Ober dominates in Detroit (8 IP with 1 hit, career-high 11 K's)

DETROIT -- They say that nothing comes easily in baseball -- but it seems that nobody’s told that to Bailey Ober.

While the chatter leading up to the Trade Deadline has been around the Twins’ desire to add to their starting rotation, Ober has continued to make his case that he can be the kind of high-end starter who can make a big difference in the postseason, and his resume grew with one of his most impressive outings of the season on Sunday.

That’s almost underselling the utter dominance he flashed in the Twins’ 5-0 victory over the Tigers to claim a series victory on the road. Ober set a career high with 11 strikeouts by striking out the side in the eighth inning, holding Detroit to one bloop single and two walks across eight scoreless frames in which no Tigers runner reached second base.

“They get up there and he sits them down,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He was in a very good place where he was repeating his delivery very well, and he was on fire.”

And he did all that while feeling far from his best.

“I woke up with a crick in my neck, so I can't really look to my left right now,” Ober said after the game. “I was loading up on Red Hot a lot to loosen that up, but maybe that helped my changeup.”

The changeup was indeed fantastic, and more than compensated for the loss of feel on Ober’s slider. Six of the career-high 11 strikeouts came on the changeup, and Ober generated a career-high 12 swinging strikes overall on the pitch that became his go-to in all counts and all situations, against all hitters.

“That's his pitch,” catcher Christian Vázquez said. “I think that's his main pitch, his swing-and-miss pitch. We can call it anytime. It was amazing today.”

Ober was perfect in his first trip through the Detroit lineup before he allowed Matt Vierling’s 63.4 mph flare to shallow right field for the Tigers’ only hit. Though he issued walks in the sixth and seventh, no runner advanced on his watch -- and he fanned Justyn-Henry Malloy, Carson Kelly and Javier Báez on 16 pitches in the eighth to cap his 98-pitch effort.

Consistency was always the hallmark of Ober’s game through his first three seasons, but the ability (or openness from the coaching staff) for the right-hander to pitch deeper into games and attain these sorts of higher-end, dominant outcomes is a continuation of his evolution that has really emerged in full force this season.

This was the fourth time in his career he had reached double-digit strikeouts -- and three of those have come this season.

Once an oft-injured soft-tosser who had his workload limited by the Twins, Ober completed seven innings three times in his first three MLB seasons -- but he has now done so four times in ‘24, and has completed six innings in each of his last seven starts, dating back to June 16.

“A lot of the time, guys that throw the ball in the zone, they might get hit hard,” Baldelli said. “They might not have the stuff to match the strike-throwing. But he has both. … Overall, mentally, physically, it’s matching up and he’s in a good spot.”

In those seven starts, including one against the MLB-best Phillies, Ober has allowed 10 earned runs in 48 1/3 innings (a 1.86 ERA) with 56 strikeouts and nine walks, lowering his season mark to 3.76 -- mostly inflated by his blow-up first start of the year in Kansas City (eight runs in 1 1/3 frames).

“He's getting very mature pitching,” Vázquez said. “We can throw whatever pitch, no matter what the count is. He can throw it for strikes. He's learning a lot.”

That span also includes his 10-strikeout, 89-pitch complete game in Oakland on June 22, which joined David Cone’s perfect game as the only outings in the pitch tracking era in which a pitcher notched double-digit strikeouts in a nine-inning complete game of no more than 90 pitches.

This didn’t come out of nowhere; it’s been a steady progression over the years, with Ober progressing from the steady starter with a 3.66 career ERA to the guy who can flash these kinds of performances -- now, to nobody’s surprise.

“It's just training and everything that goes into it goes into every single outing,” Ober said. “Everything you prepare for in the offseason, everything in Spring Training, your work in between starts.”