CLEVELAND — It has taken an extraordinary and unlikely sequence of events over multiple months for the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Guardians to be tied for the AL Central lead with five games left to play. It’s only fitting, then, that the game that secured the deadlock atop the division — Cleveland’s dramatic, 5-2 victory over Detroit on Tuesday at Progressive Field — featured one of the more preposterous half-innings imaginable, the ultimate display of baseball randomness and absurdity.
Entering the bottom of the sixth inning, Tarik Skubal, as usual, was in control. The reigning AL Cy Young Award winner was tasked with reversing the misfortunes of a Tigers team that had seen its once-sturdy lead atop the AL Central completely evaporate over the past month. And for five innings against the rival Guardians — whose spectacularly hot stretch in September combined with Detroit’s skid to culminate in an unexpected division race — Skubal exhibited his trademark ace behavior.
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The four-seam fastball was humming, climbing as high as 101 mph. The sinker was exploding into the strike zone at unhittable angles. The slider and knuckle-curve were breaking sharply. And, of course, the changeup was giving hitters fits. When Skubal struck out David Fry with a 99.6 mph heater to end the fourth, he confidently skipped off the mound back toward the dugout, certain another masterpiece was in progress. Cleveland mustered two baserunners in the fifth, but Skubal squashed the threat, finishing the frame with his pitch count at just 74.
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The Tigers had afforded Skubal a two-run lead thanks to a Wenceel Perez RBI double in the third and a Riley Greene solo home run in the sixth. Given how Skubal was throwing, those two runs appeared to be a rather comfortable cushion on which Detroit could rely en route to a victory that would snap its six-game losing streak.
But the Guardians had other plans.
With Skubal dialed in, fighting fire with fire was a fool’s errand, especially given Cleveland’s dearth of offensive thump; the Guardians rank 28th in MLB in slugging percentage, 30th in barrel rate, 30th in hard-hit rate and 30th in average exit velocity. Instead, Steven Kwan led off the sixth with a picturesque bunt on the first pitch from Skubal, racing to first with hopes of sparking a rally.
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Before the packed Progressive Field crowd of nearly 30,000 could quiet down after Kwan’s successful gambit, No. 2 hitter Angel Martínez followed with another bunt on the first pitch of his showdown with Skubal. The ball trickled down the first-base line with delicate precision, forcing Skubal to charge and either attempt to make a difficult play or pocket the ball and yield another baserunner with no outs and José Ramírez coming up.
Skubal opted for the former, but in unthinkable fashion: Facing home plate, he reached down, grabbed the ball and flipped it through his legs toward first, as if he were hiking a football. The ball sailed over first baseman Spencer Torkelson’s head and into foul territory, allowing Kwan to reach third base and Martínez to coast into second.
“He was in a tough position as a left-handed pitcher to make that play in general and didn’t want to wheel and throw it down the line,” Tigers manager AJ Hinch explained postgame. “So instead, he chose to do the emergency flip, which is not something that is easy to do, and it obviously didn’t produce a good play.”
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Skubal echoed that sentiment, referring to the Martínez ball as an “impossible play” while reiterating his intention to prevent a second consecutive bunt hit at all costs. He also revealed that the between-the-legs toss was something he’d tried before: “Yeah, in Miami, actually,” he said. “Same result.”
Indeed, Skubal attempted a near carbon-copy of the play two years ago against the Marlins, when Jon Berti chopped a ball down the first-base line. The result was nearly identical, but the circumstances couldn’t have been more different. That was in the second inning of a July contest on a Sunday afternoon in Miami. Skubal wasn’t Skubal yet, and the Tigers were 47-59. Trying something like that then? Fine.
But on Tuesday, in the biggest game of the season thus far, with Guardians players and their fans desperate for any ounce of momentum? That was a poor choice.
“That is an example of an uncharacteristic mistake piling up on us at the worst time,” Hinch said.
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Of course, this was an exceptionally challenging play for Skubal; expecting him to have recorded an out without trouble feels unfair. That said, his decision to uncork a low-probability toss rather than hold on to the ball and keep Kwan and Martínez at first and second proved extremely costly.
And so, with the bunts having spiked the volume in the venue, up came Ramírez to try to cash in. As Cleveland’s top slugging threat, Ramírez was the one Guardian Skubal didn’t need to worry about attempting a bunt. But baseball has a funny way of surprising you. When Ramírez swung hard at a 99.9-mph fastball with two strikes, the result was roughly the same as the two bunts that preceded it: a weak roller up the third-base line, poorly struck with a harmless exit velocity of 65.5 mph, and too slow for third baseman Zach McKinstry to corral and make a play. Kwan scampered home for Cleveland’s first run. Martínez advanced to third.
The unexpected rally was far from over. But the game took a scary turn before things continued. With still no outs and runners on the corners, Fry came up to the plate. Sticking with the theme of the inning, he squared around to attempt to bunt in hopes of garnering another defensive gaffe. But Skubal’s 99.1-mph fastball ran up and in, hitting Fry squarely in the nose and sending him to the ground.
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Although it was ruled a foul ball, replay fairly clearly showed that the pitch didn’t graze Fry’s bat at all, instead making flush contact with his face — a terrifying sequence considering the velocity. The crowd went silent, and players on both teams, including Skubal, were visibly shaken. Thankfully, Fry was able to rise to his feet and get on the cart to be transported to a nearby hospital, where he is expected to remain overnight as he undergoes testing.
“I’ve already reached out to him,” Skubal said afterward. “I look forward to, hopefully at some point tonight or tomorrow morning, getting a text from him and making sure he’s all good. The health of him is more important than a baseball game.”
Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said postgame that Fry stayed conscious the whole time and the team would provide an update as soon as possible on Wednesday.
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Such a harrowing injury scare is difficult to move past, but the high-stakes timing forced the two teams to reengage immediately — and it took just one pitch for the chaos to resume. Rookie George Valera replaced Fry in the batter’s box with a 2-2 count, and Skubal’s first pitch to the new batter was a wayward changeup that got past catcher Dillon Dingler and allowed Martínez to score the tying run, with Ramírez advancing to second.
Valera eventually struck out, but then, while facing Gabriel Arias, Skubal balked for just the second time in his career, enabling Ramírez to move to third, still with one out. He then scored easily when Arias tapped one softly to first base, marking Cleveland’s third run of the inning and a lead it wouldn’t relinquish.
Before Tuesday’s sixth inning, Skubal had allowed just one run in 27 innings against the Guardians this season, with 37 strikeouts and just five walks. Then, over the span of five plate appearances — with an average exit velocity of 52.8 mph and without a single ball leaving the infield, except for the one Skubal sailed himself — the Guardians conjured three runs. Because of course they did.
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“They showed that the team that made the most contact got rewarded for it, even if it wasn’t great contact,” Hinch said. “They did a good job with that.”
To his point, Detroit’s disastrous inning wouldn’t have loomed quite as large had the Tigers been more productive offensively. But Cleveland starter Gavin Williams had a heck of a night himself, matching a career high with 12 strikeouts over six solid innings of work. Detroit struck out 19 times total Tuesday, the franchise’s most in a nine-inning game since the 2019 club — a team that would go on to lose 114 games — matched the ignominious feat on two occasions.
This Tigers team will not lose 114 games. In fact, this Tigers team might still win the AL Central, despite an unfathomably bad run of play that has them at risk of making history for all the wrong reasons. With the victory Tuesday, Cleveland clinched the season series over Detroit, giving the Guards a critical tiebreaker should the two teams finish with the same record after 162. But there’s still ample opportunity for the Tigers to avoid that fate and fight their way back into enviable playoff position.
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“We got to flush today’s game and then get ready to play again tomorrow. The team across the way doesn’t feel bad for us, so there’s no reason we should feel bad for ourselves,” Skubal said. “That opportunity to come out there and win tomorrow and win a series — I think that’s what really matters.”
“We have to get to tomorrow and get to a better result,” Hinch said. “Everybody knows. There’s no hiding behind anything other than showing up ready to play.”
