It takes a lot to swing the Los Angeles Angels’ spotlight away from Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout. You might even say it takes something like a changeup — the pitch rookie left-hander Reid Detmers threw so spectacularly in no-hitting the Tampa Bay Rays in Angel Stadium on Tuesday night.
Detmers, a 22-year-old making only his 11th career start, recorded the latest must-see moment in an Angels season that is gathering momentum. He struck out only two batters in a wild, 12-0 victory in which Trout smashed two home runs and Anthony Rendon, a right-handed batter, blasted a homer from the left side.
Angels 12, Rays 0 | Box Score | Play-by-Play
After cruising through eight quiet innings, Detmers had to wait out his team’s offense in an extended bottom half of the eighth. He showed zero evidence of jitters or jinxes when he finally did get back to the mound, retiring Vidal Bruján on a foul pop to the catcher and veteran outfielder Kevin Kiermaier on a ground ball to second. Then he stamped his name into the record books, recording the 12th no-hitter in Angels history by inducing another ground ball, this one from Yandy Díaz.
It was the second no-hitter in the majors this season after five Mets pitchers combined for one last month. Last year, M.L.B. pitchers recorded nine no-hitters, breaking a single-season record that had been set in 1884.
“I don’t know if it has really sank in yet,” Detmers said after he joined the exclusive club. “It is something I have always dreamed of. I can’t even process it right now.”
The long wait before finishing things off had come after the game took a turn toward the absurd. Trailing by 8-0 in the eighth inning, Tampa Bay moved Brett Phillips, the team’s plucky outfielder and would-be pitcher, from right field to the mound for mop-up duty. The Angels scored four times against him while banging out five hits, which left Detmers marooned on the bench. Trout and Rendon’s homers off Phillips each came off 54-mile-per-hour sliders.
“I thought it was great theater. Baseball is looking for fun moments like that,” Angels Manager Joe Maddon said of Phillips’s adventure on the mound, adding: “It was a cool inning. I was only concerned that it was taking too long and Reid was on the bench thinking about it.”
The Angels’ top pick in the 2020 M.L.B. draft, Detmers entered this season as Baseball America’s top-ranked left-handed pitching prospect. He was 1-1 with a 5.32 E.R.A. in five starts coming into Tuesday’s action and had been working with the Angels’ pitching coach, Matt Wise, and the team’s assistant pitching coach, Dom Chiti, on better placement of his inside fastball to right-handed hitters and working his changeup off his fastball.
“If he learns to do that on a regular basis, with the other stuff he has, that’s going to be a big part of his success,” Maddon said.
In turn, that could be an enormous part of the Angels’ success. That the spotlight swung to the mound on this night in Anaheim is an encouraging development for the Angels, whose all-bat, no-arms status over much of the past decade has kept them out of the playoffs since 2014.
The Angels, now 21-11 this season, continue…
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