Tigers Cy Young Winner Puts Together Incredible May as Detroit Rules MLB

The Detroit Tigers have Tarik Skubal in their starting rotation and that’s reason enough to believe they could get to a World Series this year.

The left-hander has had an incredible season and he’s a big reason why the Tigers enter June at the top of the American League.

Detroit was 19-12 at the start of the month and they wrapped up May with a 38-21 record. The Tigers went 19-9 and continued to build a lead in the American League Central.

Skubal was at the center of it. When one looks back at May and tries to determine Detroit’s best pitcher for the month, the research doesn’t take long. It was Skubal.

Tarik Skubal’s Incredible May

Skubal had some competition, mostly from reliever Will Vest, who had a solid month in which he had a 1.29 ERA and saved a team-high five games.

But without starters like Skubal, relievers like Vest have far less to work with.

Skubal started six games, went 2-0 with a 2.20 ERA and threw 41 innings. He struck out 59 and walked two. He allowed 22 hits and 10 earned runs to finish with a 0.59 WHIP.

Along the way, he did things no Detroit pitcher — and some MLB pitchers — had never done before.

For instance, in his victory over the Texas Rangers earlier this month he threw 96 pitches in seven innings. He gave up just two hits, one run (earned) and didn’t walk a hitter. He struck out 12, which tied his career high.

Rangers hitters swung and missed at 32 of the 96 pitches Skubal threw. At the time, no pitcher had induced that many swings and misses this season.

Last week Skubal pitched the first complete game of his career, and he did so with the typical record-setting flourish.

Per Tigers PR, he became the first pitcher in Tigers history to throw a complete game with zero walks, no more than two hits, and 13 or more strikeouts in a win over Cleveland. He became the first pitcher to do it since Jacob deGrom, who did so with the New York Mets on April 23, 2021.

His last pitch of the game was a 102.6 mph fastball, which was the fastest pitcher thrown by a Tigers pitcher in the Statcast era, which goes back to the 2015 season.