Some things just belong together in this world. Ranch dressing belongs on a salad. Beautiful lakes belong in the mountains. And college football belongs on Saturday mornings in the fall. Don’t mess with what works.
So that’s where we can pick up my narrative of the 2024 Detroit Tigers – on a college football Saturday. Sure, my favorite baseball team was still scratching and clawing at the outer edges of playoff contention. But more importantly, Michigan’s football team was getting ready to get their asses kicked on national television by Texas! I mean, you just can’t pass up an opportunity to watch something like that, can you?
Michigan got their asses kicked.
But, in a game that I already don’t remember as it was lost to history, the Tigers won on September 7, 2024 in Oakland, scoring twice in the 7th to steal a 2-1 win. I probably don’t remember it because September 7th was also the only OU game that Elizabeth and I went to in 2024, a 16-12 win over a horrible Houston team that proved to be prescient for the rest of the season of pain ahead of me.
But this fortunately isn’t a football post. This is about baseball, and how for the first time in 8 years I cared what the Tigers were doing in September. They were 4.5 games back of the final wild card spot – just close enough that you had to watch in case they stayed hot down the stretch. After all, all they needed was for one of Minnesota or Kansas City to choke down the stretch! Coincidentally, the Twins and Royals were playing each other this weekend. The Royals won both games on the 7th and 8th, which meant that when Detroit beat Oakland 9-1 to take another series win, the gap had narrowed all the way to 3 and a half.
Deep in my heart, I didn’t really believe in the Tigers at this juncture. The math was clearly still against them. But each day that they failed to prove me right added to the fun. Even off days were fun at this juncture. Take, for example, September 9. The Tigers didn’t play, but the Twins and Royals both did, and they both found ways to lose. It made it that much easier to get swept up in the wave.
I had a new type of “shower math”. There were 18 games left in the season, and the Twins were 3 games ahead of the Tigers. If the Twins went 8-10 down the stretch, which was realistically probably what the Tigers needed, then Detroit would need to go 12-6 in those remaining 18 games to get themselves into the playoffs. Difficult? Yeah, for sure. But over such a small sample, it was also definitely not impossible.
With that, Detroit headed home for their second-t0-last homestand of the season. They had 6 home games – 3 against the hapless Colorado Rockies and then 3 against the playoff-bound Baltimore Orioles. I felt like they needed 4 of those 6. And it was all going to sit on rookie Keider Montero’s shoulders to start. Montero was the contrast to the pitching chaos all around him – while every other mediocre starting pitcher on the roster was being broken down for scraps and turned into a lethal weapon designed to get 6 outs early in the game, Montero continued to start every 5 games, despite his ERA sitting at a replacement-level 5. Riley called him “Cy Montero” with more than a little bit of sardonic glee. My main hope on September 10 was that he would only have to beat the Rockies’ hapless Bradley Blalock.
So of course Montero turned in a complete-game shutout, giving up just three hits and facing the minimum 27 batters.
https://twitter.com/tigers/status/1833670090887213061
The Tigers piled on plenty of offense in an 11-0 win in front of a Detroit crowd that was suddenly turning out in a way they hadn’t in almost a decade. They’d found something to believe in. There was only one thing clouding the day – that the Twins and Royals had also won.
The next night, I hadn’t even settled into my couch yet to start cheering on Detroit when Riley Greene was crushing a home run off of Tanner Gordon. Then there was a Matt Vierling single, a Kerry Carpenter triple, a Spencer Torkelson single, a Jace Jung single, and a Trey Sweeney home run of his own. And just like that, it was 6-0 in the first inning, en route to a 7-4 win. The dopamine rushes came hard and heavy during this time period.
I struggled to convey to Elizabeth: this isn’t normal. Baseball teams go on hot streaks all the time – when you have 162 games, it becomes easy to find a period where you flip the coin and land heads 12 times out of 14. But to ask your team to keep flipping heads while the Red Sox, Mariners, Twins, and Royals all kept flipping tails? Preposterous. Even now, the chance that the Tigers made the playoff was relatively slim, which made each coin flip against them hurt more. For example, there was the come-from-behind win the Twins got over the Angels on September 11, with the Angels stranding the tying runs in scoring position in the 9th inning. The lost chance to make up a game stung. That sting was nothing compared to what happened on Thursday afternoon, when the Tigers sent Tarik Skubal to the mound to try to sweep the Rockies. He left after 6 innings with a 2-1 lead, only for the bullpen to cough up the lead and the offense to get shut down by a collection of Colorado scrubs. In a year where Skubal starts felt like auto-wins before they began, this one was crushing.
Baseball makes you get back up off the ground quickly as a fan, especially when your team is in a pennant chase. That next night was a Friday, and Detroit kicked off a weekend series against the very good Baltimore Orioles. I had just started midnight shifts – the bane of my life. Usually the evening is booked around naptime, since you can only sleep so long when you go to bed at 7:30 am and you can only exist for so long on four hours of sleep. But tonight, naptime was superseded by the need to watch the Tigers. Kerry Carpenter got the party started in the first inning with a solo home run, and then the offense turned off. But that was fine, as it turned out.
I’ve talked a little bit about how the Tigers basically had Skubal, Montero, and then a whole lot of nothing available behind it. Well, even now, with Casey Mize working his way back from injury, Detroit still only had 2.5 starters. That meant they had devolved about half of their starts into a theory known as “pitching chaos”, where anyone and everyone could be called upon to try and shut an offense down for a while. There was no need to try and throw the opening pitch, either. Baltimore featured a lefty-heavy lineup in 2024 and must have been licking their chops when A.J. Hinch announced righty Beau Brieske as the starter. Brieske faced four batters, including the dangerous righty Anthony Santander. Then Hinch yanked Brieske in the second inning and replaced him with the soft-tossing rookie lefty Brant Hurter.
Hurter was an entirely unheralded prospect who had basically gotten the call after Detroit’s deadline fire sale out of necessity. Against the odds, he’d turned into a gem; already, Hurter was 4-1 with an ERA near 3.00. Undoubtedly, tonight was his masterpiece. He threw 71 pitches, 53 of them for strikes, and was constantly pounding the Orioles from 0-2 and 1-2 counts. Unsurprisingly, the strikeouts and the ground balls mounted. The Tigers never extended the lead from 1-0, but it didn’t matter. Through the 4th, then the 5th, then the 6th, and finally with an approving roar from the crowd in the 7th, Hurter did the unthinkable – he didn’t allow a single baserunner. That’s right. Through 7 innings, the Tigers were on pace to throw the 25th perfect game in the history of the MLB.
Even though Hurter had been used in more of a swing role over the last month, there was no question that Hinch had to send him out for the 8th. The cleanup hitter for the Orioles was the dangerous Adley Rutschman. For the first time all game, a Baltimore hitter battled – and Hurter blinked. Rutschman drew the 8-pitch walk to end the perfect game and bring the tying run to 1st base. Hinch worked quickly to call out another one of those AAAA dudes who were putting in an amazing second half, Brennan Hanifee, while Hurter left to a standing ovation.
Any concerns about the game or the still-active no-hitter in Hanifee’s hands were quickly negated, as he struck out the first batter he faced, got Eloy Jimenez to ground into a fielder’s choice, and then after badly missing his first 3 pitches to Colton Cowser, dusting him for an epic 9-pitch strikeout. The Detroit crowd went wild. The no-hitter was alive through 8.
This game was a good outline of what “pitching chaos” looked like for the Tigers. Nowhere were there methods helped more, though, than by the steadying presence of Tyler Holton. Holton is a soft-tossing lefty whose main calling card is a refusal to walk anyone and an ability to pitch anytime when called upon. Only one reliever combined for 160+ innings in 2023 and 2024 – Tyler Holton (he also added another 10 innings as a starter during that span). With the Orioles throwing a bunch of left-handed hitters out there, you knew who would be called on to protect a 1-0 lead.
First batter – Emmanuel Riveria – flew out to right. Second batter – pinch-hitter Coby Mayo – frozen on a 3-2 pitch for strike three. We were one out away from a no-hitter, but the Orioles had MVP-caliber Gunnar Henderson up. He took a rip at the first pitch – and laced it down the first base line past a diving Torkelson. Into the corner it went, and Henderson ended up all the way on third. All of a sudden, the no-hitter was over and the Orioles were 90 feet away from tying the game in the 9th.
I was nervous. I’m sure the screaming fans in the Motor City were nervous. Tyler Holton? He was not nervous. He got Anthony Santander to swing and miss at a 2-2 pitch, and a magical night in Detroit was salvaged. A couple of hours later, the Reds beat the Twins 8-4, and that magical night got even better.
The Tigers had a tough task on the next day. They faced Corbin Burnes, one of the American League’s best pitchers. He didn’t disappoint, throwing 7 shutout innings to duel his way past Pitching Chaos. The Tigers trailed 4-0 in the 9th but battled back enough to get the tying run on 1st base with a 4-2 deficit before Baltimore slammed the door shut. How did I feel about it? Well, OU was struggling at home with a decidedly “meh” Tulane squad and Michigan was struggling at home with a much-worse-than-meh Arkansas State team, so baseball was far from my only woe. At least the Reds beat the Twins again to give Detroit a mulligan at 2.5 games back.
There was still a game left in the homestand and the Tigers had a chance to finish off the 4-2 stretch that my shower logic said they needed. The Sunday noon start was brutal for me on mid-shifts, but if Keider Montero wanted to go out there and try to deliver a bookend win, I’d gladly take it. And lo and behold – he hurled 5 more scoreless innings before Hinch yanked him early to protect the young starter. He probably did that because the only scoring Detroit had done so far was a two-run homer from Riley Greene. He turned it over to the chaos agents of the bullpen – Holton, Will Vest, and Jason Foley, the “veteran” options on the team – who managed to hang in there for a 4-2 win after Greene hit a second homer.
With 12 games to go, the Tigers were 77-73 and still just 2.5 games out of the playoffs. If they went 8-4 down the stretch (not easy but not impossible, especially with a three-game series at home against the moribund White Sox remaining), then they’d need the Twins to go 5-8 in their last 13 games to finish one ahead in the standings. Even now, that seemed like a fairly tall order; Fangraphs had the Tigers at just a 9.9% chance of making the playoffs. That’s much better than 0.2% from a month ago, but I was trying to preach a measured approach. Enjoy the meaningful baseball but don’t get too wrapped up in it.
In the coming week, I was going to learn something: the ride is way more fun if you just let yourself believe.
