How did we get here? In an abstract way, that’s a great question. The Detroit Tigers were in the middle of one of the greatest playoff runs in the history of Major League Baseball. They’d gotten off the deck – from 1 in 500 playoff odds to 4 in 10. With 7 games to go, it was hard to fight a feeling of inevitability that could make any statistician nervous. Weren’t they still more likely than not to miss the playoffs, if you believed the numbers? Why didn’t it feel that way, then?
I don’t believe a whole lot in “clutch” hitters in baseball. Everyone comes up with a clutch hit at some point, and everyone chokes with the game on the line far more often. That’s just baseball. If you have the mental wherewithal to watch a fastball go within a foot of your groin at 100 mph without pissing yourself on national TV, the thought of driving in your buddy from 3rd base with 2 outs isn’t going to intimidate you.
But what about long-term sports psychology? What if the Tigers continued to win simply because the Tigers continued to expect to win, and refused to countenance anything else? Maybe that’s possible. What about the reverse of it? What if the Twins continued to lose because the Twins had already accepted the inevitability of their collapse?
Now, that I believe.
Sunday, September 22, 2024 was the pivotal day in the AL Wild Card race. The Twins began the day with a slim 0.5 game lead over the Tigers and a double-header in Boston. Three innings into the early start, the Red Sox had built a 6-0 lead and that game was over. The Tigers could now force at least a tie in the standings with 6 games to go if they beat the Orioles one last time in Baltimore. You had to like the odds, especially when a resurgent Spencer Torkelson hit a bomb in the second inning to help propel the Tigers to a 2-0 lead. Kerry Carpenter added a nuke of his own to make it 3-0 an inning later. Tyler Holton added a few innings of pitching chaos as the Tigers fully committed to the bit and abandoned all starting pitchers not named Tarik Skubal.
In the 5th, trouble struck Ty Madden, yet another journeyman minor league who had become a bullpen hero. He gave up 3 runs and Sean Guenther had to come in to rescue the tie game. Maybe somewhere out there, a Minnesota fan felt a small sense of hope. Perhaps the world wasn’t ending for their beloved Twins. Kerry Carpenter quickly disabused that optimistic Twins fan quickly by hitting his second home run of the game to bring the Tigers back in front. It was 4-3, and the back end of the bullpen made that lead hold up. The Detroit Tigers were ahead of the Minnesota Twins in the standings.
A second Minnesota loss to Boston felt like a fait accompli at this point. Sure enough, the Red Sox won 9-3 to put the Tigers a game clear with 6 games to go. To add a little bit of insurance, the Kansas City Royals were also in the middle of a terrible collapse. The Giants blanked them 2-0 to drop KC to 82-74. The Wild Card picture was thus: Baltimore certain to get in, the Tigers and Royals tied for the last two spots, Minnesota one game back, and the Mariners hanging out a game behind the Twins (Seattle also lost on this day). In other words, everything had gone right, and there was no looking back.
The Tigers headed home for the final 6 games of the year, beginning on Tuesday the 24th. My infamous shower math basically said they needed to go 4-2 against the Rays and the White Sox to earn their first playoff berth in 10 seasons. Going 4-2 is never “easy”, but when your team has been winning 75% of its games for a month and a half AND has three games at home against one of the worst teams in history AND the potential for the unanimous Cy Young winner to start two of them, it’s hard not to be optimistic.
Skubal was getting the first of the six games against the Tampa Bay Rays, who started Ryan Pepiot. The game instantly devolved into a pitcher’s duel. Unfortunately for the Rays, Tarik Skubal yields to nobody in high-pressure circumstances. All the offense had to do was find a way to break through at some point in front of the most raucous home crowd Detroit has had in late September in years. They finally found it in the 5th inning in a way that underscored what made this run so magical. First it was Trey Sweeney, the rookie who was only playing because the nominal starting shortstop was out for the year, drawing a walk. Then it was the defensive-specialist catcher Jake Rogers lining a single. Parker Meadows, who was so bad in the spring that he got demoted to AAA for the middle of the year, drew a walk of his own. Then with the bases loaded and two outs, the unheralded rookie prospect Wenceel Perez yanked a pitch into the right-field corner, where it one-hopped over the wall. 2-0 Tigers.
Skubal kept breathing fire until he’d thrown 7 shutout innings. Beau Brieske took over in his new role as the most exciting fireman in the MLB. He gave up a 2-out, bases-empty home run in the 9th to Brandon Lowe, but then slammed the door on a 2-1 win in front of a rapturous home crowd. The Tigers were now 83-74 and all of the MLB knew they were the team of destiny. Behind them, the Twins gave up a bunch of early runs at home to the Marlins of all teams. The Marlins! Detroit’s Wild Card lead had swelled to 2 games with 5 left to play, and the Magic Number was 4.
Keider Montero got his final regular-season start the next night against Zach Littell of the Rays. This always felt like the “reach” game for me. The matchups didn’t seem super favorable. Still, I’d come to learn that logic was not the driving force behind this team. That lesson was reinforced when Parker Meadows led off the bottom of the first:
Montero was shaky. He let two runners on base in the first, and let the Rays load them in the second. He wiggled out of both of those, but after giving up a home run in the 3rd inning to cut Detroit’s lead to 2-1, Hinch decided he’d rather just ride bullpen chaos the rest of the way. Nobody could be sure of it at the time, but this was the end of the Tigers pretending to use any real starting pitcher not named Tarik Skubal. From here on out, it would be openers every other day.
And who could blame Hinch for the decision? Sean Guenther, yet another one of those unheralded guys who had gone from a career Minor Leaguer to a key part of an MLB playoff team’s bullpen, immediately slammed the door into the 5th. When the lefty-mashing Junior Caminero came up with 2 outs, Brennan Hanifee came in to mop that up. When Hanifee ran into trouble an inning later, Tyler Holton calmly mopped that up.
Meanwhile, the Tigers were putting on a show for the city that was rallying behind them. Riley Greene had already contributed a couple of big hits to make it 3-1. His All-Star season had been one of the best storylines of 2024. But it was his supposed partner in crime who stole the show tonight. Spencer Torkelson had been one of the top hitting prospects in all of America, and 2024 was supposed to be his breakout year. It hadn’t happened; he’d spent a decent chunk of his 2024 languishing in AAA-Toledo for want of hitting the ball. After the fire sale of spare parts like Mark Canha and Gio Ursehla in July, there was an opportunity for Tork to come back and try to fight for his roster spot. This was a convincing argument:
Tork added an RBI double in the 8th, then scored on a single from rookie Dillon Dingler. The rout was on – yet another win to get the Tigers all the way up to 10 games above the .500 mark that had previous felt like a wall. But even a rout was special in late September 2024. That day, the Tigers had done the one thing you never do in a playoff race – they called up top pitching prospect Jackson Jobe. It sort of made sense when you thought about it – this was a team of “why not?” Every little bit of pitching chaos helped. In the top of the 9th, with the Tigers up 7-1, Hinch made the call to the bullpen and Jobe went out there to a mammoth roar from the crowd. He threw a 1-2-3 inning in his MLB debut to slam the door on another win. I was already thinking about how he could start a game in the playoffs if Detroit wanted. This was not a time to be rational.
The Twins beat the Marlins, but time was very much not on their side anymore. The Tigers had a Magic Number of 3 with 4 games to go.
September 26: the series finale with Tampa, first pitch at 1:10 on a Thursday afternoon. A sign of how much Tigers-mania had gripped a sports-starved Detroit was that even this game, at an inconvenient time and in crappy weather, featured a raucous crowd. Reese Olson was making another start in his return from a long injury against former Tiger swingman Tyler Alexander.
Olson was pretty good, but he got into trouble in the 3rd and couldn’t get a big out before giving up the first two runs of the game. He only lasted four innings before Hinch lifted him for the newly-in-the-bullpen-as-part-of-pitching-chaos Casey Mize. Mize gave up a run of his own in the 5th to make it 3-0, all while the soft-tossing Alexander stymied Detroit.
I was watching passively on my iPad at work. Most of the time, a game like this would make me just turn it off and not worry about it. No harm, no foul. But there was just something about this team that kept me engaged on a Thursday afternoon. All they were going to need was a spark – even if that spark was just a two-out Matt Vierling walk in the 6th. All of a sudden, Colt Keith was ripping a triple into the corner, and Kerry Carpenter was coming up with a pinch-hit single, and it was a 3-2 game. And you felt the Gritty Tigs getting ready to do it again.
It didn’t happen in the 7th, but in the bottom of the 8th, Riley Greene singled with one out. Then Vierling walked again. Then Keith came up with another one of those massive hits that made you forget all about his early-season rookie jitters:
https://twitter.com/dannydHRs/status/1839389439639904317
The go-ahead run was on 3rd with one out. I was pumping my fist with delight in the office. Yet another rookie strode to the plate – Justyn-Henry Malloy. He had a chance to become a minor hero in this slow-motion, months-long drama that was the 2024 comeback story. He didn’t fail.
https://twitter.com/dannydHRs/status/1839390098124878329
In that moment, any lingering doubt in my mind about what the odds said was gone. This was a team that was going to the playoffs – and for the first time, I thought about more. Why not just win the whole fucking thing?
Beau Brieske had given two more clean innings in relief to get it to this point. Now it was Jason Foley’s turn to fully turn the page after the debacle in Baltimore over the weekend. He made it look easy, finishing off a 1-2-3 inning with a strikeout of Jose Siri to close out a 4-3 comeback win. And I realized: this was actually happening.
https://twitter.com/kicks/status/1839414266052644995
Coming home from work later that afternoon, I got a chance to watch the Twins finish their series off with Miami in front of a completely empty stadium. You had to feel for those Minnesota players – the writing was fully on the wall and it looked like they were struggling against fate itself. The Marlins jumped out to a 4-0 lead, but the Twins scored in the 6th, 7th, and 8th innings to tie the game. Then they got the winning run onto 3rd in the 9th before stranding him there. After the Marlins scored in the 10th, the Twins once again loaded the bases before settling for only one run to bring it to the 11th. This time the Marlins didn’t score, and wouldn’t you believe it – the Twins stranded a bases loaded, one-out situation yet again. Finally in the 13th inning, Miami broke through for 3 runs, and you just felt the whole Twins team deflate like a balloon. Their season wasn’t officially over, but after Carlos Correa made the last out after not hustling down the line, they were done. Scipio was also done, after such a long game.
So now the situation was simple. It was Friday, September 27. The season ended on Sunday, September 29. In the intervening 3 days, the Tigers just needed the Twins and Mariners to lose once. Even more simply, they could just win a single game against the 39-120 Chicago White Sox. The Sox coincidentally were a loss away from breaking the MLB record for most Ls in a year, though they had just swept the Angels to put off that fate for as long as they could. Chicago even lined up their rotation so the Tigers would have to face their couple of legitimately good starting pitchers in the final series. You had to respect it, even while you hoped the Tigers crushed them.
The Tigers went tag-team with Brennan Hanifee and Brant Hurter against Garrett Crochet in “Game 1 of the Series to Avoid the Most Embarrassing Thing Ever”. James was coming into town for a house-warming party Elizabeth and I were having the next day, and I had plenty of time to sit down and watch while I waited for him. Crochet and Pitching Chaos put up matching zeroes through 4 innings, but the moment the Sox went to the bullpen in the 5th, the Tigers got to work. A passed ball and a sac fly made it 2-0. A couple of innings later, Riley Greene crushed an RBI double to extend the lead to 3-1. Then a wild pitch made it 4-1. A sellout crowd of 44,435 people knew what this meant. So did the White Sox. So did me, on my couch here in Norman. At some point James had arrived and was watching next to me. Faces flashed by on the screen – Will Vest, Tyler Holton, Jason Foley. The Sox had two outs in the 9th. The final batter was lifting a fly ball toward right center, and Wenceel Perez was grabbing it an instant before he ran into Parker Meadows. This was real. It was happening. After 10 long, painful years of waiting, the Tigers were officially headed back to the playoffs.
Yeah, I cried. I probably didn’t say a word on the couch for a half hour as the team celebrated on the field. As Jason Benetti tried to put the feeling into words on the TV. As the celebration moved into the dugout and the clubhouse, where players made it clear they were not done. I don’t know that a sports moment has ever made me feel happier.
At length, it was over, and James and I had flipped the TV over to the Virginia Tech/Miami football game. Already though, I was scheming. The Braves had beaten Kansas City, so the Tigers now were in the second Wild Card spot by one game with just two left to play. But if the Tigers rested Skubal and anyone else useful over the next two days like I suspected they would, then KC could make up that final game in the standings and leapfrog Detroit for the role of the Wild Card team heading to Baltimore. That would put Detroit in Houston, where Elizabeth and I had already presciently booked a refundable hotel… just in case. So I guess I was rooting for the Tigers to lose their last two games now?
Lo and behold, they obliged. From a record of 86-74 they fell to a final season output of 86-76 as Kenta Maeda and Casey Mize did their level best to serve some meatballs to Chicago. The Braves beat KC 2-1 on Saturday. But on Sunday, while Elizabeth and I were taking Scipio to Lake Thunderbird for a late-September swim, the final stages of a personal miracle fell into place: while the White Sox were beating the Tigers 9-5, the Royals jumped on the Braves for a 4-2 win to finish 87-75. Thus, the Tigers claimed the last Wild Card spot and a first-round game in Houston on Tuesday. I looked online for tickets, fearful of how much they would cost… and was surprised to see that you could get outfield seats in Houston for like $20. Elizabeth was cleared to take a personal day on Tuesday, and I swapped my shifts around so I worked Monday instead (thanks, Mark!). It all came together so fast – Elizabeth and I were going to her first-ever Tigers game. And not just any Tigers game – Tarik Skubal in Detroit’s first playoff game in a decade.
