CHICAGO — Logan Henderson was standing at his locker at American Family Field last week when a familiar face approached.
“Hi, I’m John Smoltz,” said the Hall of Famer and FOX color commentator, “and I love watching you pitch.”
The exchange lasted only a few seconds. Henderson won’t forget it.
Smoltz got to watch the 24-year-old right-hander pitch again on Thursday night at Wrigley Field, and he was treated to a good old-fashioned pitcher’s duel, a 2-1 Brewers loss in which Henderson and Cubs starter Kevin Gausman each carved through seven innings, and Chicago earned a split of the four-game series.
In the bigger picture, the series might be viewed as a win for the Brewers, who came into Wrigley Field eight games ahead of the Cubs in the NL Central standings with 25 to go, and emerged eight games up with 21 to go, including three head-to-head matchups next week in Milwaukee beginning on Labor Day.
“I’ll let other people do that. We’ve done some great things, but I just think about today,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “Things we’ve got to improve on. Approach, we’ve got to improve on. I want to give credit to the opponent for what they did, but I think we could be a little bit better in some areas.”
“I think we’re playing good baseball, and this is a good time to be playing good baseball,” Henderson said. “We played a good team over there. We just have to keep going.”
Henderson is lined up to face the Cubs again in that series, and he’ll head into it with plenty of confidence after Thursday’s only blemish was Pete Crow-Armstrong’s two-run home run on a changeup well below the strike zone in the third inning, Crow-Armstrong’s 39th home run of the season. Before that swing, he was 3-for-34 with three singles and 17 strikeouts against Brewers pitchers this season –- and one of those pitchers was a position player, Andrew Vaughn.
Henderson’s changeup certainly was not a bad pitch. But the Brewers know that Crow-Armstrong feasts on spin below the strike zone, so it also was not the pitch Henderson wanted. He would have preferred to locate it farther away.
“There’s days where you’re really seeing the baseball and, fortunately, today I was,” Crow-Armstrong said. “You saw the last three days, how deep my contact point was, and just the level of intent on some of my swings were just terrible. So, making a real conscious choice today to be on the heater and let my athleticism play like I’ve done all year. And that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”
Said Henderson: “It was in his honey hole. He scooped it and got it.”
Henderson rebounded by retiring the final 14 batters he faced to cap one of the strongest starts of his budding career: seven innings, three hits, two earned runs, no walks and seven strikeouts on 102 pitches.
Twenty starts into his Major League career, Henderson still hasn’t allowed more than three runs in a game. Going all the way back to 1893, if you pull out openers and pitchers who had relief outings along the way, Henderson and Zac Gallen (23 starts from 2019-20) are the only starters to go this far into a career without allowing more than three runs in an outing.
What Smoltz loves is that Henderson is doing it without the premium velocity that dominates today’s MLB.
“There have been, like, five instances that I can remember where I’ve gone up to someone [and tell them] I really admire the way they go about it,” Smoltz said while preparing for the broadcast. “He’s one that has stood out. It was the game in L.A. that I remember first.”
That was Aug. 16, when Henderson completed seven innings for the first time in his professional career and held the Dodgers to one run on three hits. Then Smoltz tuned in to see Henderson beat the Braves while allowing one run on five hits in six innings on Aug. 22, and watched again when Henderson held the Rangers to one run on one hit in another seven-inning victory last week.
“This guy knows how to pitch,” Smoltz said. “So when I ran into him, I was like, ‘I love watching you pitch.’ I’ve done that with Jake deGrom, Zack Wheeler and some others. When somebody stands out and doesn’t look like the rest, yeah, I probably gravitate toward them because I want that guy to be successful.”
The Brewers have won 16 of Henderson’s 20 career starts, so he’s been plenty successful.
“It’s a game of wins and losses, and ultimately, tonight it wasn’t enough,” Henderson said. “But there’s a lot of positives from tonight.”