A Sense of Doubt blog post #3882 - DETROIT TIGERS WIN!! Move on to the ALDS vs the Seattle Mariners
I had a little cry when they made it.
Their success is so tied up with my Michigan home, my Dad, things I love best, so many friends, fond memories of 1984, of 2006, of 2012.
BLESS YOU BOYS! as Ernie said in 1984.
First game today, Saturday October 4th. Here in my new home state of Washington.
GO TIGERS!!
It is perhaps a cliché of sorts, in sports — especially after a playoff victory — to say, “No one believed in us!”
Nearly every team, in nearly every situation, has had someone believing in them.
The 2025 Detroit Tigers, after a 7-17 finish in September — a .292 final-month win percentage that ranks as the worst of any playoff team in MLB history — might have a case, however to say, “Very few people believe in us,” less-inspiring though that might be.
CLEVELAND — The tipping point came a couple of hours into Game 3 of the Detroit Tigers' AL wild-card series.
Seventh inning. Bases loaded. One out. 2-1, Tigers.
Here came Wenceel Pérez and his 5-for-57 skid at the plate.
Here we go again.
That’s what you were thinking, right? How were the Tigers going to get one more run across? Just build a little on their 2-1 lead?
And then hold off the Cleveland Guardians for the final few innings of the three-game series that had been uncommonly torturous?
You’d seen it before. The day before, in fact. And so many days before that. The Tigers built a slim lead, put runners in scoring position and ... just ... couldn’t ... get ... the ... big ... hit.
Then Pérez singled to right field and drove home two runs. Spencer Torkelson followed with an RBI single. Riley Greene followed with another. For weeks — for what felt like months, actually — the team that had done almost everything right for four months couldn’t do much right.
Already, they’d lost the American League Central in an all-time collapse. Already, they’d booted a chance to sweep the wild-card series, leaving 15 runners on base, a team record for futility, in Game 2. Already, they’d turned the most antsy part of their fan base against them.
I’m out! And: I hope they lose and get this over with!
It wasn’t hard to find that sentiment in the hours leading up to Game 3. Then the seventh inning happened on Thursday, Oct. 2, a pin to an expanding balloon, and the Tigers will ride the release all the way to Seattle.Former Tigers manager Jim Leyland used to say momentum in baseball was the next day’s starting pitcher. And it’s true when that pitcher is Tarik Skubal. Yet there is momentum and there is momentum, and momentum isn’t so easily scuttled.
The Tigers finally got some, just not from the most obvious inning. Yes, the seventh inning won them the game — and therefore the series. And it felt indescribably giddy to the Tigers hitters and to all those who love the team.
Not even Javier Báez saw this redemption story coming with the Detroit Tigers
He has saved the season more than once here lately. And though Javier Báez isn’t the only member of the Detroit Tigers to do so, he’s certainly the most unlikely, at least if we consider where the shortstop was a year ago.
Or even this spring.
Baez will tell you that he wasn’t sure he’d even be on the team this season when he got to spring training. Nor was he confident in how he'd perform after hip surgery in August 2024.
Here was a 32-year-old former All-Star, a defensive wizard with power plate who had arrived in Detroit three years earlier after signing a six-year, $140 million contract in December 2021 ... and then played nowhere near the expectations created by that money.
Those things made it worth giving him a shot, right?
Boy, are the Tigers grateful they did. So is Báez, who isn't hitting with the kind of power that made him a star for the Chicago Cubs but can still play with a touch of sparkle and a sense of the moment.
Now look at him, drenched in champagne twice in one week's time, the darling of Tigers fans and his Tigers teammates, and a reminder that redemption, at least in baseball, is never more than a timely hit or game-saving catch away.
“I didn’t know if I was going to come back or if things were going to get better,” he said on July 2, not long after he’d found out he’d made the AL All-Star roster as the starting center fielder. “You know, I got my surgery, I got my work done. It’s paying off right now.”
And while his bat dipped the second half of the season, his work and return are paying off right now, too.
On the day the Tigers clinched a playoff spot in Boston with a win over the Red Sox – Saturday, Sept. 28 – Báez made a diving catch in shallow left field that stopped a Boston rally.
“Most important play of the game,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said that day.
Báez can make the spectacular look routine, though from his teammates’ reaction in the dugout when he landed face-first in the outfield grass with the ball in his glove, they understood exactly what they’d just watched.
You can argue the Tigers might have missed the postseason if he hadn’t caught that ball. At the least, Hinch would’ve been forced to pitch ace Tarik Skubal for the series finale against the Red Sox, and the left-hander might've missed the wild-card series against the Cleveland Guardians entirely.
So, yeah, he saved the season there.
Then did again a few times in Cleveland.
Let’s see, there was his bat – he went 5-for-11, including a leadoff double in the seventh inning Thursday that began the Tigers’ best offensive inning in three weeks. (That was after he went 6-for-16 during his final four regular-season games.)
There was his glove. Twice, he took throws to tag out José Ramírez at second base, each out stomping out the Guardians’ momentum.
The first came in the fourth inning, after Ramírez had singled to tie the game. Ramírez tried to steal second. Dillon Dingler gunned the ball to second and Báez caught it and snapped his glove so quickly to tag Ramirez you needed slow-motion replay to comprehend it.
The second came in the eighth, after reliever Will Vest dropped a throw at first base from Spencer Torkelson, who had fielded a grounder from Ramírez with two outs. Two runs scored. Vest sprinted toward the loose ball, turned, and rifled it to second. Once again, Báez was waiting in the perfect spot and quickly applied the tag.
That ended the inning, and the threat, and whatever voodoo Cleveland was trying to conjure up with it.
And then there were his feet, and his arm, and his sense of timing. He leapt and stabbed a line drive; he raced into left field and grabbed a flare; he scooted to his left – on two occasions – and gloved hard-hit balls and threw to first across his body to get the putouts.
And he made it look easy. Not to mention effortless. That it’s also stylish is a bonus, the caramel on top of some homemade vanilla bean ice cream. Báez is cool like that, and cooler still because he somehow mutes the swag with humility.
“Don’t try to do too much,” he said in Boston after the Tigers were celebrating their postseason berth, goggles strapped across his head, champagne dripping down his face.
That’s the mantra of his resurrection, and you can can hear the admiration in his teammates' defense of him, as pitcher Jack Flaherty did with an ESPN reporter after the Tigers clinched the wild-card series Thursday.
“For anybody who wrote that guy off, you guys, you gotta look in the mirror,” he said, “especially after what he did this year, and how incredible he was. … That guy comes to play, he was incredible.”
They appreciate Báezs gifts, his fluidity, his style – the “El Mago mystique,” as Hinch called it recently. But they might respect the grind more, the journey from prodigy to near superstar to flailing former star – and back.
Or if not all the way back, then back to relevance, and back to contributing to winning baseball.
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