This is what fans with teams who are no longer in the playoffs (which applied to the Rangers in June) want. All four playoff series are tied at 1-1. Going up 2-0 in a best-of-five series pretty much ends the series for all intents and purposes.

But Kansas City and Detroit won yesterday to even their series. For Detroit, they took the Better Late Than Never approach, going seventeen innings in this playoff series without scoring a run before, finally and impossibly, getting three runs of the best reliever in baseball in the top of the ninth inning. The Tigers were shut out 7-0 in Game 1, and 0-0 through the first eight innings of Game 2. As the Rangers proved in 2024, it’s very hard to win a game when you don’t score.

Going into the ninth inning, the Tigers were facing Emmanuel Clase, the best relief pitcher by far, who had 47 saves in 2024, a microscopic 0.61 ERA in 2024, and an almost joke of a WHIP of 0.66. His ERA+ was 674, meaning he was more than six-times better than the average pitcher. He’d given up just two home runs all year.

Are you starting to get the picture for how impossible this was for the Tigers?

The first two Tigers got out. Then the next two scratched out singles. Then, with a 3-2 count, Kerry Carpenter drilled a slider, the third one in a row he had seen, over the right field wall to do the impossible.

They beat Clase. They beat the Guardians. They finally scored a run.

October baseball is all about doing the impossible. That was about as impossible as it gets.

*****  
TODAY’S GAMES: 

4:08, Philadelphia 1 @ New York 1, FS1

8:08, Los Angeles 1 @ San Diego 1, FS1