Cleveland rocked, and so should the LCSes

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Gavin Williams

Gavin Williams (with 12) tied Charles Nagy’s Cleveland franchise single-game postseason strikeout record.

Unfortunately, there are some things even a pope can’t bring about. Whatever the Holy See’s divine pull, even he couldn’t deliver the White Sox from the hands of their adversaries. The hands or, in the case of the Guardians, the arms.

By the way, that’s the American League Central-winning Guardians. That means that this year’s American and National League Championship Series will be played strictly by teams who finished the regular season in first place.

So take that, Commissioner Pepperwinkle and your claque, you suggesting the shorter regular season, further diluted (sorry, expanded) postseason with best-of-seven division series, and letting the higher-seeded teams choose their victims (sorry, opponents) in the wild card and division series rounds.

Take that, baseball government spokesman Glen Caplin, and while you’re at it, take your formal statement and shove it:

A shorter regular season unlocks making October even better for our fans—with fewer weekday afternoon games, a longer Division Series, and more opportunities to see the game’s best pitchers on the biggest stage. And allowing the top seeds to select their opponents in the first two rounds would create compelling storylines, intensify existing rivalries, and create new ones.

The pre-LCS is long enough as it is now. We’ve just been through 25 games and, if each set had gone the distance, we could have been through 32. That’s before adding a minimum of eight and maximum of fourteen to come, which would have us at 46 games all postseason long. And what did it all mean this time around?

So far, it’s meant that the cream rose, for the most part. Three out of the four League Championship Series combatants finished one through three overall on the season: the NL Central-winning Brewers (103-59), the NL West-winning Damndodgers (100-62, and yes people do make it sound one word when they say it), and the AL East-winning Rays (98-64).

The Guardians won the AL Central as baseball’s eleventh-best team. Five out of the six teams standing between them and the now-gone NL East champion Braves (94-68) made it into the postseason but got dispatched early enough and, in one or two cases, in utter embarrassment enough.

What was the fun of the Yankees shoving the Red Sox to one side and out of the action in two straight in their wild card series just to turn up even more futile getting swept away by the Rays? What was the fun of the Padres shoving the Cubs to one side and out of the action in two straight only to get bumped off by the Brewers in four?

Chicago had enough heartache when the Cubs got pushed away. Now they have to handle the White Sox, who had an even more charming tale of resurrection following three straight 100+ loss seasons, getting overthrown after it looked early enough and often enough as though they just might overmatch the Guardians.

Savour it, Guards fans. Your heroes are going to their second ALCS in three seasons. Two years ago, the Yankees shoved them away in five. They won’t have things simple against the Rays this time around. But they’re liable to make it fun regardless.

Not that it was simple getting here. The Guards got wrestled down 2-0 to start this division series, and in their own house. Then the set moved to Rate Field, the house where the White Sox delivered a storybook resurrection this season, then flattened what was left of injured and aging Houston in the wild card round.

You thought the White Sox got a bit rude in the Guards’s house? The Guards shifted from scoring a mere three across division series Games One and Two to scoring four in the top of the Game Three third alone. They shifted from resembling the team over which the White Sox might step into overthrowing them twice in Rate Field and once in their own joint.

This time, it wasn’t a higher-scoring huff. This time, the only scoring the Guards needed was José Ramírez, in the bottom of the fourth and with Steven Kwan aboard on a leadoff single, hitting one over the right field fence. Their pitching—which struck a record 21 White Sox out—took care of the rest. (What a way to bookend their season: as my friend Jessica Brand pointed out, the White Sox opened 2026 by getting punched out 20 times in a game by the Brewers’s pitching staff.)

Sean Burke, José Ramírez

José Ramírez about to hit Sean Burke for the two-run homer that was all the Guards needed on a record-making night for their pitching staff.

Everybody wondered if Guardians starter Gavin Williams would be running on empty, or at least down to his final drops, after his Game Four-ending shutout relief inning. We should all have such depleted tanks. He took a no-hitter into the sixth, including twelve strikeouts (tying Charles Nagy for a Cleveland franchise postseason game record) and striking out the side twice, before he threw a breaking ball errant enough to hit White Sox shortstop Colson Montgomery on the foot to open.

Chicago would love to have many innings back over the city’s postseason history. The sixth Saturday night would have to rank among the top five at least. From the Montgomery plunk, the White Sox went to a two-out base hit from Kyle Teel before Williams’s evening finally ended with a bases-loading walk to Miguel Vargas—with lefthand-hitting first baseman Munetaka Murekami due up and Guards manager Stephen Vogt bringing lefthander Erik Sabrowski in to pitch.

Maybe Murakami would overcome his weakness against portside pitching this time, when the White Sox’s season depended the most upon it? Not quite. Sabrowski struck him out swinging. The best threat of the White Sox’s night evaporated just like that. The Pope watching from his Vatican roost must have been reminded that even he has only so much divine influence.

The Guards needed nothing more than further bullpen bulls Hunter Gaddis and (coming in with one out and a man on first in the eighth) Cade Smith to keep the White Sox pinned. Smith even paid tribute to Williams’s effort by striking the side out in the bottom of the ninth to finish it.

In one way, the outcome didn’t matter: Except for the Damndodgers, the LCSes will be fought by the lower budget corps. The Damndodgers lost their season series to the Brewers, 3-4. The Guardians, with the number 29 player payroll of 2026, fought the number 26 White Sox to get to the ALCS. Where they’ll meet the number 27 payroll Rays.

Never mind that saying the Damndodgers do it with dollars alone is a willfully ignorant lie.

There’s no earthly reason to believe the Brewers will be NLCS pushovers. Not with Jacob Misiorowski starting Game One. And no, Les Mis does not live by fastball alone, even if his is faster and better controlled than Nolan Ryan’s. He’s got a cutter, a slider, and a curve ball, any and all of which can dance like Fred and Ginger and beat, sweep, and clean you like a Hoover.

There’s no earthly reason to believe the Dodgers are invincible despite winning the two previous World Series. (Remember how the Blue Jays got thatclose to winning last year but for old man Miguel Rojas? Commissioner Pepperwinkle hopes you forgot.) Not even with Tarik Skubal starting Game One. Maybe Sku and Les Mis fight to a draw and turn things over to the bulls. Maybe the Brewers start praying their bulls aren’t full of bull. Maybe.

There’s also no earthly reason to believe the ALCS will be a crashing bore. If the Guards keep pitching the way they manhandled the White Sox, assuming their arms and/or shoulders don’t resign their commissions, they stand a chance against a Rays team that figured out how to build a dominant, all-elements team from the Family Dollar clearance shelves.

So the Empire Emeritus and the Olde Towne Team aren’t there? Except for entitlement-drunk Yankee fans who still think the World Series is illegitimate without them (and who still think, erroneously, that only the ghost of George Steinbrenner can “restore” them), who cares? Except for entitlement-longing Red Sox fans who think they’ve earned the right to a fifth Series title this century (they already lead the century with four), who cares?

The Lords of Baseball will cast their longing eyes upon the proceedings, misread the forest, misinterpret the trees, and ignore those among their ranks who lack the up-and-down development, discipline, and intelligence of those now playing for pennants.

Must I remind you that big payrolls (read: $200 million or higher) did the Mets and the Blue Jays no seasonal favours? That they didn’t keep the Yankees, the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Padres, the Cubs, the Braves, and the Astros from early postseason exits?

The Lords, and the fans and writers who think only money determines who takes the next lease to the Promised Land, insist that what you’re seeing coming out of Tampa Bay, Milwaukee, and Cleveland is three flukes, two of whom stand to be used as toothpicks by the big blue whale out of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, if the Dodgers do get thwarted, the wailing will start swiftly enough over how difficult-to-impossible it is to win more than two straight World Series anymore.

Too many people can never be satisfied. Those who can be will now enjoy a pair of likely to be splendid LCSes and a just-as-likely to be splendid World Series.

The Papal bullpen, and other division series observations

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Muneteka Murakami

Munetaka Murakami about to demolish Parker Messick’s pitch for an ALDS Game One home run Saturday. (MLB TV capture.)

Just think. A few more days, and there just might be a pair of League Championship Series lined up with nobody involved except four division winners. Among the division series contenders who didn’t win their divisions, let’s be honest. The most likeable of the group is the White Sox.

Come to think of it, the White Sox did edge the American League Central champion Guardians by one game in their regular season series. Considering where they’d come from only too recently, beating the Guards 3-0 in their division series Game One must have been a confidence builder for which you couldn’t forge a special order.

Back to them in a few.

The National League Central-winning Brewers are a lot closer to that all-champ NLCS after slipping past the wild card Padres from the NL West in division series Game Two Sunday. From a whacky-finish 3-2 Game One win, the Brewers overcame an early fielding mishap and a two-run deficit to win it, 4-3, on a walkoff single.

Game One’s whacky finish involved a ninth-inning American Family Field ricochet roof catch that prevented San Diego’s Ty (Viva la) France from hitting a two-run homer that would have yanked the Padres up and ahead off a one-run deficit. The ball bumped a roof rail and sank into Brewers left fielder Jackson Chourio’s glove.

The ground rules in the park say balls hitting the roof or its cabling in fair territory are in play and catchable for outs as long as the ball stays fair. That’s what an appeal told the Padres, who tried arguing to no avail that the ball was foul.

Maybe the last thing the Friars needed was Chourio in the middle of their Game Two loss. Especially with their best relief pitcher, Mason Miller, out to work the bottom of the ninth on assignment to make their 3-2 lead hold up. Miller didn’t exactly make things simple for himself, either. After a leadoff groundout, he walked Christian Yelich (who stole second as soon as he knew it to be available, practially) and Sal Frelick. He got pinch hitter Andrew Vaughn to fly out to right, but then he walked pinch hitter Gary Sanchez and the pillows loaded.

Enter Chourio, who’d helped make the Padres’s lives miserable enough in Game One. Before he caught the Ricochet Heard ‘Round the World (social media argued about the play almost an entire day to follow), he’d tied Game One in the third with a hefty two-run homer, his fifth bomb of this postseason thus far.

He wrestled Miller to 2-2. Then, he shot a low liner beneath diving Padres second baseman Jake Cronenworth, sending Yelich and Frelick on a frolic home with the tying and winning runs, Frelick coming in a dive Olympic swimmers might have envied.

You might start getting the idea that the Padres may believe their survival chances now depend on having Chourio kidnapped and hidden away on some remote island in sub-Antarctica. Clearly, the guy has no respect for the team that won twenty out of its final 23 regular-season games. To him, and to his fellow Crew members, the Padres are the guys one loss from wait till next year.

Now, back to the White Sox. Well, let’s look big picture first. Didn’t the Braves look unintimidated for having lost their NL division series Game One by two to the Damn Dodgers, with Tarik Skubal manhandling them and Teoscár Hernández, Kyle Tucker, and Max Muncy taking them over the Dodger Stadium fences? Of course not.

Don’t the Rays feel a little more than confident leading their AL division series 1-0, after Drew Rasmussen got close enough to no-hitting the Yankees—before Austin Wells got a little greedy after busting the no-no in the eighth, and thrown out trying to make his double a triple? And, after Jonathan Aranda provided the game’s only run when he went against the usual Rays way (ninth from the bottom of the Show for long balls) and hit one into the right field seats in the third?

Of course they do. And don’t think Pope Leo XIV’s favourite team doesn’t feel all varieties of confident entering their AL division series against the Guards.

They dispatched the Astros in the wild card series so swiftly it was legitimate to question whether that set was just a magic trick. Then, they bullpenned the Guards quiet in ALDS Game One. (The papal bullpen?)

Meanwhile, Munetaka Murakami’s hefty two-run homer in the fourth, Colson Montgomery’s RBI double in the seventh, and the White Sox bulls striking out twelve among them, while leaving the Guards stranding the bases loaded twice, took care of the rest.

But I sense a lot of people not tied to Chicago pulling for at least one non-division champ to make it to the LCS. That would be the gang who broke the Original Mets’s single-season loss record two years ago, picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, tinkered here, tucked there, then shoved the Astros to one side.

God bless the White Sox. The Pope already did.

In fact, that blessing plus the swift wild card series dispatch inspired a sentence that ought to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize—if there is a Pulitzer for single lines. “An offense predicated on power and prayer got none of the former and played a team with the Pope on its side,” wrote The Athletic‘s Chandler Rome. (It had to be a writer named Rome?)

Suddenly it’s to wonder and possibly fear the Padres picking up, dusting off, pushing the Brewers to a fifth game overthrow, and finding ways to win the NLCS from there. Think of the mad fun Rome (the writer, not the Vatican) and others may have if the White Sox finish the Guards off, then prevail in an ALCS.

A World Series featuring Friars on one side and a team with the Pope as a lifelong fan on the other side. And you thought a hypothetical Cubs vs. Red Sox World Series might test the Lord’s patience.

Retirement, Verlander style

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Genevieve Verlander, Justin Verlander

Daughter escorts father from the mound without a dry eye in the Comerica Park house Saturday.

The games meant nothing and everything at once. Nothing in the big picture of the Tigers’s season or the postseason they’re going to miss, but everything to their retiring Hall of Famer in waiting and his family. Especially his seven-year-old daughter.

Genevieve Verlander—that’s Vivi to her family and friends, as seen on the Tigers jacket she wears—highlighted the Tigers’s commemoration of Justin Verlander Friday night with a ceremonial first pitch curve not necessarily unlike the ones her father threw in his heyday.

Daddy himself squatted down to take the pitch. The split second it hit his glove, Verlander thrust his arms skyward and galloped out to sweep her up as she leaped into the arms she’s going to feel far more now than in her first years.

“It’s been awesome,” Verlander told MLB.com’s Jason Beck about their preparations. “We’ve been practicing. She’s all pumped up about it. We actually came out here to the field and practiced off the mound one day. I asked her, ‘Where do you want to go? You want to go to the mound?’ And she’s like, ‘The mound.’ I’m like, ‘That’s my girl’.”

The lack of dry eyes in the Comerica Park house could be equaled by one thing only, and it happened on the following afternoon. At the end of a season Verlander lost to injury in April, willing his way back to make a final stand before beginning the retirement he announced in July.

That’s when Verlander took the mound for the final time in his major league life, against the Pirates. When he pitched almost like a reasonable facsimile of his classic self, surrendering a measly two runs, both on solo home runs, then got the first out of the sixth and a surprise unlike any his career had brought him before.

This time, Vivi had more help. From mother Kate Upton and Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, who’d once also managed her father in Houston. They’d plotted this very moment. Verlander had no clue what would happen after he lured Brandon Lowe into a pop out to catcher Dillon Dingler.

Hinch walked out to plate umpire Laz Diaz to inform him of the pitching change. Then he motioned to the first base side. Vivi ran out toward the mound wearing an even bigger grin than the one behind which she threw the Friday night curve. Father and daughter hugged even harder this time around.

And Verlander—one of the most composed pitchers who ever stood on the mound before tying lineups into knots; a competitor who married power to smarts and feel to analytics; a lion so intense that it took marriage and fatherhood to let him look more human than he looked in his bristling younger seasons; a lancer who’d spent his final innings on the mound ironed up for work as always—lost it.

He wept. Unashamedly, unapologetically. Even Hinch looked as though he might shed a few tears as he joined father and daughter for a quick mini-group hug. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Verlander admitted after the game. He also admitted he hoped Vivi would understand he wept for joy, not sorrow.

This beat any father-daughter dance on record so far.

“He’s a really hard guy to surprise,” acknowledged Finch, who attests to numerous conversations with Verlander about fatherhood and family life. “He’s as planned out and mapped out as any human I’ve ever been around. And so I contacted Kate a little while ago and just tried to think about ways that we could create a special moment for him.”

It must have hit the Tigers like a ton of bricks that Verlander walked off the mound with Vivi in his arm and into the arms of her mother and her younger brother, Bellamy, with the Tigers in a 2-0 hole. (Lucky Pirate boys Lowe and Jacob Gonzalez. They get to brag that they took a Hall of Famer yard on his final day in the bigs.)

Lucky for them they could wrestle back to where a 3-1 deficit in the bottom of the ninth was, for once, just a simple hurdle.

First, Kevin McGonigle pushed Max Clark (one-out single) across the plate and Hao-Yu Lee (double) to third. Then Eduardo Valencia won it with a clean blast into the left field seats. Verlander wouldn’t get credit for a pitching win, but nobody questioned he and his family had won the day. And the weekend.

Detroit probably won’t remember Saturday’s final score as heavily as they’ll remember Vivi racing out to make sure her father wouldn’t step off the mound alone. In baseball terms, they’ll have far older memories to hold, as The Athletic‘s Cody Stavenhagen noted:

Electric strikeouts in the playoffs. Thrilling feats of dominance on so many summer days. He is best known throughout the sport for his longevity and his durability, a near-unbreakable force who lived to see an era where starters are coddled rather than pushed, where battles are won through algorithms and optimization just as much as they are heart and grit. The way he embraced it all, the old and the new, is part of what helped him outlast so many of his peers.

The family embraced again in front of the dugout and in front of Verlander’s teammates, with whom he’d share some final handshakes. Comerica Park rocked in tribute to the big righthander. He’d pitched for his heart and soul Saturday, and they knew it.

“It felt very storybook,” Upton said after the game. “And it was so Justin. That’s the most Justin Verlander thing I’ve ever seen.” She could have been referencing his pitching and his paternal vulnerability at once.

Then, the family disappeared through the dugout to the clubhouse and toward the rest of their lives.  Suddenly, you forgot the grizzled veteran resembling a prospector in the mountains too long, saying goodbye to the game he enhanced, stepping full time into the family life that didn’t unmake the three-time Cy Young Award-winning, 3,560-strikeout pitcher, but remade the man.

“I never wanted to retire because of a milestone, a number or a date on the calendar. I wanted the game to tell me it was time,” wrote the 43-year-old in a social media post.

Baseball has given me more than I could have imagined. It taught me discipline, resilience and the value of continuing to adapt and evolve. I’ve been fortunate to play with and against incredible players, for outstanding organizations and compete in front of fans who deeply appreciate the game.

Don’t waste your time pondering that Saturday’s quality start might portend Verlander rethinking retirement. He knows his body would laugh and bark, “That’s what you think.”

One day, perhaps Vivi Verlander will come to understand that she did a lot more than just charm the living daylights out of Detroit and baseball nation with her Friday night pitch and Saturday afternoon escort. God and her parents willing, she’ll see she helped her father do what too many of the greats fail to do. Hell, she helped him do what too much of this regular season failed to do.

She helped him leave baseball fans wanting more. But the only thing more her father can give fans from here is a speech on the Cooperstown stage in five years.

Turning to the Final Stretch

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Mike Yastrzemski

Mike Yastrzemski took a page out of Grandpa’s book Sunday to help the Braves clinch the NL East title.

As mid-to-late September weekends go, this one just finished had a few highs and a few lows. It also had at least one unexpected jolt of an injury to a batter who wasn’t even at the plate at the time.

In His Face Dept.—Alex Bregman did nothing but stand in front of the on deck circle with Michael Busch at the plate for the Cubs against the Reds in the fourth inning Sunday. Then Busch hit a check-swing foul off Reds righthander Luis Mey. Bing! The ball shot back, then into and off Bregman’s face, the veteran third baseman covering the stricken side as he made for the clubhouse.

“He got hit in the left cheekbone essentially, under the eye,” said Cubs manager Craig Counsell after the Cubs finished their 9-1 win. “I don’t know anything more than that right now. He was bleeding from his nose a little. There’s some swelling. It’s a terrible, terrible accident. We hope he’s OK.”

Bregman managed an Instagram post indicating he thinks he’s going to be more OK than his manager might: “Thanks for all the messages yall. I’ll be back.”

The better news for the Cubs: Most Valuable Player Award candidate Pete Crow-Armstrong smashed his 45th home run of the season, a two-run shot in the fifth inning. Last week, PCA became the Cubs’s all-time single-season home run hitter from the left side, passing Hall of Famer Billy Williams.

On the Threshold Dept.—Bregman’s injury may have sobered the Cubs postgame, but the win cut their magic number for a postseason berth to one. They might have clinched if the Diamondbacks lost to the Yankees Sunday, but the Snakes upended the Aaron Judge-less-again Yankees, 8-4.

The big blow: Nolan Arenado’s fifth-inning grand slam, his third salami slice of the season, off Yankees reliever Brent Headrick.

The good news for the Diamondbacks: The game was their 47th come-from-behind win this season, the best in Show. The bad news: They trail the Phillies for the final National League wild card slot by four games and have six left to play.

The Yankees have a wild card berth clinched. But to win the American League East, they’d have to win the rest of the way to season’s end and get a little help from their friends. They’ll have a grand chance to win half the battle: they start a four-game set against the division-leading Rays in Yankee Stadium Tuesday.

Whether You’re a Brother or Whether You’re a Mother Dept.—Going 52-25 since they looked dead and buried in late June has the Red Sox with a clinched American League wild card slot . . . but they needed some help from the Braves, who spent the weekend sweeping the Astros and thus enabled the Olde Towne Team—who lost to the Rays 5-1 Sunday—to clinch.

They’ve been rolling to the Bee Gees’s classic “Stayin’ Alive” during their long self-resurrection. “I think that pretty much says it all,” said left fielder Roman Anthony after they secured their slot. “We pretty much stayed alive when nobody else thought we could. Now here we are.”

It made the Red Sox only the fourth team to reach a postseason since 1903 after being fourteen games under .500 or more. Encouraging further note: two of the three previous reached the World Series, with one (the 1914 Boston Braves) winning it.

Let us remember: In this century, the Red Sox have made it to four World Series . . . and won all four of them. That’s a very far cry from their 20th century legend of extraterrestrial, star-crossed loss.

Land of the Braves Dept.—The Braves didn’t just nudge the Red Sox into the postseason with their weekend sweep. After clinching a postseason berth at all Friday, they finished their weekend clinching their seventh National League East title in nine seasons with a 4-2 win over the Astros.

“This is what it’s all about,” said outfielder Mike Yastrzemski while the Braves popped and sprayed the champagne after Sunday’s game. “It’s so hard to win baseball games in general in the big leagues because everybody is so good. It’s obviously not the end goal, but these are the times that you need to celebrate because it’s hard to get here.”

The grandson of Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski helped make things easier on Sunday, when he took a page from Grandpa’s book and hit one into the right center field seats with two aboard during a four-run sixth. The Astros’s Jose Altuve and Yainer Díaz homered solo and it wasn’t enough.

Walt Weiss, former major league infielder who’s in his first season at the Braves’s helm, agreed with Yastrzemski: “I told these guys winning the division is really tough. I know it’s the first step, but it takes six months to do it. It takes everybody, and we used everybody. Virtually everyone that got an opportunity stepped up and helped us win games this year. Special group in that way. Very close group.”

Weiss summed the Braves up well. They entered the season boasting of their depth, and the long grind they needed to prove its worth paid off.

One Lat, One Ranger Dept.—The AL West-leading Rangers took a blow this weekend: righthander Cal Quantrill hit the fifteen-day injured list with a tight right lat, incurred Saturday after twelve pitches to four Blue Jays.

Sunday wasn’t much better for the Rangers, their record back at .500 even with a loss to the Jays in which starter Jacob deGrom pitched despite some “mild” groin tightness and came out in the fifth with the bases loaded and the Jays up 3-2.

With the 7-2 final win, the Jays join the Astros in the hunt for the third AL wild card, and both finished Sunday two and a half behind the White Sox for the berth. The White Sox helped their own cause by spanking the Tigers Sunday, 8-1.

Chicago Unbound Dept.—Come to think of it, the White Sox finished Sunday remaining a single game back of the AL Central-leading Guardians. Their rough September nudged them out of the division lead, but they could still take the division with a stronger finish than the Cleveland company.

And to think that, just two years ago, suggesting a future higher than the basement for the White Sox was something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Immaculate intro

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Payton Tolle

You’d grin, too, if you were just one pitch away from a game-opening immaculate inning and feeling you were going to nail it right before throwing pitch nine.

Payton Tolle can do an awful lot more than hug opposing hitters up the baselines or send other reminders of legendary fun-haver Mark (The Bird) Fidrych. He can even pitch. Sometimes, he can even do things for his team that only a Hall of Famer could and did 24 years earlier.

Things such as the most immaculate intro since B.B. King’s crying guitar ushered “The Thrill is Gone” in.

The big, bearish lefthander chose Sunday afternoon in Fenway Park to stand and deliver. Against the top of the Royals’ order. Nine pitches. Three strikeouts. Two swinging strikes followed by a called strike on Nick Loftin. Three swinging strikes by Bobby Witt, Jr. One foul followed by two swinging strikes from Jac Caglianone.

Tolle didn’t get to hug Loftin, Witt, or Caglianone. He simply grinned after pitch number eight, then pumped his glove and his fist and went, “Whooaaaa!” after strike nine. Nobody complained. Especially not the Red Sox, since Tolle went from there to pitch five shutout innings scattering four hits. To the Red Sox, those are hugs that help mean successful pennant races.

But they don’t exactly mind their gregarious southpaw’s act, either. Neither do the opponents. So far.

The only previous immaculate inning to open a Red Sox start was Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, who did it to fellow Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki (swinging strikeout) plus Mark McLemore (called strikeout) and Rubén Sierra (swinging strikeout) on 18 May 2002. The most recent immaculate Red Sox frame in any inning was Chris Sale to the Twins in the top of the third on 26 August 2021. The victims: Nick Gordon, Andrelton Simmons, and Rob Refsnyder, performing their own version of “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

The Red Sox won both those games, Martinez’s 4-1 and Sale’s 12-2. Tolle went from those first five to a slightly troublesome sixth: leadoff single (Witt), hit batsman (Caglianone), first and second and nobody out. Then: fly out to right (Salvador Perez) and back-to-back swinging strikeouts (Michael Massey and Matthew Lugo).

Didn’t seem to faze him. I can do this kinda stuff to ’em all through the picture, he seemed to say as he hopped off the mound. The Royals could have stepped into the batter’s box with bazookas, not bats, and Tolle would have indulged the hearty laugh. Then, he’d stuff a few fastballs down the tubes. With a cutter and a sinker now and then to break up the monotony.

All that with only one run to work with from his mates. More specifically, from Caleb Durbin,  who hit the first pitch he saw from Royals starter Nick Cameron over the Green Monster’s left center field side. You’d think a team averaging 4.4 runs a game playing an American League Central basement resident with a tragic number of four entering play Sunday could hand their most colourful pitcher a little bit more room to maneuver.

Oops. With Tolle finished after six shutout innings, the Royals now had a shot at the Red Sox bullpen. They opened against Erik Miller in the seventh with back-to-back inning-opening walks, a fielder’s choice making for an out at third the Royals challenged to no avail, and then Carter Jensen pinch hitting for Lofton and singling the run home against Garrett Whitlock.

Whitlock kept the damage to a single run when he got pinch-hitting Vinnie Pasquantino to fly out to deep enough center field for the side. Then the Red Sox got a crack at Craig Kimbrel, the veteran reliever. He once toiled for the Red Sox. His career then and since has been too much akin to the arsonist putting his own fires out. That’s a too sad decline for a guy who was one of the best relievers in the business, once.

Kimbrel spent the earlier part of the year with the Mets, before they released him to be picked up by the Rays—who released him, in turn, to be picked up by the Royals. His Royals stint thus far has actually been the best of the season and respectable in the bargain: a 3.27 ERA and a 3.01 fielding-independent pitching rate. The bad news: He’s given up ten hits in eleven innings’ work as a Royal, his walks/hits per inning pitched (WHIP) rate is a skating-near-thin-ice 1.27, and he sports a 3.3 walks-per-nine rate.

Entering a tie game to start the seventh, Kimbrel induced a leadoff fly out (Trevor Story) but walked Durbin and Nick Sogard back-to-back. Royals manager Matt Quartraro took no further chances. He pulled Kimbrel post haste and went to Connor Thomas. Double oops.

Thomas got rid of Andruw Monasterio with a punchout but Roman Anthony cashed Kimbrel’s errant chip, singling Durbin home to break the one-all tie. Thomas slid out of further trouble with another called punchout. But in the bottom of the eighth, Story slashed a two-run single. The score held for a 4-1 Red Sox win.

Shame, though, that Aroldis Chapman had to work the top of the ninth as if he was a late-career Kimbrel disciple. Putting out a small fire he set himself: back-to-back walks to open, then striking out the side. If we can’t discard the save rule just yet, perhaps we can call “no save” when you’re starting the ninth cold but setting your own fire from which to save your team?

None of which was enough to erase the joy of Tolle’s game-opening feat. Just the latest ode to joy from a pitcher whose mother’s guidance and memory inspired him to inscribe her favourite phrase for him (You’re so pretty) on one finger of his glove. If this keeps up, the Red Sox theme might become the wearing of the grin.