Brandon Woodruff and Jesus Luzardo were both on a roll when they took the mound on Monday night, but only Woodruff could keep it going.
Woodruff delivered the Milwaukee Brewers’ first complete-game shutout since 2021, and the National League Central-leading team collected a season-high 17 hits in a 12-0 blowout of the Miami Marlins.
Milwaukee’s lopsided victory came one night after they lost 4-3 to the New York Yankees, despite Corbin Burnes, Devin Williams and Abner Uribe holding the Yankees hitless for the first 10 innings.
Photo: AFP
“Opportunities like this just don’t come around much,” Woodruff said of his first nine-inning complete game. “Especially after the game yesterday, it wasn’t on my mind, but it was a long game and we used a lot of guys, and we played well enough to win that game yesterday and we just didn’t. So today I just wanted to go out and give my team a chance to win. Thankfully, I was able to finish it off.”
Woodruff’s only previous complete game came in a 4-2 loss to the St Louis Cardinals in a seven-inning doubleheader matchup during the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season. He recorded the Brewers’ first complete-game shutout since Adrian Houser threw a three-hitter in a 4-0 triumph over the Cardinals on Sept. 4, 2021.
Manager Craig Counsell agreed to let Woodruff (5-1) go out for the ninth, but he said the veteran right-hander could not go over 105 pitches. Woodruff gave up two hits in his final inning, but Counsell let him stick around to complete the six-hitter on his 106th pitch.
“Getting out there and warming up and having those warmup pitches, my heart was just racing, to be honest,” Woodruff said. “The first couple of pitches weren’t even close, and I just talked to myself a little bit and told myself to settle down and to just try to keep making pitches.”
“Thankfully I did a good enough job to get through it. Yeah, I was nervous, for sure,” he added.
Woodruff’s outstanding performance came six days after he allowed two hits over seven innings in a 7-3 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates. Over his past four starts, Woodruff has yielded just three runs in 28 innings.
Luzardo (9-9) was on a similar run heading into the night, allowing two runs in 18 innings over his previous three starts, but he gave up six runs and 10 hits on Monday.
Luzardo said he “just felt little out of whack mechanically.”
“I’ve just got to be better,” he said. “There’s no excuse for it.”
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
Taiwan’s top table tennis player Lin Yun-ju made his debut in the US professional table tennis scene by taking on a new role as a team’s co-owner. On Wednesday, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), founded in September last year, announced on its official Web site that Lin had become part of the ownership group of the Princeton Revolution, one of the league’s eight teams. MLTT chief executive officer Flint Lane described Lin’s investment as “another great milestone for table tennis in America,” saying that the league’s “commitment to growth and innovation is drawing attention from the best in the sport, and we’re
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For