The thrill of the Detroit Tigers is an instant reminder of what the MLB playoffs are all about

HOUSTON – Of course it wasn't going to be easy. Or without stress. Or even without near-pain.

You haven't forgotten what that's like, have you? Baseball in October? When a team can control a game for eight innings and then send their fan base to the hospital?

Hey, that's why we love it when a game can end – one way or another – with a single blow. That's what happened here Tuesday afternoon at Minute Maid Park, in the first game of the wild-card series between the Detroit Tigers and the Astros.

MUST READ: Tarik Skubal, MLB's youngest team, handles Astros and playoff pressure in Tigers' Game 1 win

Here, in the bottom of the ninth, with the bases loaded and the Tigers defending their 3-1 lead, Beau Brieske and Jason Heyward, a two-man unit under season-changing pressure, stepped up to the plate in front of 40,000 foes.

Well, hostile against Brieske, who had relieved Jason Foley with two runners on in the ninth, and a game that felt relatively, and for anyone who likes Detroit, surprisingly calm, Brieske quickly turned a few swings with the bat.

But those are the tigers, right?

They step up when it would be easy to collapse, and Brieske did, feeding a liner to Spencer Torkelson at first base to secure the 3-1 victory and in this best-of-three playoff spurt the to take decisive leadership.

Talk about bowel checks. Consider that half of the Tigers' roster wasn't even in the stadium yet. Only one player — Matt Vierling — had played in the playoffs before Tuesday.

You want to talk about noise?

AJ Hinch certainly did, and that's what he did when his young and inexperienced team arrived in the Texas heat on Monday to take a stage that almost none of them had seen. He said a few words about the environment. You could tell they were ready. Said they were ready. Then his team rolled out show it was finished.

Boy, were they ever. Win here again and the Tigers will travel north to Cleveland for a date in the ALDS.

The thought of it is still almost unimaginable, and for good reason. Teams don't just do what the Tigers just did. In fact, only one team had come this far back this late in the season in the last 60 years.

Keeping it running now shouldn't be shocking. Not with Tarik Skubal on the mound. Not while Hinch is in the dugout.

The Tigers manager, of course, won a World Series here. Here too he lost his job. To his credit, Hinch has proven that in recent days and did so again ahead of Game 1 of the Wild Card Series on Tuesday.

He has stories. Lots of them. And while he wanted to demystify the playoffs for his team, he didn't want to bore them with his past.

“I don’t think they want to hear too many old stories,” Hinch said. “It’s about their experiences.”

He made sure of that. They made sure of that, thanks to Skubal and the cheerful group of relatively unknowns in the cast.

Trey Sweeney?

Jake Rogers?

Wenceel Perez?

Oh, people in Michigan or wherever Tigers fans gather get to know Sweeney, Rogers, Pérez and all the rest, but in the larger baseball world? They're part of a collective, and that's what made the Tigers' improbable – and historic – playoff push so compelling.

They had the ball again in the second inning when Andy Ibáñez flied out to center. And Pérez hit a single. And Torkelson left. And Parker Meadows made a fielder's choice, setting the stage for what the Tigers do so well.

There were runners on the corners and two outs. And here Rogers, who grew up in the Texas Panhandle, came hard from Oklahoma, nine hours and change from Houston, and entered the batter's box against the team that drafted him out of college, the final piece of the Justin Verlander trade.

He took three straight balls and swung the fourth pitch, lifting a sinker to safe center. Pérez scored.

Sweeney, who came from Los Angeles as a junior in the Jack Flaherty deal over the summer – just as Rogers arrived as a junior seven years ago – also singled to center. Meadows scored.

But wait, the Tigers weren't done with that two-out blitz. Vierling got involved and also hit a single up the middle. Rogers scored, and before Minute Maid Park was anywhere near full, the Astros were down 3-0.

With Skubal on the hill. Speaking of the best pitcher in the American League, he picked up another comebacker in the second inning, in a similar spot to his last outing. When the ball hit him, all of Michigan gasped, especially when he threw up his hand in pain and the glove came off.

Reign: Detroit Tigers star Tarik Skubal pitches six scoreless innings in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card

The ball fell on the mound. Shaking off the pain, he reached down with his left hand and gently threw it forward to push it out. The exhalation could be heard down here.

Skubal began his outing with 12 strikes before bowling his first ball. He got out of the jam. He clenched his fists. Thrown more punches. Howled. And shut out the Astros for six innings before making way to the bullpen.

As Hinch said before the series, he would strike out Skubal in the first game and the rest of the series would be “pitching chaos.”

The rest of the series is here. And if Houston can't survive the chaos, the Tigers' story becomes even more unlikely.

Contact Shawn Windsor: [email protected]. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply