Reds prospect, former Dayton Dragon pitches perfect game

Former Dayton Dragons right-hander Tyler Mahle, who went into the 2017 season ranked by Baseball America as the 12th-best prospect in the Cincinnati Reds farm system, showed why on Saturday.

Mahle, Cincinnati’s seventh-round pick in the June 2013 draft, threw a perfect game for Double-A Pensacola in a 1-0 Blue Wahoos win over the Mobile BayBears at Mobile’s Hank Aaron Stadium.

He clinched the perfect game by coaxing BayBears left fielder Caleb Adams into bouncing back to the mound, a grounder Mahle grabbed and flipped to first baseman Eric Jagielo for the final out.

“It happened so quick,” Mahle, who finished with eight strikeouts, told milb.com. “I just threw the ball as hard as I can over the plate, and I got the ball so quick in my glove. I looked up and (Jagielo) was standing there with his wide eyes, and that was it.

“I feel perfect.”

Mahle, 22, threw 68 strikes among his 89 pitches while improving to 4-0 with a 0.68 earned-run average in four starts. He got into a three-ball count only once.

“My stuff wasn’t technically perfect tonight,” Mahle told milb.com. “My slider, I threw a lot of those up. Some of them backed up. I threw my changeup well. I want to have a curveball. I mean, I have one, but I don’t throw it very often, so I mean there was a lot of stuff to work on.

“It could have been better. I’m not getting greedy, but you could always get better.”

Former Dayton catcher Joe Hudson drove in the game’s only run with a single.

Mahle, a 6-foot-3, 210-pound California native, also threw a no-hitter last season for high Single-A Daytona, facing the minimum number of batters in that game despite hitting a batter.

In his fifth season in the Reds organization, he is 37-21 overall, including a combined 14-6 for Daytona and Pensacola last season.

The non-roster invitee to Cincinnati’s Goodyear, Ariz., major-league spring training camp this season went 0-1 with a 7.20 ERA in five innings over three games.

Among interested observers of Mahle’s gem was professional golfer and Blue Wahoos part-owner Bubba Watson, who Tweeted that he was watching from China, where he was playing in a tournament.

Pensacola extended its franchise-record best start to 13-3 and became the first minor-league team this season to reach 13 wins.

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