DETROIT -- The last time the Tigers swept the Yankees in a three-game regular-season series in Motown, C.J. Nitkowski, Jeff Weaver and Dave Mlicki were the winning pitchers, and Comerica Park had just opened.

That was 2000, and it ended up being a blip for a Detroit team that had already dug itself too deep of a hole. Time will tell whether this weekend’s sweep of the Bronx Bombers marks a turning point for this year's Tigers, but for the starting pitchers, it's a glimpse of the future.

Two days after Casey Mize dueled Gerrit Cole, and a day after Spencer Turnbull retired 10 Yankees in a row, Tarik Skubal topped them both with six scoreless innings and eight strikeouts in Detroit’s 6-2 win on Sunday. But the outing, and Skubal’s improvement the past few starts could best be summed up in one ruthlessly efficient inning.

• Box score

Not only did Skubal retire the top of the Yankees' lineup in order on eight pitches, all strikes, in the top of the third, he made it look easy against a group of hitters that roughed him up for three homers in as many innings exactly one month ago in the Bronx.

Skubal’s 1-0 curveball induced DJ LeMahieu into a groundout to short, maybe LeMahieu’s easiest out of the series.

Up came Giancarlo Stanton, who had hit Skubal’s fastball for a 115.7 mph double off Yankee Stadium’s right-field wall a month ago and walked in his first at-bat Sunday. Stanton swung and missed at a first-pitch changeup at the top of the zone, chased a high fastball for an 0-2 hole, then flailed at a curveball in the dirt for a filthy three-pitch strikeout.

“It’s a big change of pace,” Skubal said of the pitch, usually a lesser part of his arsenal. “It’s a lot slower. It’s almost an auto-take or kind of like a late swing, for the most part. It’s a big pitch to slow guys down when they’re trying to be aggressive.”

That brought up Aaron Judge, whose home run to center summed up Skubal’s rough April night in the Bronx but whose double-play grounder helped Skubal escape Sunday’s first inning. This time, Skubal dropped a first-pitch curveball on the outside corner and a fastball over the plate, both for called strikes. Skubal finished him off with a slider at Judge’s back foot as the All-Star slugger swung through it.

“That felt good for me,” Skubal said, “but it was good for our team to get our bats back up.”

The Tigers scored four runs in the bottom of the inning with help from Willi Castro's bases-clearing double and two Gleyber Torres errors. Skubal took the mound for the fourth with a six-run lead and Torres slamming his glove in the visiting dugout.

Skubal retired 13 of his final 15 batters, finishing with six scoreless innings on three hits with three walks and eight strikeouts. He became the first Tigers rookie in franchise history to strike out eight or more batters in three consecutive starts, according to Elias Sports Bureau, and the first Major League rookie to do it since Domingo Germán for the Yankees in June 2018. Only one of his strikeouts took more than four pitches, and just four batters went to three-ball counts.

Skubal, Mize and Turnbull combined to allow two runs on 11 hits over 16 2/3 innings with 21 strikeouts. In the process, they provided a snapshot of how the Tigers can compete against talented teams, leveraging their starting pitching while using opportunistic hitting for run support. The pitching part has been the blueprint of the Tigers’ rebuild, but the last couple of weeks have shown signs it might be coming together sooner than expected, especially with Skubal and Mize.

“I’m very proud of what we did and what we’ve been doing,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “This has been a couple weeks now where we’ve put some things together where we’ve had our stretches of good and only spurts of bad. I think that the players start to feel that momentum and feel that excitement.”

While Mize finished May with a 2-0 record, a 1.74 ERA and a .162 batting average allowed, Skubal posted a 3.33 ERA for the month with 39 strikeouts and nine walks over 27 innings.

“I know I use the same quote that I use for Casey,” Hinch said, “but we’re watching [Skubal] mature at his pace, and we’re obviously seeing some stretches where he can really be a dominant pitcher. We’ve got to continue to build off of that.”