Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning during the regular season you’ll get a fresh, topical story to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
On a night that saw Justin Verlander make a bid for his fourth career no-hitter, it was Reid Detmers, making just his 11th career start, who recorded the first individual no-no of the 2022 season.
Detmers dazzled in the Angels’ 12–0 win over the Rays on Tuesday night in Anaheim. Across nine innings, he allowed only two base runners—Taylor Walls led off the sixth inning with a walk and Brett Phillips reached on a Jared Walsh error with one out in the seventh. Detmers had only two strikeouts, but he was efficient (108 pitches) and limited hard contact.
Detmers was the team’s No. 1 ranked prospect when the season began and earned a spot in the rotation out of spring training, but he struggled across his first five outings. The impact of his rough start was minimized because of the Angels’ potent offense and their otherwise steady rotation.
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The no-hitter was far from the only highlight for the Halos on Tuesday. Mike Trout went 3-for-4 with two home runs. The three-time MVP is slashing .337/.457/.726 and reminding everyone that he is still the best player in baseball. Shohei Ohtani, the game’s most talented player, had two hits, one night after he banged two home runs, including his first career grand slam. Facing Phillips, an outfielder, Anthony Rendon, a right-handed hitter, batted lefty in the bottom of the eighth inning with the game well out of reach and hit a 411-foot home run.
The Angels are in first place in the AL West and are having an absolute blast. They finally have the pitching needed to make a playoff push, and that staff will only get stronger as Detmers figures things out at the major-league level. For as exciting and historic as this no-hitter is for the Angels and the rookie, it’s only the beginning of what is shaping up to be a special season in Anaheim.
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The wildest thing that happened in the Yankees’ 6–5 win over the Blue Jays on Tuesday night was not Aaron Judge’s walk-off three-run home run. It wasn’t that Toronto lefthander Yusei Kikuchi carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning. It wasn’t even what happened in the second inning, when Luis Severino yelled into the dugout from the mound to tell Aaron Boone not to pull him from the game, by which point he’d already allowed three runs and thrown more than 60 pitches.
Instead, the most ridiculous moment came in the sixth inning when Blue Jays reliever Yimi Garcia was ejected from the game without warning for hitting Josh Donaldson with an 0–1 fastball. Donaldson was the first batter Garcia faced after allowing a game-tying, three-run homer to Giancarlo Stanton. Any time a hit batsman follows a home run, there are some thoughts about whether the plunking was intentional. But any rational read of the game made it clear that was not the case with Garcia and Donaldson.
Indeed, the only people who thought Garcia was trying to hit Donaldson with the pitch were the umpires.
“In my heart of hearts, I don’t think it was [intentional],” Donaldson said, “but it didn’t look good on television. That’s for sure.”
So what prompted the ejection? Crew Chief Alfonso Marquez said that Donaldson and Blue Jays catcher Tyler Heineman had exchanged “pretty strong words” earlier in the game.
The pool reporter who spoke with Marquez asked why Garcia would intentionally put Donaldson on base in the sixth inning of a 3–3 game immediately after he had surrendered the lead. Marquez didn’t answer that specific question.
“Given all the situations up to that specific moment, we just deemed it intentional,” he said. “And when that happens, we have to eject or [issue] warnings, but we felt ejection was the way to go.”
It absolutely was not the way to go.
