PHOENIX – During conversations ahead of the 2020 college season, several teams told Noah Skirrow that he was projected to be picked between the fourth and sixth rounds of the draft that summer.
He’d had a couple of good seasons at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., plus a solid summer in the Cape Cod League, with a few more months to further up his stock.
Then came COVID, the draft’s reduction to five rounds and chaos. “The sixth round didn’t exist, so that made it a little tough,” quipped the right-hander from Cambridge, Ont. “I was quite literally the definition of on the bubble.”
No team picked Skirrow but more than 20 teams came after him immediately after, resulting in a deal with the Philadelphia Phillies and a development path that had him facing the minimum over five dominant innings for Canada in a 5-0 win over Colombia at the World Baseball Classic.
Bo Naylor delivered an RBI single in the fourth the inning after catching Oscar Mercado stealing at second to end the third, Owen Caissie added an RBI single in the eighth, Otto Lopez broke things open with a three-run homer in the ninth and Canadians retained full control over their fate.
At 2-1, a victory in the Wednesday’s finale against Mexico, when Rob Zastryzny starts against Jose Urquidy, sends them into the Classic’s quarter-finals for the first time. Mexico was 1-1 heading into Tuesday night clash with Great Britain (1-2), while Colombia (1-2) has one game remaining against the United States (2-1).
Multiple scenarios remain in play, but Canada avoids all the potential tiebreaking algebra by taking care of its own business.
One hiccup is that Freddie Freeman, perhaps tweaking a hamstring on a third-inning popup, left the game in the fourth with an NHL-style lower-body injury.
Skirrow got Harold Ramirez on a grounder to second to start the game, walked Gio Urshela and then induced a 5-4-3 double-play ball by Jorge Alfaro to end the first and kept rolling from there. He struck out four of his next six batters, erased a Ramirez leadoff single in the fourth with another Alfaro double-play ball and got three cans of corn to right in the fifth to end his outing.
All of it took 58 pitches, seven shy of the opening-round limit of 65.
In the leadup to the outing, Skirrow described the opportunity to pitch such a meaningful game “as pretty surreal. It’s something I wanted to do for a long time. Didn’t get a chance to play on the junior national team, so to get the call that I was invited to this was a really special moment for me.”
Skirrow made the most of it before handing the reins to Curtis Taylor, whose 1.1 innings of work in the 18-8 rout of Great Britain helped settle the Canadian staff, and he retired six of the seven batters he faced.
Another Rays prospect, Trevor Brigden, sliced through the Colombians in a two-strikeout eighth and after Lopez’s homer, Canada sat Matt Brash and handed the ninth to Scott Mathieson, who worked around a pair of singles to open the inning to lock things down.
