CLEVELAND — If the roof officially caves in and the Detroit Tigers do not make the postseason, this will be the defining image of a brutal collapse: Tarik Skubal fielding a bunt toward the first-base side, grabbing the ball with a bare hand, keeping his back turned away from first base and hiking the ball between his legs.
That ball sailed errantly, far over the head of first baseman Spencer Torkelson. It landed and trickled deep into foul territory. Cleveland Guardians runners advanced to second and third. And a phantasmagoria of an inning began a descent that took the Tigers one step closer to absolute rock bottom.
Tarik Skubal tried to hike a baseball through his legs for an out after a bunt.
It…did not work 😅
— The Sporting News (@sportingnews) September 24, 2025
To understand how we arrived at this point, it’s worth considering the background. Skubal has faced the Guardians so many times. He has shut them down, twirled gems and even pitched a complete game in which he struck out 13 batters, perhaps the most dominant performance of his major-league career earlier this season at Comerica Park.
However, Cleveland’s Progressive Field has become Skubal’s Waterloo, the site of the two most painful and fateful moments of his career thus far.
It was last year in Game 5 of the American League Division Series when Skubal left a sinker over the plate to Lane Thomas. The ball carried through a cloudy sky and crashed into the glove of a celebrating fan, a grand slam that effectively ended a magical Tigers run.
After that game, Skubal stood proudly and answered the questions, vowing to be better and that his team would be back.
On Tuesday night, the feeling inside a white-walled clubhouse with church-like silence was so much different.
Less pride, more dejection.
Less conviction, more shock and awe.
In what became a 5-2 Guardians victory to mark the Tigers’ seventh loss in a row, a free-fall verging on total disaster reached yet another low point. The Tigers (85-72) once led the AL Central by 15 1/2 games. Now they are tied with the Guardians, who hold the head-to-head tiebreaker. The Tigers have blown their division lead. In the five regular-season games that remain, their playoff lives are at stake.
Has this finally reached a boiling point?
“Yeah,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “It has to be. These are tough. We’re doing a lot of uncharacteristic things, and it’s hurting us.”
For five innings, Skubal pitched much like his dominant self. He punished hitters with fastballs and left them dizzied with his changeup. He skipped and danced off the mound to punctuate a strikeout and radiated all the powerful swagger that has him on the cusp of winning a second consecutive AL Cy Young Award.
However, then came a sixth inning from hell, the latest dose of the Guardians’ bedeviled magic and the strangest self-implosion one could imagine.
It started with a Steven Kwan bunt single, an ambush from baseball’s peskiest hitter.
Then came another bunt from Angel Martínez. That play started innocently enough. It led to that odd image of the arguably best pitcher in baseball, blindly tossing a ball from in between his legs and sending it sailing to nowhere in particular.
Skubal had attempted this play once earlier in his career, during a game in Miami, and made an error. This time, as Tigers second baseman Gleyber Torres raced toward the ball, Kwan advanced to third. Martínez reached second. Skubal was left stunned.
Why try such a hero-ball play? Was his only hope to make an out?
“Exactly,” Skubal said. “That’s exactly what went through my mind.”
Added Hinch: “I think he was in a tough position as a left-handed pitcher to make that play in general. Didn’t want to wheel and throw it down the line, so instead he chose to do the emergency flip, which is not something that is easy to do and obviously didn’t produce a good play.”
That was merely the beginning of a frame so wild it seemed destined for this matchup between the red-hot Guardians and the moribund Tigers. This series could determine whether Cleveland completes an epic comeback and whether the Tigers succumb to the worst disintegration in MLB’s divisional era.
There was another infield single from José Ramirez. There was a frightening moment when David Fry squared to bunt and ended up taking a Skubal fastball straight to the face, leaving him down and bloodied near home plate.
Fry was carted off, and Skubal was visibly shaken. With his hat atop his head and a flabbergasted look on his face, he watched Fry being loaded onto the cart. Skubal texted Fry, who was undergoing evaluation, after the game.
“There’s things that are bigger than the game, and the health of him is more important than a baseball game,” Skubal said.
After the fraught delay, play resumed nonetheless. Skubal soon fired a wild pitch, only the 11th of his career, which allowed Martínez to score. That run tied the score.
Ramirez advanced to second, where he soon led off, danced and darted from left to right in the infield dirt. Skubal, apparently flinching with the noise, balked for only the second time in his career. Ramirez went to third. Catcher Dillon Dingler was left trying to settle his frazzled ace.
“You’re worried about (Fry) in that moment, and then you got to flip the switch back,” Dingler said. “I know that’s tough.”
Soon, it was another weak chopper in the infield. That ball off the bat of Gabriel Arias bounced toward first base and brought Ramirez home. The Guardians took a 3-2 lead.
None of those balls left the infield. None was hit harder than 65.5 mph.
By the time the misery was over, Skubal walked toward the dugout, took a hard seat on the bench and clasped his hands. Then he broke his hands apart, raised his arms, grabbed his dark blue cap and flung it underneath the bench.
Skubal was done after 95 pitches. And though the score was only 3-2, the Tigers seemed done, as well. They finished the night having struck out 19 times. They swung and missed at 33 pitches and took 32 for called strikes. Flustered by the breaking stuff from Cleveland starter Gavin Williams and equally hapless against the bullpen, the Tigers did little outside of a Riley Greene home run and an RBI double from Wenceel Perez to mount an attack.
By the end of the night, Torkelson struck out, grabbed his bat with two hands, lifted it over his head and tomahawked it toward the dirt near home plate.
Even Hinch, who has done his best to project calm and confidence during this dastardly stretch, made one of his most questionable decisions in five years managing the Tigers.
In the seventh inning, reliever Tommy Kahnle got ahead (0-2) of catcher Austin Hedges, who entered with a .149 batting average. Hedges walked. With the top of Cleveland’s order up in the form of the lefty Kwan, Hinch brought in right-hander Kyle Finnegan rather than a left-hander such as Tyler Holton. Kwan’s splits are better against righties — a .774 OPS compared to just .590 against lefties — and he proceeded to hit a double to left field. Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt then inserted left-handed pinch hitter Daniel Schneemann, who singled to left to give the Guardians a 5-2 lead.
“It’s going to our guy,” Hinch said. “(The top of the order) is the spot where we want Finnegan to pitch.”
The Tigers have spent the better part of September living in the upside down. Dealing with a haphazard bullpen framework, a manager who has long been obsessed with matchups said before the game, “I’m not as concerned about handedness as maybe some people.”
A team that has branded itself as gritty and unflappable has more often looked shellshocked. A club that made a mesmerizing run last fall is falling off a cliff this time around.
For so long, Skubal has been the Tigers’ equalizer. But Tuesday night in Ohio, a powerful pitcher who thrives on emotion stood at his locker after the game, terse and lacking the words to describe what had just happened.
“Did you watch the inning?” Skubal asked a reporter.
Given how this unfolded, perhaps that was all that needed to be said.
(Top photo: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)
