Twins blank Tigers 5-0 as Bailey Ober fans career-best 11, gives up one hit in eight innings

DETROIT – If the people who make Red Hot muscle ointment were looking for an athlete to endorse their product, Bailey Ober seemed to pass the audition Sunday.

“Physically, I wasn’t feeling great. I woke up with a crick in my neck, so I can’t really look to my left right now,” Ober said. “I was loading up on Red Hot to loosen that up. Maybe that helped my changeup, I don’t know.”

Either way, it’s a good bet Ober will lather on the ointment between innings from now on, because the Twins righthander was electrifying, giving up only one bloop single over eight innings, striking out a career-high 11 and never allowing a Detroit Tigers batter to reach second base.

The result: A 5-0 victory at Comerica Park, a 2-1 victory in the three-game series and a 7-6 victory in the season series. That last part might not matter, given the 7½-game gap between them, but it gives the Twins the tiebreaker should the teams wind up tied for a playoff spot.

Ober threw 98 pitches, and Tigers swung and missed at 20 of them. And even when they put the ball in play, they didn’t hit the ball hard; no Detroit hitter recorded an exit velocity of 100 mph all day.

“He was dotting everything. The changeup was nasty today,” catcher Christian Vázquez said. “It’s easy to call a game like that, you know? It’s fun where there are a lot of zeroes on the scoreboard.”

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BOXSCORE: Twins 5, Detroit 0

Vázquez may have been more impressed than Ober himself, because the righthander rated his four-hit complete game in Oakland last month — a game in which he retired the final 17 hitters — as better.

“I felt like the Oakland start, I really had all four pitches working. This start, I mainly had just three. The slider was kind of on and off,” said Ober, who threw no more than a dozen pitches in six of his eight innings Sunday. “But the changeup [today] was probably the best pitch.”

Ober’s ERA in four July starts is 2.00, and he has posted seven consecutive quality starts — completing six or more innings with three or fewer runs.

“He was awesome,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “He has a unique ability to just repeat and repeat and continually make good pitches. He really had the changeup working today. He was in repeating his delivery very well, and he was on fire. He was on fire.”

That’s as opposed to his position-player teammates, at least with runners in scoring position. The Twins collected 12 hits against six Tigers pitchers, but they went 0-for-12 over the first eight innings with runners on second or third base.

Only a couple of sacrifice flies — one by Brooks Lee to score Manuel Margot in the second inning, another by Carlos Santana to bring home Austin Martin in the third — prevented them from putting up as many zeroes as Ober was.

“We beat them today by just having very tough, determined at-bats. It wasn’t always gorgeous. It was difficult, and we often weren’t successful,” Baldelli said. “But we were able to find ways to get people on base, put the ball in play, and just do it in a kind of grimy, tough way.”

The Twins added a third run off former teammate Kenta Maeda in the seventh inning when Willi Castro led off with a single. Martin launched a deep drive to left field, but Ryan Vilade made a spectacular running catch to rob him. He couldn’t do it twice, though — when Matt Wallner sent a nearly identical blast to the left-field fence, it fell for a run-scoring double.

With Ober likely done after eight innings — he struck out all three hitters he faced in the eighth, running his pitch count to 98 — the Twins offense broke through in the ninth to make sure his gem wouldn’t be wasted. A double by Martin and a single by Ryan Jeffers, the Twins’ only two hits with runners on second or third base all day, added two more runs, and Caleb Thielbar finished off the Tigers with a scoreless ninth.