The challenge of pitching is to stay unknowable—to keep hitters guessing, to never be timed up or figured out. By the end of the Tigers-Guardians American League Divisional Series, which featured a considerable number of relief innings even by the standards of postseason baseball, it did feel like these teams, who had met 13 times already in the regular season, were each becoming quite familiar with the other. The resulting sights could be something unfamiliar to fans: Detroit’s Beau Brieske, who hadn’t given up a home run off his fastball all season, serving up a go-ahead meatball to David Fry in Game 4; unhittable Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase allowing one less earned run in this series than he had all year. The threat of overexposure made each game feel extra tense. “It was such a fun series,” Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt said after Game 5 on Saturday, a 7-3 Guardians win. “Two very evenly matched teams going at it, and it was a lot of fun.”
Though Cleveland’s path to the postseason wasn’t as bizarre as Detroit’s—the Guardians took first place in the division in mid-April and never relinquished it, despite scares from the Twins and Royals—they were both teams depending on run prevention. The Guardians offense cooled off in the second half, but the team stayed afloat thanks to an elite homegrown bullpen. An early-season injury to ace Shane Bieber, plus some underperformance from young arms, left the Guardians rotation in roughly the same [shrug emoji] shape as the Tigers’ heading into the postseason.
But the Tigers hoped that having only one guy in their rotation wouldn’t matter so long as it was the right guy: likely AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. To Tigers fans, he offered a respite from what manager A.J. Hinch termed the team's “pitching chaos.” Skubal had pitched 13 mostly stress-free shutout innings in his first two postseason appearances, Game 1 of the Wild Card series in Houston and Game 2 of the ALDS. He had spun another four scoreless innings to start Game 5, even escaping a one-out jam with runners on second and third in the bottom of the third inning. Still, Vogt said, “every single person that walked in our clubhouse today believed we were going to get to him.”
Guardians outfielder Lane Thomas told a different story. “Absolutely not,” he said, when asked whether there was a sense of team-wide confidence about facing Skubal. In that third-inning situation, the result of a single and a two-base fielding error, Skubal got David Fry to chase three pitches, and then intentionally walked José Ramirez to load the bases with two outs for Thomas. Thomas popped up a 99-mph fastball to end the inning. “I’ve never seen someone throw that hard and just locate in on me so well,” he told the team's hitting coach. But however little he believed at that moment, the next time he came up to bat, with the bases loaded again in a tie game, he ambushed a first-pitch sinker for a grand slam to left-center to put the Guardians up 5-1.
“My first time with the bases loaded, I was kind of looking soft,” Thomas explained afterward. “I thought in that situation he wasn’t going to come at me, and he proved me wrong, and then the next time, I was like, you know, I gotta be ready for the fastball.” Vogt added that the ALDS was a lot like the unnerving regular season series between the two teams. “It’s kind of whoever got the big hit was going to win.” Detroit, meanwhile, stayed starved for their big hit. After being up 2-1 in the series, the Tigers went 1-11 and 1-12 with runners in scoring position in the last two games.
Skubal, who was pretty homer-prone early in his career, had never given up a grand slam. Live by the ace, die by the ace. This ended up a surprisingly tolerable way to lose. “He could have gave up 100 today and I’ll still take him over anybody,” his batterymate Jake Rogers said afterward.
Thomas, a trade deadline acquisition responsible for another game-breaking home run in the first inning of Game 1, was the rare Guardian the Tigers hadn't seen much; Detroit and Cleveland wrapped up their season series on deadline day. He struggled badly in his first games as a Guardians, making him a somewhat unlikely postseason hero. But maybe the likeliest postseason hero is an unfamiliar face.
