One thing you learn in sports: most great stories don’t actually end up happening. Dreams do come true for a select few teams, and it’s always at the hands of someone else. Being a sports fan is about embracing the journey, embracing the pain, and feeling sweet catharsis when your team finds its way into the sun.
As a Detroit Tigers fan, I’ve learned to embrace the pain. The end of the 2009 regular season is still one of my most painful memories – a Detroit team that had led the division wire-to-wire choking it away in the most excruciating fashion against the Minnesota Twins. The Twins were the gremlins of my childhood, the team that you could never count yourself safe against. There was 2009, there was the division title in 2006, and there were countless games where Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau had ruined my night.
And now in 20 the Tigers were just 2.5 games back in the standings from turning the tables on them.
The 2 teams didn’t have any games left against each other and the Twins had already claimed the 2024 season series, largely against the moribund midseason version of the Tigers. That meant that Minnesota had the so-called tiebreaker between the teams, making Detroit’s lift even tougher. Obviously all the Gritty Tigs could do was just try to keep winning.
On Monday, September 16, the task got tougher. Sure, Minnesota was heading to Cleveland for a tough series, but Detroit was also heading to Kansas City for a difficult road trip of their own. The nice thing for the Tigers was that young pitching phenom Reese Olson was finally back from an injury. He’d provide a much-needed stabilizing force to the increasingly careening Pitching Chaos behind Skubal/Montero. The bad news? Olson may have been back, but he was a long way from sharp. The first two innings were smooth sailing, but he ran into trouble in the third. Kansas City’s MVP candidate Bobby Witt Jr. came up with the bases loaded and 1 out. Moments later, it was a 4-0 game and Sean Guenther was entering.
Maybe some time, to some other team, that would be a concern. But not to these Tigers, who had already defied the odds so many times. They got one back in the 4th, only for Guenther to spot the run back to the Royals, so the comeback really began in the 5th. There was a Parker Meadows single, then Witt misplayed a ground ball to let him score. Then Colt Keith, the rookie second baseman who had outright sucked for the first two months of the year, took Kansas City’s extremely good pitcher Seth Lugo deep. 5-4 ballgame, and it was on. The Tigers gave up another run in the 5th, but it literally didn’t matter. This was a time when anyone could be anyone for Detroit. The rookie outfielder Wenceel Perez tied it up with a two-run double in the 6th, and he scored a batter later when Matt Vierling singled him home. From a 4-run deficit, Detroit had a 7-6 lead.
Since I was blacked out of the Kansas City market in Oklahoma, I couldn’t watch this game. Instead, while preparing for my midshift that night, I was listening to the game while playing the Guardians/Twins game on the TV. Minnesota had jumped out to a 3-0 lead on a night where they basically could have ended the Wild Card race. But as inevitable as Detroit felt, Minnesota just felt the opposite. A two-run homer by Cleveland in the 8th gave the Guardians a 4-3 win, which opened the door that much further for the Tigers. Pitching chaos became that much more tense as I drove into work. Journeyman righty Will Vest came on for long reliever Brennan Hanifee in the 7th and worked out of a jam. Then Vest got replaced by Beau Brieske in the 8th. Brieske was already building a reputation in my mind as a guy who was addicted to getting into and out of jams. True to form, he put the tying and go-ahead runners on immediately, then buckled down to get a strikeout and a double play. Nails. Jason Foley came on in the 9th and got a 1-2-3 inning, and the Tigers had finished off a 7-6 win. They were just 1.5 games back. The Fangraphs playoff odds page finally showed a significant movement, bumping Detroit’s playoff odds from 9.9% to 17.5% – a 1 in 6 chance.
Mass hysteria abounded among Tiger fans at this point. Even one month ago, there was no way to think that the 10-year string of meaningless September games was over. There was no denying it now, though. It was here. They still had to win some difficult games to get over the hump, though, and none of them would be more difficult than this next one on Tuesday, September 17. Cole Ragans, another stud pitcher for the Royals, would face Casey Mize, who had given up at least 3 runs in each of his first 3 starts since returning from the IL. Either the offense was going to need to get to Ragans, or Mize was going to need to pitch lights out, or they’d need to get super lucky. And to add to the pressure, the Twins beat the Guardians on September 17.
At first, it looked like the offense might hold up their end of the bargain. Ragans hit Andy Ibanez to start the game, and Matt Vierling doubled him home a few pitches later. 1-0, Detroit in the top of the first. And that was just about it for the offense. For a while, it looked like Mize wouldn’t need a whole lot more. He worked efficiently through 2 innings with 3 strikeouts. Then the wheels started to come off in the 3rd, especially because Mize seemed afraid to challenge Witt and Salvador Perez. A deep lineout limited the damage, but the Royals had tied the game at 1.
History looked to repeat itself in the bottom of the 5th. Mize walked Witt and Perez with 1 out to load the bases. AJ Hinch had seen enough – unfortunately, the downside of Pitching Chaos was a gassed bullpen that was lacking for options this early in the game. So he turned to Shelby Miller, the mercurial gascan of the bullpen. I am not joking when I say that I cued up a 9/11 meme to prepare for what Miller was about to do to their playoff chances.
Miller got Michael Massey to ground into an inning-ending double play.
Ragans was still dealing, and he quickly set the Tigers down 1-2-3. Miller was sent back out for the 6th, where he gave up a soft single and a pair of walks to the bottom of Kansas City’s order.
Then he got a pop-up to leave the bases loaded yet again.
At this point, you just had to embrace the Team of Destiny thing. I was listening avidly on the radio at the start of my midshift as first Beau Brieske, then Tyler Holton mowed down Royals inning after inning until the offense could finally break through. It took until the 10th when Parker Meadows and Riley Greene finally both hit RBI singles, but from there you just knew the Gritty Tigs wouldn’t send the win back. 3-1 final; Detroit was now 6 full games above .500.
Minnesota’s win meant that this game didn’t mean quite as much as the night before for the playoff odds calculation – the Tigers rose on September 17 from a 17.5% chance to a 21.5% chance. I kept having to remind myself that 1 in 5 events only happen 1 out of every 5 times, and that sequencing didn’t matter, and all sorts of stuff that my brain believed but my heart was having a hard time signing on to. I mean, how could you not see the sign of some real-life angels in the outfield with this team? How could you believe that they’d fall short with just 11 games left, AND with Tarik Skubal lined up to pitch 3 of those games if needed? What wasn’t to love?
The first of those Skubal starts was on Wednesday, September 18, in the series finale against Kansas City. He was 16-4 and already a virtual shoo-in to win the American League Cy Young. His start was like manna from heaven for Hinch and the overtaxed bullpen. I assumed they’d just throw him until his arm fell off or Kansas City started squaring up the fastball, whichever came first.
The Royals had a different plan – just wait. They were patient, they fouled everything off, and generally made a pain in the ass of themselves. It sort of worked – three singles in the first inning got them a run, and they did eventually chase Skubal from the game after 5 innings. On the other hand, those three singles were their only hits against Skoob. He punched out seven batters and got Dan Dickerson to raise his voice several octaves in my living room multiple times with big pitches. By the end of his outing, the Tigers had jumped out to a 4-1 lead – Riley Greene hit a towering home run, and Trey Sweeney added a two-run double to score his fellow rookie Jace Jung with an incredible slide around a tag.
At this point, I’d fully committed to the Gritty Tigs grind. It was my last midshift of the string on this night, and I was putting together a table for our front hallway at our new house. Since the game was blacked out on TV in Oklahoma, I put the audio on my iPad while working on the table. Meanwhile, the TV was locked in on the Guardians/Twins game, where Cleveland had forced extra innings with a late home run. Minnesota loaded the bases with nobody out, then got a 2-run single to take a 4-2 lead in the 10th. Any hope of a comeback and a game made up in the standings rested on the bottom of the 10th. In slow motion, the train wreck built up for the Twins. An RBI single. A walk to put the tying run at second. Another single to tie the game, putting the winning run on third with no one out. A strikeout. And then one more single and a 5-4 Guardians win. The Twins were in full-on meltdown mode and you could just feel the opportunity becoming ripe.
By shortening the game up, the Royals had a chance at the meaty underside of the Tiger bullpen to come back – or they would have if this wasn’t full-on Pitching Chaos season. Hanifee got through the 6th and 7th, and only left in the 8th because of a cheap bloop double by Witt that made the game 4-2. Guenther was called upon to put out the fire, and he immediately got a double play ball. I had the game on in my headphones for the bottom of the 9th, where Will Vest was called upon to slam the door. He did so with aplomb, finishing a 4-2 victory and an absolutely stunning series sweep in Kansas City.
Minnesota: 80-72
Detroit: 80-73
9 games to go.
The Tigers had another off day on Thursday as they headed to Baltimore for their last road series of the year. I was freed from midshifts and ready to enjoy a long weekend off, but at this point the Minnesota/Cleveland series meant too much not to pay at least a little attention. It seemed like it followed a familiar pattern – Minnesota up 2-1 early, a late Cleveland run to tie it, a blown chance for the Twins in the 10th, and then the inevitable Guardians walk-off. For a brief moment in time, I almost felt bad for Twins fans. Then I snapped out of it. Unbelievably, the Tigers and Twins were tied for the final playoff spot.
It’s funny that even as the games were becoming appointment viewing, I was still viewing so few of them live on TV. Partially this was due to the media blackouts, but it was also a byproduct of how rapid the rise of the Tigers really was. If Elizabeth and I had made plans just a week ago to go see Cole Swindell in concert on September 20, then I was just going to end up missing the series opener against the Orioles. And honestly… maybe that was just as well. The O’s hit 4 home runs off of Montero, and Corbin Burnes was absolutely lockdown in a 7-1 game. Honestly, losing a “Burnes vs Rookie” matchup was totally expected. It wouldn’t have hurt as much if the Twins hadn’t actually pulled out an extra innings win this time by beating the Red Sox in 12 innings. 8 games to go, and the Tigers were a game back again.
We moved on to the 21st day of September. It was a college football Saturday with the eyes of the world on Norman, Oklahoma, where College Gameday had arrived for OU’s SEC opener against Tennessee.
Against a raucous backdrop, baseball was once again only an afterthought. There was even an SOM tailgate occurring right across from the stadium. The only issue for Elizabeth and myself – we hadn’t bothered to buy tickets, since I was pretty sure Tennessee was going to kick Oklahoma’s ass and I didn’t need that kind of usage of $400 in my life. Instead, we planned to go to the tailgate, spend our day eating and drinking for cheap, then watch the game from a bar on Campus Corner. It was an excellent plan, and one that ended up justifying itself perfectly in the way that Tennessee suffocated OU.
There was only one problem: if you’re having a nice time at a tailgate on Oklahoma’s campus, you’re in the middle of the biggest cell tower draw that the entire state can produce. There’s limited to no service under basically any circumstance. What little service I could get mostly got directed to watching the Michigan/USC game. But there was also a Tigers game in there; Reese Olson faced off against Cade Povich. Olson did much better in his 3 innings than he had against the Royals at the start of the road trip. Meanwhile, rookie catcher Dillon Dingler had an improbable triple to plate a pair early. That brought us into the pitching chaos portion of the day. The Orioles tied it in the 6th.
But, in the 8th, the Tigers showed that AJ Hinch really had the mandate of heaven. He pinch-hit for Kerry Carpenter, the left-handed slugger who had one of the highest OPSs in baseball, because Carpenter struggles against lefties. Who did Hinch replace him with? The light-hitting OTHER catcher, Jake Rogers. Of course Rogers hit the go-ahead RBI single. That’s just how it worked these days.
In the bottom of the 9th, Jason Foley came on to try to lock down another Detroit win. Things… did not work according to plan. Two ground ball singles and a walk loaded the bases with nobody out. Then the always-dangerous Gunnar Henderson unloaded one to center field. It looked like it might be a game-winner, but the runner on first held at 3rd on Henderson’s game-tying 2-run double. It hardly seemed to matter. The winning run was 90 feet away and Foley was going full gascan mode. Somewhere under a tent in sweltering Norman, Oklahoma, I groaned.
Foley was toast. Enter Beau Brieske. Like I said earlier in this post, Mr. “Brieske Business” himself seemed to be addicted to these types of jams. Nobody seemed more at home with runners on base than him. Still, with the winning run on 3rd and nobody out, he was being hung out to dry. Cedric Mullins had the first crack at trying to call game, but he hit a ground ball to second that failed to drive in the run. Next up was Anthony Santander.
What happened next, though I didn’t see it live, will be seared into my memory forever. The highlight of it is that electric. Santander hit a little duck hook popup into shallow left field. Riley Greene charged in and began his slide, but pulled up. That’s because Trey Sweeney – the shortstop prospect who was the throw-in in the Jack Flaherty trade, who had forced his way onto the roster by getting red-hot in Toledo and was now the de facto starter with Javy Baez sucking too bad to play – charged back and to his left with all of his might, lunged, and snared the ball an instant before it dropped. Sweeney went flipping over Greene at full speed, crashed into the ground, and popped up just long enough to chuck the ball in so that the runner would have to hold at 3rd. Then he keeled over in pain and disbelief.
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/1837641039953248487
At that point, you just accept that you’re the team of destiny and you’re winning this game. There was no way Colton Cowser was going to get a hit off of Brieske with two outs. He’d saved the game, and I was stunned to see the Tigers living on in extra innings. Greene singled home the ghost runner and later scored on a sac fly, and Brieske came back to mow down the middle of the order in the bottom of the inning. The Tigers had won, 6-4.
The Twins/Red Sox game had gotten rained out, so this latest edition of the Gritty Tigs had gotten them to 81-74 and just a half game back of Minnesota. The Giants clobbered the Royals, dropping Kansas City to 82-73 and giving the Tigers multiple possible avenues to jump into a playoff spot with just seven games left. The brief downward blip in playoff odds from yesterday had been corrected, and the Tigers now had about a 4 in 10 chance of completing one of the greatest in-season turnarounds ever.
For someone who didn’t watch much baseball, Elizabeth was sure getting into the mood too. I asked her if she’d be interested in a potential trip down to Houston for the Wild Card series if somehow Detroit got there, and she said sure. The question was: could the Tigers stay hot?
