DETROIT - Max Clark spent time on the Trajekt machine getting ready for Tarik Skubal, but the device that can mimic big-league deliveries couldn’t do much with the Tigers left-hander’s changeup.
Clark handled Skubal better the second time through, and that adjustment ended with a triple in the fifth inning, but the story of Friday night was still Skubal’s ability to make hitters guess wrong. Even Statcast had a hard time sorting out one of his pitches. Clark’s RBI triple initially showed up as a 99-mph sinker before Hawk-Eye quickly changed it to a four-seamer.
“His four-seamer was cutting like crazy,” Clark said.
That movement also explained why the pitch was first tagged as a sinker.
“His sinker was really working,” Clark said. “We’d talked before the game about how he’d gotten away from it once he went to LA.
I don’t know if they didn’t like it as much or they were tinkering with it. But I got a couple of them.”
Clark said he prepared for Skubal on the Trajekt, but there was only so much that could be done against a changeup that plays off deception as much as velocity or movement.
“Trajekt is struggling still with changeups and especially splitters,” Clark said. “It’s hard to replicate that.
And part of what makes Skubal’s changeup so elite is the deception. If you look at it in paper, it’s a 70-grade pitch.
What makes it 80 is the deception. Whether it’s his high release, where it looks like it’s coming out of his palm, or if it’s just Skubal.
Nobody can explain it.
“Guys come back to the dugout shaking their head like, ‘I don’t, I don’t know.’”
Skubal showed exactly why the pitch gives hitters fits right away. In the first trip through the order, he threw 14 changeups and used them to collect four strikeouts. He also used the pitch to set up a fifth punchout, freezing Javier Baez with three straight changeups before blowing a 99.6-mph four-seamer past him.
“He came right at all of us,” said Kevin McGonigle, who punched out on a changeup in the first inning. “That changeup looks a lot bigger when I’m in the box than when I’m playing behind him.”
Clark got caught by the same pitch in his first at-bat, when Skubal worked him into an 0-2 hole with a 96-mph sinker down and a 96.7-mph four-seamer up before finishing him with a changeup down and in. But Clark made the adjustment in his next trip.
“Yeah, after the first at-bat I thought he was going to go back to the changeup. It’s what he makes his money on,” Clark said, after seeing a four-seamer, change-up and sinker in the fifth inning to get into a 1-2 hole. “He threw a changeup below the zone and I saw it much better that I did the first time but I thought he’d go back to it to get me to chase.
“So I pushed the heater back (in his mind) but the pitch came out of the same lane. I just trusted my hands and tried to filet the other way.”
Clark barreled the misread four-seamer 105 mph and sent it into the left-field corner. He scored from first in 11.08 seconds, the third fastest by a Tiger since Statcast started tracking sprint speed.
“Going around first, I was kind of Cadillacking it,” Clark said. “I saw it get by Teoscar (Hernandez, left fielder) and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s time to go,’ and I turned on the jets.
It felt really good. Probably a 29.7 (feet per second) on the Max Clark scale (laughs).”
That was the only damage the Tigers managed against their former ace. Skubal finished with seven strikeouts over six innings.
“We were all familiar with him but he’s a great pitcher,” rookie Ben Malgeri said. “Knowing him doesn’t make him easier to hit. We grinded out some at-bats but unfortunately, we didn’t get it done.”
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