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Jesus Luzardo is Back
Published:
After two outings in which he gave up 20 earned runs on 21 hits, Jesus Luzardo was back to looking like prime Sandy Koufax on Wednesday afternoon in a 7-2 win against the Chicago Cubs. His stat line:
- six innings
- five hits
- one earned run
- 10 strikeouts
- 0 walks
He threw 99 total pitches, 70 for strikes and 29 for balls. The Phillies won their first series since Atlanta at home back on May 29th.
Putting the two-game slump off to the side, Luzardo also struck out 10 batters in his two starts prior. They were against the A’s and Rockies, so not exactly the 2004 Red Sox making up those batting orders. But he had only allowed more than two runs once in the eight starts prior, and that was the San Francisco game in which the Phillies won 6-4 on a three-run Bryce Harper home run in the bottom of the 7th inning. It was pretty obvious that these were extreme outliers and that he hadn’t just magically fallen off a cliff.
To that point, there was some buzz about pitch tipping, with quotes in a recent Scott Lauber Inquirer article, and there’s video to go along with it:
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com