Gasser’s MLB debut was one for ages
It wasn’t all that long ago, all things considered, that Robert Gasser was the most diminutive player on his Southern California travel ball team, the Sierra Valley Storm, struggling in his early efforts as a pitcher.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Gasser’s coach at Oak Ridge High School considered cutting him from the varsity team during tryouts his junior year.
It wasn’t all that long ago Gasser was getting shelled as a freshman at the University of New Mexico, a tough but necessary challenge that handed him the rude awakening he ultimately needed by forcing him to go pitch the following year at junior college.
On Friday night on the mound at American Family Field, though, as Gasser, poised and in complete control, made his major-league debut, those hardships felt like they were lifetimes ago as the left-hander twirled his way to six innings that formed the night of his life on the biggest stage of his life.
Making his first start in the big leagues, the 24-year-old spun six shutout innings against the St. Louis Cardinals while allowing only two hits, no walks and striking out four. In doing so, he became the fifth pitcher in Brewers history to throw at least six scoreless innings in his MLB debut and just the second to allow three or fewer base runners in six-plus frames.
A five-run fifth by Gasser’s offense turned the game into a blowout, ultimately won by Milwaukee, 11-2. It gave Gasser not only a first victory but also allowed him to soak in every second of the rest of the evening once manager Pat Murphy shook his hand after the sixth inning.
A toothless, ear-to-ear grin on Gasser’s face while standing on the top step of the dugout said it all.
“It was awesome. Especially ending on strikeout, it was everything I could’ve dreamed of,” Gasser said. “Playing in front of that many people and probably the biggest game of my life so far, it was awesome.”
Gasser in control from first pitch
From the very moment Gasser first toed the third-base side of the rubber Friday, he did so with conviction and confidence. Even though he ascended to the heights of a top prospect in the minors, he’s been battle-tested.
“It wasn’t easy for Rob for a while,” said Gasser’s former coach, Ryan Rodriguez. “You look at him now and assume he’s always been the best player on his team, but there were a lot of years there where that wasn’t always the case. He had to work for this. He just continued to get better, learn about his game and as he developed and got more serious about the game you saw him start to take off.”
Gasser took off from the jump Friday. Starting with an eight-pitch, perfect first inning that included his first career strikeout on a sweeper to Lars Nootbaar, Gasser had the exterior appearance of a wily veteran.
“When he was out there, he didn’t see names on the back of jerseys as a lot of guys would,” outfielder Sal Frelick said. “That’s just how he goes about his business.”
Gasser’s foot was fully on the pedal the rest of the way.
A nifty double play turned by second baseman Brice Turang helped him get through the second inning, then he made some big pitches to strand a runner on second in the third. From there, the Cardinals were hitless over the final three frames, which Gasser punctuated by striking out Nootbaar for a third time with a sweeper.
“Two different fastballs, good sweeper,” Nootbaar said. “I thought he did a good job of mixing it well. Kind of had different shapes on that sweeper today, and I thought he didn’t miss too many times, so I thought he did a good job.”
Gasser waited long time for shot
Gasser’s debut was a long time in the making, and not even specifically because of the ups and downs he’s dealt with years ago. He sat on the doorstep of the majors for a long time, certainly much longer than most highly-regarded prospects wait, and made 33 starts at Class AAA. Gasser finished the 2022 season at Nashville after being acquired by Milwaukee from San Diego as the headliner in the Josh Hader trade, spent all of 2023 there while earning Brewers co-minor league pitcher of the year honors and then made three more starts in AAA while recovering from bone spurs that shelved him to start this season.
“I think Gas came with a little chip on his shoulder,” Murphy said. “Like, ‘I should’ve been here last year, in my mind, and they made me wait.’ Maybe that’s something we can think about sometimes. Maybe we need to make some guys wait. Gas is a talked-about guy as a minor leaguer. It’s great to see when they get here that they pay their dues and they got a little edge to them.”
For a pitcher with a surname that lends itself to being nicknamed “Gas,” it is the sweeper that is Gasser’s best pitch. Against the Cardinals, it was unhittable. He threw it whenever, wherever and to whomever. Gasser generated seven of his 10 total whiffs on the night with the sweeper and 44% of the 36 that he threw were either a called or swinging strike.
To top off his outing on the swinging strikeout of Nootbaar, Gasser hurled a sweeper with a remarkable 20 inches of horizontal movement to render the Cardinals outfielder helpless.
“That sweeper kind of had a little bit more movement than the guys were anticipating,” Cardinals manager Oli Marmol said. “That first time through a lot of guys came in kind of saying the same thing. The movement was good. It was a little funky, and gave us a tough time.”
Gasser threw 17 consecutive strikes without a ball across six different hitters to end the game. Just when you thought he might be tiring – he hadn’t gone five innings into a game since his final Nashville outing last year – he found more. And he did it without throwing arguably his second-best pitch, his cutter, a single time as he never shook off catcher William Contreras once.
“The plan really was to go out there and challenge hitters,” Gasser said. “It wasn’t to punch a bunch of guys out or to be perfect or try to be perfect. It was just throw it down the middle and see what happened.”
These are banner days for the Milwaukee Brewers as far as the St. Louis Cardinals are concerned.
Thanks to a two-out, three-run home run in the seventh inning by Rhys Hoskins, the Brewers knocked off their National League Central rivals, 5-3, at American Family Field on Saturday night.
The blast helped move Milwaukee to 6-0 against St. Louis on the season, 8-0 dating to last season – the team’s longest such winning streak in the series – and 11-1 in the teams’ last 12 meetings.
It’s been quite the run against a Cardinals team that has been the class of the division for the last decade-plus.
“I think we’re just playing good baseball right now,” Hoskins said. “We were too when we played them in St. Louis. Little bit different. Getting the same results, but I think it’s just the type of baseball that we’re playing. We as a group never really feel like we’re out of a game. Our pitching has been absolute nails keeping us in games, specifically in the division.
“That’s a good combo, right?” Good enough on Saturday to improve the Brewers to 24-15, 1 1⁄ games ahead of
2 the Chicago Cubs for first place in the standings. The Cardinals, losers of seven straight, dropped to 15-24 and are in last.
It had been mostly offensive frustration for the Brewers offense against right-hander Kyle Gibson, who was charged with two runs in his five innings of work.
Both came on hit by pitches – one against Jake Bauers with the bases loaded in the third that gave Milwaukee a 1-0 lead and the other on a pitch thrown by JoJo Romero with the bases loaded in the sixth that pulled the Brewers to within 3-2.
Gibson’s counterpart, Freddy Peralta, was solid in his first game back from suspension as he allowed eight hits, three runs and a walk with eight strikeouts over six innings and 100 pitches.
Two of those runs scored in a frustrating fifth when a double, walk completed on a pitch-timer violation and fielding error by Peralta on a bunt set the stage for a single by Lars Nootbaar.
Atwo-out double by Nolan Gorman in the sixth then made it 3-1.
“Really good,” is how manager Pat
Murphy described Peralta’s outing. “Freddy’s got a lot of pressure on him to throw shutouts. He gives up three runs in six innings and it’s like, ‘What happened? Wow!’
“He’d take a few pitches back, I’m sure. But we put a lot on his shoulders. He gave us a six-inning outing. Credit to the Cardinals, too.”
Milwaukee put together its gameturning rally in the seventh when William Contreras – who’d extended his onbase streak to 19 games with a first-inning double to tie Freddie Freeman for the longest active streak in the majors – walked with one out and Bauers singled with two outs to bring Hoskins to the plate against Andrew Kittredge.
Hoskins quickly fell behind in the count, 0-2, before working his way back to 3-2.
The next pitch was a slider down and out of the zone that Hoskins reached down and somehow got enough muscle into that the ball carried just over the center field wall 407 feet away despite the best efforts of a leaping Michael Siani.
It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the twoout, three-run homer hit by Willy Adames in the ninth inning win in Kansas City on Tuesday.
But still pretty darned good.
“I knew I got some good barrel to it,” Hoskins said. “But the way some of those balls have been going and just the way he was tracking it I thought he was going to get some glove on it.
“Obviously he did, but I got just enough.”
Peralta was already in the clubhouse doing his wrapup work for the night when Hoskins turned the game around. The TVs in the clubhouse are on a delay, but Peralta said he and the others know quickly when something big happens because they can feel the vibration of the crowd.
“I knew that something was going on,” Peralta said. “I told the guys, ‘Hey, something good happened! Let’s see what it was. I’ll take a base hit.’ That’s what I said. And then I saw the swing and the centerfielder going back and was like, ‘Damn,’ and it was a homer.
“It was perfect.”
Bryan Hudson took the ball from Hoby Milner (1-0) and threw a scoreless eighth, then with Joel Payamps on bereavement leave it was Trevor Megill’s turn to once again try to slam the door as closer.
He recorded the first two outs before allowing singles to Nootbaar and the struggling Paul Goldschmidt, who’d struck out in each of his previous four atbats.
That brought up Nolan Arenado, who like Goldschmidt has crushed Milwaukee pitching over the course of his career.
But this time Arenado flied out to left, Megill had his fourth save and the Brewers were winners of their third straight with a chance to make it two straight series sweeps of the Cardinals on Sunday afternoon.