BOSTON — The manually operated out-of-town scoreboard got a workout on Sunday at Fenway Park, with crew members scrambling to update 14 games going on simultaneously. The Tigers could peek to their left from the third-base dugout and check how results elsewhere affected their potential postseason scenarios.
After entering the regular-season finale with four potential scenarios, the Tigers are heading back to Cleveland for their American League Wild Card Series starting on Tuesday. Of course they’re heading back to Cleveland.
Riley Greene didn’t need to look at the scoreboard. As he told reporters after Sunday’s 4-3 loss to the Red Sox, it was as if the “writers in the sky” penned the script.
“We’ve played Cleveland 50 times in the past four days,” Greene said. “We know them. They know us. It’s going to be fun.”
Greene is only slightly exaggerating. If the series goes the distance, the Tigers and Guardians will have played nine games against each other in a 17-day span, a rarity even back when schedules were more unbalanced towards division rivalries.
Those matchups helped flip the AL Central race. Sunday finished it. The Tigers’ loss, coupled with the Guardians’ walk-off victory over the Rangers, secured the title outright for Cleveland.
Detroit became the first team in Major League history to hold a double-digit division lead and not hold on for the title. The Tigers will begin the postseason with a chance to knock out the team that surpassed them.
“Obviously, we know what kind of team they have,” catcher Dillon Dingler said. “We’ve played them six times in the past two weeks. We’re going to have a good game plan going in. The biggest thing is it’s a clean slate now, so we’re not going to worry about anything that’s happened. We’re going to move forward and we’re going to have a lot of fun.”
It’s not only a rematch of the past two weeks, it’s a rematch of last year’s AL Division Series, a dramatic five-game battle that turned on Lane Thomas’ grand slam off Tarik Skubal in Game 5. The Tigers will send Skubal to the mound on Tuesday in Game 1. It’ll be his third consecutive start against the Guardians; he struck out 17 batters over 12 innings with two earned runs allowed in his previous two starts combined, but the Tigers lost both contests.
There’s very little these teams can do to surprise each other at this point, so it likely comes down to which executes its game plan best.
“We’ll make sure our guys don’t take for granted that we know them well,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “The biggest concern when you play a division opponent is familiarity can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it, from being a little bit too comfortable. So we’re going to have to turn over every rock to make sure we’re prepared.”
Said Dingler: “I think we’re just going to go and do what we’ve been doing the entire season. I don’t think we’re going to look into it all that much. We obviously always lean on our pitchers’ strengths more than anything, but we’ll have a good game plan.”
In many ways, Hinch seemed prepared for the matchup. A day after the Tigers clinched a postseason berth by beating the Red Sox, he gave a rare day off to Greene, Spencer Torkelson, Gleyber Torres and Dingler. With Skubal pushed back to the postseason opener, Hinch turned to Chris Paddack for his first start since Aug. 29, followed by Paul Sewald and Tanner Rainey.
The skipper who’s known for playing in-game matchups to get favorable at-bats stuck with his lineup. Jahmai Jones, Saturday’s hero, was the only pinch-hitter available off the bench, Hinch said, and he left Jones on the bench when the Red Sox brought in lefty reliever Steven Matz to face Zach McKinstry with the potential tying run on third base in the seventh.
“Going back and forth on that, really from last night to today,” Hinch said. “There’s so many downstream effects that come with that, with the guys that have been going at it. We’ve got guys going through things. We’ve got guys that really did deserve a day off. What you saw was what we had.”
The Guardians’ win made it moot.
“Obviously, we wanted to win today to get the division,” Dingler said, “but at the end of the day, we are playing in the postseason. We just have to look forward now.”
