Game Notes – 09/23/2025

On July 6, 2025, Tarik Skubal and his Tigers were in Cleveland to take on Gavin Williams and his Guardians.  Detroit’s southpaw was in complete – cruising beautifully – control, logging seven scoreless innings in which he fanned 10 with no walks.  Williams nearly matched the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner, putting up zeroes across all six of his innings with eight strikeouts.  The battle – ultimately decided by the bullpens – resulted in a 7-2 win for the visitors, a victory that widened the gap between the first place Tigers and the fourth place Guardians to 15-and-a-half games.  Detroit had the best record in the Majors, Cleveland was eight games below .500.    

Since then, the Guardians have played .652 ball, the best any AL team has mustered.  Since then, the Tigers are 10 games below .500.  And that 15-and-a-half game gap?  Vanished, all gone.  

Gavin Williams struck out a dozen in pitching the Guardians to a 5-2 win over Tarik Skubal (6.0 IP, 3 R) and the Tigers.  The two clubs are now tied atop the AL Central.

~Williams is 7-1 (.875 winning percentage) with a 2.18 ERA in the season’s second half, tied for the second-most victories in the Majors since the break.  

~Casting a wider view, for all Cleveland hurlers with at least 12 starts after any All-Star break, Williams is tied (with Dick Tidrow, 1972) for the 14th lowest ERA and tied (with a few others) for the ninth best winning percentage.  The only Cleveland pitchers to improve upon/match Williams’ numbers in both categories:  

Johnny Allen in 1937 (2.11 ERA, .917 winning percentage)

Bob Lemon in 1954 (2.10, .875)

Corey Kluber in 2017 (1.79, .917)

Cal Quantrill in 2021 (1.94, .875)

~The Guardians are 17-5 this September for a .773 winning percentage that stands among the best ever for the franchise in this final monthly split.  

Best Winning Percentage in September/October for Cleveland

.867    2017 team goes 26-4 with a 2.13 team ERA

.792    1952 team goes 19-5 with a 2.36 team ERA

.778    2013 team goes 21-6 with a 2.84 team ERA

.773    2025 team is 17-5 with a 2.31 team ERA

Kyle Schwarber hit his 54th home run, a solo shot that brought his RBI tally to 130.  The DH is tied for the 23rd most home runs in a season, matched with a bunch of others:  Babe Ruth (1920 and 1928), Ralph Kiner (1949), Mickey Mantle (1961), David Ortiz (2006), Álex Rodríguez (2007), José Bautista (2010), Matt Olson (2023) and Shohei Ohtani (2024).  

~A couple of the names above might have registered as fellow designated hitters … indeed, Schwarber is tied with Ortiz and Ohtani for the most home runs ever for a player with at least half of his games in the role.  Additionally, Schwarber’s 130 RBI tie him with Ohtani from last season and J.D. Martinez (2018) for the ninth most for any DH, most closely trailing Juan González’s 131 in 1997 and Hal McRae’s 133 in 1982.  

Cristopher Sánchez (7.0 IP, 0 R, 6 K’s) reached the 200-strikeout mark for the season, the 17th Phillies left-hander to fan at least 200 in a campaign.  Some items to draft off that start …

~Sánchez’s ERA+ stands at 172.  If all 17 of these 200-K southpaws are arranged from the best to lowest ERA+, Sánchez’s 172 lines up behind only Steve Carlton’s 182 in 1972, when “Lefty” captured both the NL Triple Crown and the league’s Cy Young Award.  

~Sánchez is the second Phillies left-hander this season with 200 strikeouts, after Jesús Luzardo (206).  The two are the seventh set of southpaw teammates to get to the milestone in the same season.  The entire list evolves like this:

1887    Baltimore Orioles – Matt Kilroy and Phenomenal Smith

1904    Philadelphia Athletics – Rube Waddell and Eddie Plank

1905    Philadelphia Athletics – Rube Waddell and Eddie Plank

2012    Philadelphia Phillies – Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels

2013    Philadelphia Phillies – Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels

2019    Boston Red Sox – Chris Sale and Eduardo Rodríguez

2025    Philadelphia Phillies – Jesús Luzardo and Cristopher Sánchez

Aaron Judge drew a pair of intentional walks in a three-walk evening, the second of the two intended free passes giving him a new AL record* 34 for the year.  In passing Ted Williams (1957) and John Olerud (1993), Judge also tied Barry Bonds (1997) and Albert Pujols (2008) for the 16th most across both leagues, with Bonds himself occupying seven of the other higher tallies.  

*For both leagues, tracking goes back to 1955

~Judge scored the game-winning run in the bottom of the ninth to mark the Yankees clinching a postseason berth.  The 33-year-old leads the AL with 131 runs scored and is aimed toward his third belt in the category (he also led in 2017 and 2022).  There have been three Yankees to lead the AL as many as three times:  

7   Babe Ruth

5   Mickey Mantle 

4   Lou Gehrig

~For the moment, Judge’s OPS+ stands at 209.  A mark at the end of this season beginning with a ‘2’ would give him three such campaigns, which would make him one of eight players in AL/NL history to have at least that many.  The list, if Judge does make it, would look like this:

11    Babe Ruth

6      Ted Williams, Barry Bonds

4      Rogers Hornsby

3      Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Aaron Judge

Josh Naylor smacked a three-run double in the bottom of the eighth to spark a come-from-behind win for Seattle and launch them into the postseason.  The first baseman is batting .353 in September for a Mariners team that has won 15 of their 20 games in the month (the second-best September record in the Majors, after Cleveland’s 17-5 mark).  Naylor’s average is pretty far behind the best any Mariner has done in any September with a minimum of 75 plate appearances – Edgar Martínez’s .447 in 1998 resting above all challengers.  

Michael Harris II homered twice to help Atlanta win its 10th straight game.  The outfielder has posted an .837 OPS in this season’s second half, a surge that has brought his OPS for the year up to .670 (he had a .551 before the All-Star break).  All of these efforts and breakdowns provide Harris with a 147 tOPS+*.  Looking at the more than 5,000 players since 1933 who posted an .800 or better OPS in a second half (minimum 200 plate appearances), only seven have worked a higher tOPS+, with Melvin Mora’s 158 in 2008 the highest mark. That year, Mora authored a 1.073 in the second half to lift his OPS for the season to .826 (his first half yielded a .686).

*Via Baseball Reference:  tOPS+ is the OPS for the split relative to the player’s overall OPS, where a number greater than 100 indicates the batter did better than usual in this split.  

Francisco Lindor’s 29th homer of the season jolted the game into a booming start and his Mets went on to defeat the Cubs, 9-7.  For Lindor, the swing and launch marked his 10th leadoff home run of 2025 (extending his single-season team record) and 30th of his career, tied with Tony Phillips and Rafael Furcal for the 22nd most in history.  

Nico Hoerner singled three times and scored four runs for the Cubs in the team’s loss to the Mets, an unusual circumstance for an uncommon performance.  Dating back to 1901, Hoerner became just the 40th Cubs leadoff batter to score at least four runs in a regulation contest; this game marked the fifth of those 40 to come in a defeat.  Before Hoerner, Bobby Hill in 2002 had been the last to be a part of this sad narrative.  

Salvador Perez knocked in his 97th run of the season, his 1,013th career RBI.  

~With the RBI, Perez moved past Hal McRae and into sole possession of second place on the Royals’ all-time leaderboard, behind George Brett and his 1,596.  

~The 35-year-old backstop has already gotten to 30 home runs on the year, and so, is in position to maybe post his second career 30-100 campaign (he led the AL with 48 home runs and 121 RBI in 2021).  Let’s say he does …

→A 30-100 campaign in 2025 would make Perez the second oldest catcher (by age-season) to hit the levels, after Carlton Fisk authored a 37-107 line in his age-37 season in 1985.  The five oldest, as they currently stand without Perez, are below, followed by the oldest age-seasons at all positions.  All references are using at least 50% of a player’s games at the specific position.

Oldest Catchers With a 30-HR, 100-RBI Season

37    Carlton Fisk in 1985 (37-107)

34    Terry Steinbach in 1996 (35-100)

33    Roy Campanella in 1955 (32-107)

32    Walker Cooper in 1947 (35-122)

32    Javy López in 2003 (43-109)

32    Jorge Posada in 2003 (30-101)

Oldest Players By Position/Role With a 30-HR, 100-RBI Season

C      37    Carlton Fisk in 1985 (37-107)

1B    38    Fred McGriff in 2002 (30-103)

2B    34    Jeff Kent in 2002 (37-108); Bret Boone in 2003 (35-117)

3B    37    Mike Schmidt in 1987 (35-113); Adrian Beltré in 2016 (32-104)

SS    30    Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1991 (34-114); Miguel Tejada in 2004 (34-150)

LF    39    Barry Bonds in 2004 (45-101)

CF    35    Cy Williams in 1923 (41-114); Joe DiMaggio in 1950 (32-122); Willie Mays in 1966 (37-103)

RF    38    Babe Ruth in 1933 (34-104)

DH   40    David Ortiz in 2016 (38-127)

St. Louis’ Brendan Donovan tied a Major League record with four doubles.  Dating back to 1901, 52 players have amassed four, including fellow Cardinals Joe Medwick in 1937 and Matt Carpenter in 2018.  Donovan is one of 11 among these 52 to have the big line from the top spot in the batting order (Carpenter can also make this claim).

Dean Kremer allowed a hit in six-and-a-third scoreless frames and came away a winner as the Orioles shut out the Rays, 6-0.  The right-hander revised his résumé against Tampa Bay to record a 5-1 record and 1.64 ERA in 11 career starts.  No pitcher with at least 10 starts against this franchise can brag of a lower ERA, with Pedro Martínez (1.99), Félix Hernández (2.19) and Max Scherzer (2.41) coming in behind Kremer. 

Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.