BOSTON — Friday afternoon inside the cramped visitor’s clubhouse at Fenway Park, Kerry Carpenter sat on a brown leather couch and flipped through Unique Homes Magazine. Dillon Dingler emerged from the batting cages and sang along to Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.”
Will Vest stood at his locker, talking about his best performance in nearly a month — a save that helped end the Detroit Tigers’ awful slide and preserve their chances at a playoff berth.
If you entered this room with no clue what was happening, you would have little idea that this team has endured a brutal, historic, embarrassing collapse.
The Tigers led the American League Central by 9 1/2 games at the start of September. By the second of a three-game division series in Cleveland, the Guardians had swindled the division lead. No team has had such a large lead in September and failed to win the division. Few teams have endured anything that could compare to the 14-game lead the Tigers choked away after July 8 and lived to tell about it.
But here they are. Saturday afternoon in Boston, the Tigers defeated the Red Sox 2-1. And with that, the Tigers clinched their second consecutive playoff berth, adding a sliver of hope to the end of a season that has become baseball’s biggest roller coaster.
“I don’t know that confidence is a problem with our team,” manager A.J. Hinch said recently. “I think execution has been a problem. I think everyone on this team knows what we can do. We haven’t won a lot of games by accident.”
Only a few months ago, the Tigers had the best record in baseball. They sent six players to the All-Star Game. Jolted by a 31-13 finish to the 2024 season and a victory over the Houston Astros in the American League Wild Card Series, the Tigers got swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers to open the year but went on to prove, seemingly, that they’re here to stay as bona fide contenders.
Javier Báez went from a disappointment at shortstop to starting the All-Star Game in center field. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
Their first half was filled with touchstone moments and sweet surprises. Spencer Torkelson, formerly a first-overall pick, battled back from the roster’s edge to reclaim his job as the Tigers’ first baseman, belting homers and showing newfound consistency along the way. Javier Báez, the shortstop in the fourth season of a $140 million deal, rebounded from the verge of getting bought out, agreed to play multiple positions and ended up starting the All-Star Game in center field. Zach McKinstry, cut from the Chicago Cubs three years ago, validated the Tigers’ longstanding belief and played the best stretch of baseball in his life, also becoming an All-Star. Those players emerged while Riley Greene remained a force in the middle of the order and Tarik Skubal left no doubt about his status as the best pitcher in the American League.
The second half, though, was more than just odd. The Tigers’ fall-off was more than a mere regression. The Tigers entered Saturday with a 27-40 record in their past 67 games. Their 6-16 record in September gave them MLB’s second-lowest winning percentage for the month, ahead of only the miserable Colorado Rockies.
Explanations and blame spread all over. No one wore it harder than the team’s front office, led by president of baseball operations Scott Harris. Rather than push the pedal down at the trade deadline, the Tigers chose a more conservative approach and clutched their prospects closely. Many of their moves did not work out. The Tigers DFA’d Charlie Morton (traded from the Orioles) after he posted a 7.09 ERA in nine starts. They moved Chris Paddack (acquired from the Minnesota Twins) to the bullpen after an equally miserable experience. Although Kyle Finnegan and Rafael Montero aided the team’s relief core, Detroit watched as its pitching nosedived and the team reverted to its “pitching chaos” approach to survive September.
The Tigers also did not bolster their lineup, and the likes of Báez, McKinstry, Greene and free-agent addition Gleyber Torres all slumped during the Tigers’ brutal eight-game losing streak. In the second half, the Tigers entered this weekend ranking 26th in on-base percentage with the game’s third-highest strikeout rate.
At least in the public eye, though, the team largely maintained a steady demeanor, hence the magazines and Seger songs. There were a few tosses of the bat and slams of the glove. Moments when the clubhouse was stone-cold silent and the frustration seemed to be setting in. They have lost because of home runs from a guy named Nacho Alvarez Jr. and a series of bunts and oddities from the Guardians. Friday night they had a lead against the Red Sox but blew it in the late innings. Along the way, Hinch stayed true to his usual refrains — playing the whole schedule, focusing on the 27 outs ahead each day.
“After what we went through last year, especially just being a young team, it was just guys realizing, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter what happened. Let’s go out, tomorrow’s a new day,’” Vest said. “I think we carried that over to this year, and that’s a good mentality to have with such a long season.”
The Tigers’ play down the stretch has dimmed their glow and made the idea of a World Series run feel less likely.
But this sport does funny things. It’s something Skubal was talking about in August, with no way of knowing how all this would play out.
“That’s what makes our sport so beautiful — it’s not always the best team,” Skubal said. “It’s the team that’s the hottest.”
The 2006 Detroit Tigers went 12-15 in September and lost their final five games to blow the AL Central title. They snuck into the playoffs as a wild card, then made it to the World Series.
After all these ups and downs, successes and failures, here the Tigers (87-74) are on the final weekend of the season. Winning the Central remains a possibility, though the Guardians hold the head-to-head tiebreaker. Detroit will push Skubal back to Game 1 of the Wild Card Series, wherever the Tigers end up.
There are lessons to learn from this slide, cracks in the organization that have been exposed. But if the Tigers have proven anything since August of last season, it’s this: You just never know.
“You play the whole season to be in it, and we are right in the middle of it,” Hinch said. “It doesn’t matter how you get here. It doesn’t matter the things that you could have or would have done differently, for better or worse.”
(Top photo of Jahmai Jones: Winslow Townson / Getty Images)
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