As Reid Detmers walked off the mound after his sixth inning of pitching on Sunday afternoon, he wiped his face with his jersey once, then twice. He looked up the third-base line, in the direction of the bullpen, where Austin Warren was starting to get loose.
It would not have been hard to argue that Detmers, sitting at 87 pitches, was entitled to a seventh inning of work in the Angels’ eventual 3-1 win against the Astros. But at this point, everyone involved had seen enough to walk away from the afternoon with encouragement about the young left-hander.
In his first two outings, against the Athletics and Dodgers, respectively, Detmers went through ups and downs, not getting past the fifth inning in either game and giving up a total of 11 runs. Facing Houston, a team sitting in first place with championship aspirations, Detmers was smooth and steady, making a lone mistake all game.
“I was just more confident,” Detmers said. “I was landing more of my offspeed stuff for strikes and just getting good contact outs.”
That one miscue — a third-inning slider to Michael Brantley that hung, then ended up in the right-field seats — does not belie the rest of an outing in which Detmers’ off-speed pitching vexed an Astros lineup that is one of the best in baseball.
“It’s gonna keep getting better and it’s all about command of his off-speed stuff,” Angels manager Joe Maddon said before the game. “Of course his fastball, but his off-speed stuff where they have to honor it because it’s a strike call, or a called strike on purpose.”
On a day when Detmers did end up putting it all together, that assessment proved to be prescient.
He threw his curveball 32 times, more than any other pitch, inducing three whiffs and 10 called strikes. His slider, thrown 19 times, got four called strikes — two of them for strike three.
Detmers struck out Carlos Correa on a curveball in the first, then got Jake Meyers swinging on the same pitch in the second. He put away Almedys Diaz and Meyers again on a curveball and a slider in the third, then got Brantley and Yordan Alvarez looking on sliders in the fifth and sixth innings, respectively. On a day that ended with six strikeouts for Detmers, none came on his fastball, and after six innings, he left having given up just three hits and one run.
“I was able to land it for strikes and throw it in the dirt when I needed to,” Detmers said of his curveball. “And I was using it ahead in the count and behind in the count. It felt good.”
As the outing went on, Maddon saw Detmers getting better, getting more extension and more break on his offspeed pitches. He pointed towards the fourth inning as a line of demarcation, and indeed, Detmers retired nine of the last 10 batters he faced after giving up a single to Alvarez to open the fourth.
“Early on I was pulling off really hard and I just wasn’t able to finish a couple of my pitches,” Detmers said. “Later on in the game I was getting a little bit more extension, so I was able to finish those pitches off, getting those easy outs, getting swing and misses, that was pretty much it.”
The other details of Sunday seem forgettable by virtue of the Angels’ record, which sits at 59-60 after the win. But that Detmers’ breakthrough outing ultimately allowed them to piece together a comeback victory against one of the best teams in the American League will make it all the more sweeter.
After the Astros took their early lead in the third, the Angels stayed quiet until the fifth. Jack Mayfield sparked a rally with a base hit followed by a nice bit of baserunning, as he went from first to third on a Shohei Ohtani single. That set him up to score on a groundout by David Fletcher.
They took the lead in a similar manner — Phil Gosselin doubled in the sixth, moved to third on a bunt single, then scored on a groundout by Jo Adell. The Angels added another run in the ninth on a solo home run from Gosselin. That, plus a bullpen effort from Austin Warren, Jose Quintana and Raisel Iglesias — featuring a ninth inning in which Iglesias put the tying run on second base before striking out Jose Altuve to end the game — proved enough to get Detmers his first career win.
“I know how good he’s gonna be,” Maddon said before the game. “He hasn’t demonstrated that here yet.”
Now, he has.
