinch. "We were pretty competitive. Obviously they did a tremendous job offensively of scoring a lot of runs, but we fought back each game and stayed competitive. No matter what your record is, you have to review what you’re doing well, what you’re not doing well. Our pitchers are going through it a little bit and offensively we haven’t gotten into games.
"Now, depending on how far you want to look back, we felt pretty good coming out of Arizona (last weekend). We’ll get back home, go play Toronto, get to a new series and play all the games, like I always say."
The Tigers start a four-game series against the Blue Jays on Thursday at Comerica Park, with wins suddenly at a premium. As for the sweep in Kansas City, "Flush it," said Skubal.
"What happened, happened. We can’t take it back. It starts with me, too. I didn’t do a good enough job of giving our team a chance to win today. Let’s just win tomorrow. Winning cures everything."
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