CLEVELAND — Tarik Skubal stood from his chair and faced the cameras. Lights shined on his navy T-shirt, the one that still proudly displays the screenprinted, skyrocketing graph of the Detroit Tigers’ playoff odds.
Skubal and his team were never supposed to be here. Not in the postseason. Not getting past the Houston Astros. Not coming seven outs from the ALCS one day and a few treacherous breaks away from advancing the next.
“Just one pitch,” Skubal said. “It’s one pitch. I’d love to have it back.”
The Tigers lost to the Cleveland Guardians 7-3 in the decisive Game 5 of the American League Division series. With such a defeat comes a question that lingers over everything in the moments after: How are you supposed to feel? Everyone grieves and reckons in their own way. There was a strange bittersweet sensation in the Tigers’ clubhouse as the showers ran and hugs were exchanged. An incredible season ended. An unprecedented underdog run fell short of the ultimate goal. The Tigers made the playoffs, slayed a dragon and won a series. They had their chances to win another, and that’s where it gets complicated.
Shakespeare wrote about binary emotions, violent delights and violent ends. Beau Brieske philosophized something similar two days ago. “That’s the beauty and the beast of this game,” he said after giving up a Game 4 homer that changed the series. The Tigers were seven outs away from winning that night. Saturday in Cleveland, they had traffic on the bases early, long before Skubal gave up a fifth-inning grand slam. Over the final two games of this series, the Tigers went only 2-for-23 with runners in scoring position. In Game 5 at Progressive Field, their hitters swung and missed an astonishing 39 times. Their strikeout total tallied to 16.
“It was part of the story today,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “We had a lot of opportunities. If you look down, they only had opportunities in three or four innings. We had it in seven or eight.”
Skubal looked the part of the best pitcher in baseball for the bulk of this fateful outing. He fought to the death, attacking hitters without relenting. Then came an Andrés Giménez single, then Steven Kwan’s devilish bat poked 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 hadn’t missed to my arm side with a sinker to a righty in my last 25 innings or 30 innings of baseball,” Skubal said. Less than two hours later, the Guardians were spraying champagne and dancing their way to New York for the ALCS. The Tigers were done.
They kept fighting even after the Thomas grand slam. That’s been their modus operandi all year. They scratched across 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 run, he remained active for Game 5. “These guys in the clubhouse, it’s pretty much who I fight for,” he said. “If I could go, I wanted to go for them.” Carpenter again looked like a postseason Hercules when he slammed a pinch-hit RBI single to the right-field wall in the top of the fifth. But in the sixth, there was no Kirk Gibson moment. Carpenter struck out.
“I was at 100 percent, it was just painful,” Carpenter said of his swings.
The Tigers scored again in the seventh. But they ultimately fell on their swords. As clubhouse attendants zipped bags and players nursed cold domestic beers, Skubal and the Tigers were left searching for the right words.
“It’ll suck,” Skubal said of the days ahead, “and it should suck. But this is only gonna make me strive to become a better version of myself. In the days in the offseason that get a little grueling and you don’t want to work out or you don’t want to do some recovery work, just the little things, I’ll just make sure to remind myself of this feeling I have right now.”
The result of Saturday’s game doesn’t change the thematic memory of this season. It shouldn’t, at least.
A team with baseball’s youngest collection of position players in key roles won 86 games, the most by a Tigers team in eight years. They brought postseason baseball back to a city that had endured a 10-year playoff drought. Skubal grew into a monstrous force. Riley Greene made an All-Star Game. So many others set the foundation for a successful future. Hinch told his team on multiple occasions: Once you play in one October, you want to play in them all.
“We never thought that we shouldn’t be here,” Hinch said, “and that is going to fuel us moving forward, and we’re going to be a problem for people if we can continue that mindset and continue that hunger to feel this.”
The offseason topics will fill a void all winter. Given the Tigers’ mix-and-match pitching staff and an offense that ranked 24th in OPS, is this truly the start of the next great era of Tigers baseball? Or was this a flash in the pan?
“I think we’re here to stay,” Carpenter said. “We have a bunch of young guys and a bunch of people who want to get better and are gonna use this offseason to get better. I think everybody in this organization is really excited, and I think we put the world on notice that we can do big things in this clubhouse with these guys.”
There’s so much good. And yet there’s still the slightest tone of regret.
“We’ll see if I can sleep tonight,” catcher Jake Rogers said. “Probably won’t.”
Rogers himself relitigated that Thomas at-bat. Cleveland’s right-handed outfielder hit .316 with two homers in ALDS. “Lane was a pain in my butt this series,” Rogers said.
But the Tigers lost in a fashion they can live with. They had their horse on the mound. They rode Skubal’s force of will for as long as they could. “He could have gave up 100 (runs) today and I’ll still take him over anybody,” Rogers said.
When it was all over, several players lingered in the dugout while the Guardians celebrated on the field. Greene was the last one left hanging over the padding. Finally, he turned 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 hit a grand slam: Junfu Han / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
