Reid Detmers keeps stacking up the kind of outings that make you do a double take.
On Wednesday at Angel Stadium, the Angels left-hander went right at AL Cy Young Award candidate Cam Schlittler and came away with another strong line: one run, six hits, seven innings, eight strikeouts and no walks in a 6-3, 10-inning loss to the Yankees in the series finale.
The result didn’t match the performance, but the larger picture keeps getting harder to ignore. Detmers now owns a 1.52 ERA since the All-Star break, with 59 strikeouts and nine walks in 53 1/3 innings over nine starts.
That leads all qualified starters in ERA in the second half. Across his return to the rotation this year, he’s at a 3.44 ERA in 28 starts, with 182 strikeouts in 162 innings.
“Honestly, I am kind of pitching against the other pitcher,” Detmers said. “Every time I go out, I’m trying to beat the other guy.
You’re trying to outlast him. You're trying to have more strikeouts.
You're trying to beat him. It was a good game.
Obviously, he pitched really well. It’s not the outcome we wanted, but move on to the next.”
The strike-throwing was there again. Detmers opened by getting first-pitch strikes to 21 of the 25 hitters he faced, and 76 of his 99 pitches were strikes. He also generated 17 swings and misses, with 12 coming on the slider, three on the four-seamer and two on the changeup.
“Reid was awesome,” manager Kurt Suzuki said. “Matching [Schlittler] pitch for pitch and executing his pitches. He was hitting his spots.”
That slider was the centerpiece. Under interim pitching coach Tim Leveque, Angels pitchers have been encouraged to lean more on their best pitch, and Detmers followed that blueprint heavily. He used the slider 51 percent of the time, far above his season average of 32 percent.
“The slider was good,” Detmers said. “It kind of got a little bigger later in the game, but I was able to dial it down when I needed to and have it in my back pocket.”
The Yankees scratched across their lone run against him in the fourth, but Detmers had already shown how quickly he could recover from traffic. He opened the game by allowing a leadoff single to Paul Goldschmidt, then erased it with a Cody Bellinger double-play grounder. After retiring eight straight, he gave up back-to-back singles to start the fourth.
A line-drive double play to shortstop Zach Neto helped him, but Ben Rice followed with a single and Amed Rosario pushed across a run with an RBI ground-rule double down the right-field line. Detmers still escaped the inning by striking out Spencer Jones on three pitches with two runners in scoring position.
He finished by shutting the Yankees down the rest of the way, including strikeouts of Jones and José Caballero to end his night. It was his sixth outing of seven innings this season and the 10th time he has gone without issuing a walk.
“Just staying on the attack and just getting ahead of guys,” Detmers said. “You're starting to see more teams not wanting to get to two strikes, so they're starting to swing a lot earlier. So that’s a part of it.”
The Angels didn’t give him much help offensively, though this time the matchup offered some context. Schlittler came in with an AL-low 2.09 ERA in 28 starts and held the Angels to two hits over eight innings. Vaughn Grissom did break through with a solo homer in the seventh, ripping a 1-0 cutter over the middle for his 10th of the year to tie the game.
The game slipped away from there. Luke Murphy struggled in the 10th, giving up five runs with two outs, though rookie Moisés Ballesteros answered with his first homer for his new club in the bottom of the inning.
Ballesteros, acquired from the Cubs for reliever Ryan Zeferjahn on Aug. 3, had a bright moment. The Angels, though, dropped the three-game series before heading out on a three-city East Coast trip through Pittsburgh, Boston and Washington.
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