by CLEVELAND – Tarik Skubal stood up from his chair and looked into the cameras. Lights glowed on his navy blue T-shirt, which still proudly displays the screen-printed skyrocketing graphic of the Detroit Tigers’ playoff odds.
Skubal and his team should never have been here. Not in the offseason. I can’t get past the Houston Astros. No seven outs from the ALCS in one day and a few tricky breaks only to get stuck the next day.
“Just one pitch,” Skubal said. “It’s a pitch. I would like it back.”
The Tigers lost 7-3 to the Cleveland Guardians in the deciding Game 5 of the American League Division Series. With such a defeat comes a question that looms over everything in the moments afterwards: How should you feel? Everyone grieves and reckons in their own way. There was a strange, bittersweet feeling in the Tigers’ clubhouse as the showers flowed and hugs were exchanged. An incredible season was over. An unprecedented series of underdogs missed the ultimate goal. The Tigers made the playoffs, slayed a dragon and won a series. They had their chance to win again and that’s where things get complicated.
Shakespeare wrote about binary emotions, violent pleasures, and violent goals. Beau Brieske philosophized something similar two days ago. “That’s the beauty of this game,” he said after hitting a series-changing home run in Game 4. The Tigers were seven outs away from victory that night. There was early traffic on the bases in Cleveland on Saturday, long before Skubal gave up a grand slam in the fifth inning. In the final two games of this series, the Tigers shot just 2 of 23 with runners in scoring position. In Game 5 at Progressive Field, their batters struck out and missed an astonishing 39 times. Their strikeout total was 16.
“It was part of history today,” said manager AJ Hinch. “We had a lot of options. If you look down, they only had chances in three or four innings. We had it in seven or eight.”
Skubal appeared to be the best pitcher in baseball for most of that fateful game. He fought to the death and attacked the batsmen without letting up. Then came a single from Andrés Giménez, then Steven Kwan’s vicious bat landed another hit, then it was a dribbler, then a hit-by-pitch. Finally, after 17 scoreless postseason innings, Skubal made his first real mistake. Lane Thomas crushed a first-pitch middle-middle sinker. “I’ve never had a miss on my arm side with a sinker to right in my last 25 innings or 30 innings of baseball,” Skubal said. Less than two hours later, the Guardians headed to New York for the ALCS with champagne and dancing. The Tigers were done.
They continued to fight even after Thomas’ grand slam. That was their approach all year long. They crossed in another run and loaded the bases for Kerry Carpenter, because of course they did. Carpenter injured his hamstring in Game 4. Despite barely being able to walk, he remained active for Game 5. “Those guys in the clubhouse, they’re pretty much who I’m fighting for,” he said. “If I could go, I would choose them.” Carpenter looked like a postseason Herculean again when he hit a pinch-hit RBI single into the right field wall in the top of the fifth. But there was no Kirk Gibson moment in the sixth. Carpenter struck.
“I was at 100 percent; It was just painful,” Carpenter said of his swings.
Kerry Carpenter hit an RBI single in the fifth inning of Game 5. (Jason Miller/Getty Images)
The Tigers scored again in the seventh game. But ultimately they fell on their swords. As clubhouse staff locked their bags and players drank cold local beer, Skubal and the Tigers had to search for the right words.
“It’s going to suck,” Skubal said of the coming days, “and it should suck. But that will only make me strive to become a better version of myself. On the days in the off-season that get a little tiring and you don’t feel like training or resting, I just notice the little things that I have right now.”
The result of Saturday’s game does not change the thematic memory of this season. At least it shouldn’t be like that.
A team with the youngest collection of position players in key roles in baseball won 86 games, the most by a Tigers team in eight years. It brought postseason baseball back to a city that had endured a decade-long playoff drought. Skubal grew into a monstrous force. Riley Greene made an All-Star game. So many others are laying the foundation for a successful future. Hinch told his team multiple times: Once you play in one October, you want to play in all of them.
“We never thought we shouldn’t be here,” Hinch said, “and that’s what’s going to drive us forward and we’re going to be a problem for people if we can keep that mindset and keep feeling that hunger.”
The offseason themes will fill a void throughout the winter. Given the Tigers’ mix-and-match pitching staff and an offense that ranked 24th in OPS, is this really the beginning of the next great era of Tigers baseball? Or was that a flash in the pan?
“I think we’re here to stay,” Carpenter said. “We have a lot of young guys and a lot of guys that want to get better and will use this offseason to get better. I think everyone in this organization is really excited, and I think we’re making it clear to the world that we can do big things with these guys in this clubhouse.”
There is so much good. And yet the slightest note of regret can still be heard.
“We’ll see if I can sleep tonight,” catcher Jake Rogers said. “Probably not.”
Rogers once again denounced this Thomas in the punch. Cleveland’s right-handed outfielder hit .316 with two home runs in the ALDS. “Lane was a pain in the ass for me on this show,” Rogers said.
But the Tigers lost in a way they can live with. They had their horse on the hill. They used Skubal’s willpower for as long as they could. “He could have given up 100 (runs) today and I’ll still take him over anyone,” Rogers said.
When it was all over, several players remained in the dugout while the Guardians celebrated on the field. Greene was the last one still hanging above the padding. Finally he turned around and walked down the tunnel and into the strange reality of elimination.
“I have a heartbroken team,” Hinch said, “for all the right reasons.”
(Top photo of Tarik Skubal reacting after Lane Thomas’ grand slam: Junfu Han / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
