If Matt Harvey had pitched as well as he has thus far in the second half of the season, he might not have been around to make Friday night’s start for the Orioles in Detroit.
Instead, the veteran right-hander’s struggles leading into the All-Star break kept contenders uninterested, even as he came out of it with consecutive starts of six shutout innings. Friday’s trade deadline passed with Harvey still a member of the Orioles. That meant he could keep that scoreless second half going in a 4-3 victory against the Detroit Tigers.
Pitching a season-high 6 1/3 innings, Harvey became only the fourth Oriole in the past 40 years with three consecutive starts of at least six innings without allowing a run, joining Kevin Gausman, Fernando Valenzuela and Jim Palmer. The scoreless run survived thanks to left-hander Paul Fry, considered a more legitimate candidate to dealt entering deadline day, stranding two of Harvey’s runners in the seventh.
Harvey retired the first six Tigers, then worked around base runners in the third, fourth and fifth. In the top half of each of those innings, an Oriole homered to support Harvey, with batterymate Pedro Severino, shaking off a poor first half of his own, offering two and Ryan Mountcastle supplying the other. After Ramón Urías added an RBI single in the sixth, Harvey worked a perfect bottom half, completing six innings on 73 pitches.
He allowed two singles to open the seventh before a hard lineout to center prompted manager Brandon Hyde to call on Fry. Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias said before the game the Orioles (36-66) came “pretty close” to trading away at least one reliever, with Fry among the likeliest possibilities. Instead, he got a popout and strikeout to push Detroit to 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position.
His performance also held Harvey’s ERA improvement in place; since he entered the All-Star break with that figure at 7.70, it’s fallen to 6.20.
Tanner Scott, another possible trade candidate, allowed a leadoff triple in the eighth then threw a wild pitch to produce the Tigers’ first run. A single, hit batter and walk followed, and Hyde called on Dillon Tate with the bases loaded and no outs to face future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera, who homered twice in Thursday’s series opener. He nearly did so again, but his drive to Comerica Field’s deep center field was caught at the wall for a sacrifice fly. At a projected 422 feet, it was tied for the longest out made against the Orioles since Statcast was introduced in 2015.
A Tate wild pitch allowed another run to score, but Cole Sulser pitched a scoreless night to complete the victory.
