DETROIT -- Simply put, the A’s 3-0 win over the Tigers on Wednesday night boiled down to the guy who got things going and the guy who brought it home, and between them, there was the guy who kept it steady most of the way.
Three guys -- all rookies, with just 90 games of Major League experience among them -- faced MLB’s best team at Comerica Park and walked away with a shutout victory that evened the series.
All in all, not bad for a Wednesday.
“We know we're all kind of young,” said Nick Kurtz, who, with 42 career games under his belt, represents the senior member of the trio. “We know we’ve got a lot of growing [to do], not just as baseball players but as people and trying to figure out how to do this every day.
“But to go against the best team in baseball and put out a good performance, that means we have the talent. We have everything we need; we’ve just got to figure it all out and put it together.”
Kurtz seems to be putting things together just fine of late. The slugger got things going for the Athletics by launching a three-run homer a Statcast-projected 438 feet in the second inning. Kurtz and Miami’s Agustín Ramírez are tied for the Majors lead among qualified rookies with 11 homers apiece.
Kurtz admitted it’s hard to top a good walk-off homer, and he would know: He’s already had two in a four-day span. Still, sending a Jack Flaherty pitch screaming into the second level of the ivy-covered walls in center field at 108.1 mph “was in the top five for sure.”
Kurtz, the No. 4 overall pick of the 2024 MLB Draft, also had a mid-June stretch of five homers in six games. Many of Kurtz’s home runs have come when Jacob Lopez, his former Triple-A teammate, is on the hill, as was again the case in Detroit. Kurtz joked that he’d like Lopez to pitch every game, and the way the latter has worked lately, the Athletics probably feel the same.
Lopez extended his breakout month by holding the Tigers scoreless over seven sparkling innings. He struck out six, and his 38 strikeouts in June are tied with Atlanta’s Spencer Strider for third behind Boston’s Garrett Crochet (46) and the Angels' Yusei Kikuchi (41) for the most in MLB (and Lopez has one fewer start).
Lopez doesn’t have overpowering stuff and doesn’t need it: A funky arm angle provides deception to his delivery and makes pitches difficult to track. The left-hander attacked Detroit early and often, drawing 12 swing and misses and allowing just three hits.
“He was effective because he hides the ball,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “[He’s] deceptive, he's got a lot of different pitches that go different ways and we had a hard time centering him up."
Though his pitch count was at 90 after six innings, Lopez still earned the right to pitch the seventh, and he finished his outing unscathed 13 pitches later. That manager Mark Kotsay felt he could risk his relatively inexperienced starter said something perhaps more encouraging about Lopez’s professional growth than any strikeout he collected on Wednesday.
“That was a great start for him,” Kotsay said. “I thought he handled that lineup exceptionally well, and showing the grit there to get through the seventh inning was a really good night.”
The bow on the Athletics’ evening came in the eighth, when Denzel Clarke did his thing once again. Reliever Michael Kelly had just allowed a two-out double to Gleyber Torres to bring up Colt Keith, and the pinch-hitter drove a sinking liner into the left-center-field gap that would have likely plated Torres had it split the defense.
If someone else had been in center field, perhaps it would have. Instead, in motored Clarke with another high-flying, acrobatic, improbable catch to end the frame and take the wind from the Tigers’ sails.
As the A’s future continues to take shape, each game like this represents a step forward for the rookies, who have always known they could and are now showing others that they can hang with a very tough club.
“Hopefully, that fired up the guys a lot and gave us some momentum to just keep playing good baseball,” Lopez said.