Monthly Archives: October 2025

We interrupt your World Series fun . . .

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Yoshinobu Yamamoto

Yamamoto carving the Blue Jays in Game Two, following the Jays’ bludgeoning the Dodgers in Game One, was rudely interrupted by the commissioner putting his foot in his mouth again.

Hand it to Rob Manfred. Baseball’s commissioner certainly found a way to soil or at least cloud our World Series pleasure. The Blue Jays bludgeoned the Dodgers in Game 1; Yoshinobu Yamamoto put restraints on almost all the Blue Jays to even it up in Game 2. Nothing but fun.

That’d teach us. Baseball’s lessons include periodic reminders that Murphy’s Law includes a clause about no good deed going unpunished. We just couldn’t be allowed to love this Series without Manfred invited to spread a little fertilizer across the field.

We couldn’t be allowed to enjoy Blue Jays outfielder Addison Barger becoming history’s first pitch hitter to step up with the bases loaded and send one into the seats. We couldn’t be allowed to enjoy Barger plus Dominic Varsho and Alejandro Kirk going long in the middle of the Jays making life miserable for Dodger starter Blake Snell and a few other starters-turned-bullpen bulls, to the tune of a 11-4 Game 1 blowout.

We couldn’t be allowed enjoy Yoshinobu Yamamoto carving the Blue Jays like Thanksgiving turkeys in Game 2, going the distance for a second straight postseason start, the first Dodger to do that since Orel Hershiser in 1988 and the first anyone to do that since Curt Schilling in 2001. Not to mention the Dodgers making a nice mix of small and tall ball — an RBI single here, a pair of solo homers there, a bases-loaded wild pitch, and a run-scoring force out yonder, to beat the Jays in Game 2, 5-1.

No, that pleasure was just too much, wasn’t it? We couldn’t even enjoy the pleasure of calling out the cone-head contingency in Rogers Centre chanting, “We don’t need you! We don’t need you!” whenever Shohei Ohtani strode to the plate, Ohtani having spurned a Jays offer on behalf of staying in southern California even if it meant switching leagues.

It wasn’t quite as contemptibly disgusting as the notorious AI-generated feces flyer his apparent pal in the White House dreamed up a weekend ago. No one that I know of is rushing to strap Manfred into the cockpit of a Boeing Shitterfortress yet. But if reporters who spotted and buttonholed him before World Series Game 2 had premeditated it, they couldn’t have done a better job of getting Manfred to put his foot in his mouth. Yet again.

With a gambling scandal battering the NBA, Manfred was asked whether baseball remains vigilant in protecting the game’s integrity from gambling infestations. After all, two Guardians pitchers (Emmanuel Clase, Luis Ortiz) remain in drydock while investigations continue into whether they accommodated suspicious microbets while pitching in June.

“We didn’t ask to have legalized sports betting,” Manfred said Saturday night. “It kind of came, and that’s the environment in which we operate. Now we don’t have a lot of choice about that, and if it’s going to change — broadly change — probably the only way it would happen is the federal government.”

The federal government.

The one whose chief executive may have strong-armed Manfred into declaring, whoops, the “permanent” banishment mandated for violating Rule 21(d) didn’t mean “permanent,” after all, meaning the end of the late Pete Rose’s exile from baseball and blockage from the appropriate Hall of Fame ballot.

The one whose chief executive conducts a dog-ate-my-homework presidency with more glee than his predecessors ever showed, while threatening the long tentacles of the law upon people in and out of government, for no crime other than disagreeing that he can do as he damn well pleases, indeed, the Constitution (which says otherwise) and the law be damned. And, with more glee than his worst such predecessors ever allowed themselves.

Manfred also said he didn’t want to discuss baseball’s pending labour issues right now (“I want to get seven exciting [World Series] games. A year from now, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about labor”), but boy have we had great postseasons since the 12-team system with wild card rounds, haven’t we?

If anyone put in front of Manfred the thought that this postseason has actually seen nothing but first-place teams in both the League Championship Series and the World Series, I haven’t been able to spot it yet.

Perhaps the commissioner wishes to fix things that might actually be broken. How about negotiating a salary floor, not a salary cap, with reasonable penalties for falling short of the floor, the better to get those billionaires’ boys’ club members who refuse to invest in their teams to either invest or divest?

How about expanding to two more major league teams, one for each league? Then, how about rebuilding baseball’s leagues and divisions thus:

1) Two conferences in each league. We’ll argue over naming them later.

2) Two divisions per conference. We’ll argue over naming them later, too.

Then, we move toward restoring genuine championship play:

3) No more wild card nonsense. If you didn’t finish the regular season with your butts parked in first place, you get to wait till next year. (A properly instituted and enforced salary floor may also stop Reds, White Sox, Rockies, and Pirates fans from awakening on Opening Day thinking, “This year is next year,” but I’d rather sacrifice a great if sad saying on behalf of up-and-down league competitiveness.)

4) No more regular season interleague play. Save it for the All-Star Game. And, while we’re at it, be done at last with those fakakta All-Star and City Connect uniforms that run the gamut from ugly to disgusting and back to repulsive. Let the players wear their proper team uniforms for the All-Star Game again. (And, for the Home Run Derby, if it must continue and for those invited to swing. Which reminds me: only bona-fide All-Stars shall be considered for Home Run Derby participation.)

5) Best-of-three division series, featuring none but the regular season division winners.

6) Best-of-five League Championship Series — the way it was from the 1969 birth of divisional play through 1984.

7) The World Series shall remain a best-of-seven, and thus have its absolute primacy restored.

Last but not least: 8) The foregoing will prevent postseason saturation, while 9) still providing plenty of postseason games. At maximum, there would be (count them!) 29 games. Even if every such series ends in a sweep (remember, baseball is the sport where anything can happen — and usually does), you’d still have 20 games.

Now, back to our World Series fun. Let’s get back to determining whether ancient Max Scherzer, the Blue Jays’s planned Game 3 starter at this writing, can summon up the old Max the Knife one more time. Or, whether the Dodgers help him decide the hard way whether it’s time to think about having his glove bronzed and letting those great seasons past make his Cooperstown case.

NLCS Game Four: Shoh there!

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Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani is about to send his second of three NLCS Game Four bombs to somewhere approaching the Delta Quadrant . . .

Was this destiny, or the mere re-awakening of a sleeping giant? Had he gone 2-for-the-National League Championship Series entering Game Four only to set Dodger Stadium and the world up for a display any world’s fair including last century’s gaudy boondoggles in New York would have been proud to hoist?

Don’t ask. You’ll drive yourself mad trying to answer, becasuse any answer might be right and any might be wrong. Just remember that Shohei Ohtani did what he did to win Game Four on both sides of the ball.

On side one he was Bob Gibson without the glare and stare, throwing six innings of two-hit, ten-punchout, shutout ball, before he ran into a spot opening the seventh ticklish enough for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to lift him with two on, nobody out, and Alex Vesia warm and good in the bullpen.

On side two, Ohtani was . . . oh, David Ortiz, Reggie Jackson, and Babe Ruth, all at once. If there’s such a thing as a postseason series sweep you could call dramatic, Ohtani made sure this one was it.

The vanquished Brewers who’d only managed to muster up a single run in each of the four games could do little enough other than watch and appreciate what was being made on their dollar. Even as they could only mourn that, whatever they were doing to keep Ohtani on his best behaviour prior to Game Four, it failed them miserably enough.

“We’re watching something we’ve never seen before,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who probably still couldn’t believe the manner in which his team’s ticket to the World Series was stamped Friday night. The scoreboard said 5-1, Dodgers. The margin was four runs; the Dodgers out-hit the Brewers by four. But . . .

There have been ouitlier pitchers who’ve hit home runs in postseason play. As Jayson Stark exhumes, only two starting pitchers have ever hit two postseason bombs in their whole careers: Hall of Famer Gibson (1964, 1968) and one-time Orioles co-ace Dave McNally (1966, 1974). And, “[s]eeing as how all pitchers not named Ohtani aren’t even allowed near a bat rack anymore, that’s a record that will never be broken,” Stark adds. “Unless Ohtani breaks it!”

Babe Ruth, you say? Well, now. Ruth pitched 166 games lifetime, including the postseason, and never hit two homers in any but one of those games, on 13 June 1921. He also recorded one measly strikeout that day. The Bambino hit three homers in a single postseason game twice, Game Four in the 1926 Wortld Series, and Game Four in the 1928 Series. Guess how many innings he didn’t pitch in either of those games.

It gets even more insane from there. How would you like to name all the pitchers who’ve hit more home runs at the plate in a game than what they allowed from the mound in the same game? Stark has named the two, Philadelphia’s Rick Wise (23 June 1971) throwing a no-hitter and Detroit’s Jesse Doyle (28 September 1925) in relief but hung with the loss despite getting eleven outs during his turn.

Yes, it’s very fair to say that Ohtani blasted those two right out of the running. What the hell, he began the blasting in the first inning. Top—he shook off a leadoff walk to Brewers second baseman Brice Turang to strike out the side. Then he led off at the plate in the bottom half, worked the count full against Brewers starter Jose Quintana, and hit one into the right field bleachers.

Two base hits and a strikeout later, Tommy Edman singled Mookie Betts home and Teoscar Hernández pushed a ground out to first that enabled Will Smith to score. As things turned out, that was really the only scoring the Dodgers needed on the night. These Brewers may have had the regular season’s best record and outlasted the wild-card Cubs in the division series, but they found themselves playing the futility flutes against the Dodgers’ big brass.

Bottom of the fourth, the count 3-1: Ohtani launched Brewers reliever Chad Patrick’s 3-1 offering to and past the rear end of the right center field bleachers. Speculation that the ball ended up making its way to the Hollywood Freeway wasn’t unreasonable.

“My reaction,” said Dodger president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, “was just mouth agape. Trying to track it. Not seeing it come down. And saying: Did that one just leave the stadium?” All I could see was the ball flying over a Starlux Airlines sign and its roof section. Maybe it ended up somewhere in nearby Glendale, maybe in the back yard that once belonged to Hall of Fame manager/character Casey Stengel.

The sad part was that blast being the only real blemish against Patrick on the evening. He pitched four relief innings and kept all but one of the Dodgers from getting any cute ideas against him. If the Brewers now ponder the what-ifs if Patrick could have started, you can’t exactly say they’re wrong.

Bottom of the seventh, Trevor Megill relieving Patrick and striking Andy Pages out to open. Megill, who’d posted a 2.49 regular-season ERA and a .209 opponents’ batting average against him. Pitched respectably in the earlier rounds this postseason, too. Now he had Ohtani in the hole 1-2. The next launch had to settle for landing a few rows up the left field bleachers.

Well, what did you expect? You thought Ohtani would hit a third bomb into satellite orbit? The man’s only human, after all.

Here are the guys I feel sorry for other than the Brewers, who ran entirely out of fuel at the worst possible time after such a magnificent season: the Mariners. They finally fought back hard against the Blue Jays who’d threatened to sweep them away in their own Seattle playpen, en route an American League Championship Series fall.

Then, they had an eighth inning to remember Friday: Cal Raleigh leading off with a Game Five-tying home run; then, after back-to-back walks and a hit batsman, prodigal Eugenio Suaárez hitting an opposite-field grand slam four rows up the right field seats. Guaranteeing a Game Six back in Toronto, where they’d swept the Jays out of Games One and Two.

Cal who? Eugenio what? Not even their late-hour of power could erase the magnitude and the impact of the Shoh in Los Angeles.

Go ahead. Review every great single-game postseason performance. Then tell me if they were better than Friday night in Chavez Ravine. Tell me Reggie Jackson seeing only three pitches and hitting every one of them onto or near the el train behind Yankee Stadium in Game Six of the 1977 World Series was a better performance. Now, tell me how many innings he pitched at all in that game.

Tell me Don Larsen’s perfecto in the 1956 World Series and Roy Halladay’s no-no in the 2010 National League division series were better performances. Now, tell me how many home runs they also hit in those games.

I don’t remember Bill Mazeroski, Kirk Gibson, Joe Carter, David Ortiz, and David Freese pitching even in the bullpen in their Big Postseason Games. Nor do I remember Howard Ehmke, Carl Erskine, Sandy Koufax, or Moe Drabowsky dialing the Delta Quadrant at the plate during their postseason pitching virtuosities.

Bob Gibson punched out ten and hit one out in the decisive Game Seven of the 1967 World Series. He did the same thing in Game Four of the 1968 Series. In between was his seventeen-punchout jewel in Game One of the ’68 Series without hitting one into the seats. None of them equal 10+K/3 HR in the same game, either.

(Who the eff is Moe Drabowsky, you say? He the eff is the guy who relieved Dave McNally in Game One, 1966 World Series, and pitched 6.2 innings of spotless, eleven-strikeout, one-hit, shutout relief the rest of the way, launching the Orioles on their surprising sweep of the last-standing Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers. At the plate, alas, Drabowsky went 0-for-2 with a walk and a strikeout.)

I don’t want to leave either the Mariners or the Blue Jays hexed or vexed as they get ready to resume ALCS hostilities. But remember that the Dodgers won the first three NLCS games without Ohtani doing much at the plate. They’re dangerous enough without him. Friday night was a staggering reminder of how dangerous they are when he is on. Whomever wins the American League pennant has a lot of studying to do.

ALCS Game One: Miller time for the Mariners

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Bryce Miller, George Springer

George Springer is about to demolish Bryce Miller’s first pitch of ALCS Game One. It was the only score Miller would allow over six otherwise spotless innings on short enough rest. (Fox Sports television capture.)

At the split second George Springer’s bat connected with Bryce Miller’s first pitch of this year’s American League Championship Series, you could be forgiven if you heard Mariners fans groaning. When the ball banged the Canada Dry sign above the right center field bullpen, you might have heard the groaning turn to moaning.

One pitch, one swing, the 21st postseason bomb of Springer’s career, and only the third leadoff bomb in League Championship Series history since pitch counting began in 1988, according to The Athletic‘s Jayson Stark. Just like that, the Blue Jays took a lead.

And Springer’s opposite-field smash on a fastball away, sending him past Hall of Famer Derek Jeter for fifth place on the all-time postseason bomb list, wasn’t the only reason Mariners fans groaned and moaned.

In the top of that first inning, they groaned, moaned, and fumed when the Mariners didn’t call for a review of that play at the plate on which Cal Raleigh (one-out hit, advancing to third on followup hit) was tagged out when it appeared he’d managed to get his foot on the plate through the legs of Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk. But television replays showed Raleigh’s foot landed a second or two after Kirk tagged his torso.

Were the Mariners unduly alarmed after Springer sprang?

Not after Miller wriggled out of further trouble in the form of a pair of walks courtesy of inducing a pair of line drive outs and a short fly out.

Not after Miller matched Jays starter Kevin Gausman point for point, dollar for dollar, from that point forward, until Raleigh atoned for missing the first inning score by squaring Gausman up, with two out in the top of the sixth, and driving a 2-2 service a little further than Springer’s traveled, about five rows up into the bleachers above that bullpen.

Not after Jays manager John Schneider decided that a followup walk to Julio Rodriguez should be he end of Gausman’s evening before he might incur jn any further damage. That came soon enough when Gausman’s relief Brendon Little wild-pitched Rodriguez to second and surrendered Jorge Polanco’s sharp opposite-field line RBI single to left to crack the one-all tie.

Not after Randy Arozarena wrung a leadoff walk out of Jays reliever Seranthony Dominguez in the top of the eighth, stole second and third while Raleigh suffered a called strikeout, then—after another walk to Rodriguez—came home on another Polanco steak, this time a spanker bouncing three times through the infield and a few more into right.

“I just choked up and wasn’t trying to do too much,” said Raleigh postgame about his bullpen-clearing blast. “I was just trying to get bat on ball and really put something in play, maybe find a hole. I didn’t want to punch out again.” He didn’t seem to mind putting that ball out of reach, out of play, and out of sight, either.

Kevin Gausman, Cal Raleigh

Raleigh is about to smoke Gausman’s splitter for a trip above the right field bullpen . . .

Aside from all that, it was Miller time. For a guy pitching on three days’ rest for the first time in his major league life. For six inning of one-run, two-hit baseball that including getting rid of seventeen of his final nineteen batters. He needed a little comfort from Raleigh at the mound while navigating his way out of that first-inning fire, but that was enough.

Miller went two innings longer than Mariners manager Dan Wilson expected him to go on short rest, only nobody told Miller until he was done for the night.

“They didn’t tell me anything, any plan,” said the lad who threw 27 pitches in the first inning and 49 the rest of his outing. “So I was going out there just letting it rip until they came out and got me.”

“That was incredible from him,” said Mariners reliever Matt Brash (now, there’s a classic name for a relief pitcher), who was one of three Mariners bullpen bulls along with Gabe Speier and Andres Munoz to pitch perfect innings once Miller’s time expired for the evening. Thus the 3-1 Mariners win Sunday night.

“I knew this was the biggest start of my career so far,” said Miller, whom one report revealed stood in Rogers Centre’s center field’s farthest location from the plate staring that direction to help focus, “and I just wanted to get out there and mentally kind of get in a zone and visualize having success on the mound.”

Miller’s season wasn’t always so simple. After a 2.94 ERA in 2004, he ran into elbow inflammation twice and an inflated ERA. He didn’t find himself on his horse fully until some time in August. Then he gave hints of his postseason potential in ALDS Game Four, pitching 4.1 shutout innings against the Tigers.

Remember: These Blue Jays are the ones who demolished the Yankees 34 runs worth in their American League division series and made the Bronx Bombers resemble the Bronx Broken. The Mariners got rid of 23 of the final 24 Jays hitters while they were at it. All of a sudden the Joltin’ Jays didn’t look all that intimidating despite Springer’s first-pitch flog.

Remember, too: These Mariners played fifteen innings Saturday to come out of their ALDS alive and reasonably well and leaving the Tigers for dead. They had to fly cross country and into Canada and endure a four-hour departure delay when mechanical issues forced their airline to get another plane up to Seattle from Los Angeles. They didn’t even have time for a Rogers Centre workout before ALCS Game One.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this as a continuous practise, but it seems as though now and then a team that should have been suffering exhaustion can turn one of the league’s howitzer corps to one side for one night. Now we’ll get to see if the Mariners can manhandle the Jays on a proper night’s sleep and with a proper pre-game workout.

We may even get to see Miller on the mound in a game that would mean the pennant for the Mariners if they win. The lad’s already proving that unthinkable isn’t necessarily impossible.

Who has the next-to-last-laugh now?

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Kyle Tucker

Kyle Tucker’s seventh-inning strikeout seemed to take what remained of the Cubs’ wind away Saturday night. (TBS television capture.)

“It’s really the only inning you could talk about,” lamented Cubs manager Craig Counsell about the top of the sixth, after National League division series Game Five. “We just didn’t do much.

“We had six base runners. You’re going to have to hit homers to have any runs scoring in scenarios like that,” Counsell continued. “They pitched very well. I mean, they pitched super well and we didn’t.”

“They” were the Brewers, whom Counsell used to manage, until he reached managerial free agency and the Cubs decided to dump David Ross for no reason better than that Counsell became available. Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer admitted as much earlier this month.

Two second-place National League Central finishes and one division series loss later, Cub fans could be forgiven if they think it’s been karma for the manner in which Ross was vaporised. The Brewers won Game Five, 3-1, with 90 percent pitching depth, five percent unusual slugging, and maybe five percent karma-the-bitch.

Until, that is, they review the seventh inning in American Family Field Saturday night. First and second, nobody out, and Kyle Tucker—the man for whom the Cubs traded three to the Astros last December, in perhaps the signature moment that explains why they made that trade—coming to the plate.

He faced Aaron Ashby, the nephew of former major league pitcher Andy Ashby, and possibly the best relief pitcher on the Brewers staff. (Regular season: 2.16 ERA; 2.70 fielding-independent pitching rate.) His Cubs were down only 2-1. He got ahead of Ashby three balls, no strikes. Michael Busch (leadoff single) and Nico Hoerner (hit by a pitch) leaned away from second and first itching for a reason to take off.

The odds were in favour of them getting that reason momentarily. Tucker had spent the first three games of the division series as a singles hitter, but in Game Four he finally unloaded, blasting a leadoff home run in the bottom of the seventh. Maybe, despite an early strikeout and a subsequent ground out Saturday night, Tucker’s power strokes were back from the fixit shop.

Big maybe. Ashby pumped a pair of bullets Nolan Ryan himself might have applauded. Tucker swung through both of them.

Then Brewers manager Pat Murphy brought rookie righthander Chad Patrick into the game. Patrick, a righthander with seven minor league seasons behind him and not one Show appearance until the Brewers called him up from AAA Nashville for this year. He got Seiya Suzuki—who’d tied the game at one in the top of the second, when he answered William Contreras’s first-inning solo home run with a bomb of his own against Jacob Misiorowski—to drive one to left that found Jackson Chourio’s glove. He dropped strike three called in on Ian Happ.

Not one Cub came home in that inning or the rest of the way. The Brewers added one more in the seventh, when Brice Turang took Cub reliever Andrew Kitteredge over the right center field fence.

“I was looking up at the heavens to Bob Uecker,” said Brewers general manager Matt Arnold, referencing the beloved late Hall of Fame broadcaster and wit, who’d become as much a face of the Brewers as any player in their history until his passing last January. “Like, during the game, I’m like, ‘Bob, we need you’.”

“I must be in the front row,” Uecker must have said from his roost in the Elysian Fields.

He must have. This team had baseball’s best regular season record this year but entered the division series with a string of failure to get past their first postseason stages for five out of the previous six seasons. They were still recovering from their former closer Devin Williams, now a reliever and frequent hate object (by their own fans) for the Yankees, serving a pitch Mets first baseman Pete Alonso demolished like a munitions expert in the deciding wild card series game last year.

This time, they had to recover from the Cubs, their next-door-state rivals, coming back from a 2-0 game deficit.

This time, they made it. So far.

They have a National League Championship Series date with the Dodgers. They secured the date doing what enough people thought they couldn’t do if it meant paying the ransoms for their kidnapped families: slug. Contreras and Turang were joined by Andrew Vaughn in the fourth, blasting a full-count service from Collin Rea into the left field seats.

They even did it with men who weren’t even topics on last year’s team. Vaughn and Patrick were joined in that club by Misiorowski, who relieved Game Five’s opening closer Trevor Megill, surrendered only Suzuki’s second-inning smash, but otherwise worked spotlessly for his four innings. In what turned out a bullpen battle, the Brewers pen was just that much more efficient than the Cubs pen, which also deployed one starter (Rea) among a group of bulls.

Andrew Vaughn

Vaughn running out his fourth-inning bomb. (TBS television capture.)

And, boy, is the deal that brought Vaughn from the pathetic White Sox to the Brewers looking better every hour. It happened when the Brewers elected to move Aaron Civale from the starting rotation to the bullpen, and Civale responded with a spoken desire to play somewhere else if that was the case. Be careful what you wish for, was the answer . . . and Civale went from a contender to a basement dweller just like that, in early June, with Vaughn—once a first-round draft pick, demoted to the farm a month earlier—coming aboard.

Therein lies a distinction between these Brewers and the Cubs they just turned aside. The Brewers don’t have Cub money, but they don’t let that stop them from constant upgrade searching when necessary. The Cubs have Cub money.  But they’d rather undergo root canal without anesthetic than spend it. And they lack the Brewers’s bargain basement ingenuity. They haven’t yet figured out that you don’t have to shop at the Magnificent Mile all the time. You can find amazing upgrades at Lots 4 Less.

How will these Brewers be perceived going into an NLCS against those Dodgers? Contradictorily, of course. The Brewers swept the Dodgers in their regular-season series, 6-0. But there’ll be more than enough who think the Dodgers will still be the overdogs. Even if the Dodgers’ NLCS ticket was stamped by a horror of a throwing error by Phillies relief pitcher Orion Kerkering in Game Four of their division series.

But how will these Cubs be perceived going into winter vacation? Not too favourably, after all, one fears. The top of their lineup acquitted themselves well enough, particularly Busch with three of his four division series hits clearing the fences and Nico Hoerner with his hits in each game and his team-leading .476 postseason on-base percentage. But the bottom of the lineup disappeared. The collective slash line of the Cubs’ bottom five? .120/.215/.205.

And they’re likely enough to move forward without Tucker, who becomes a free agent and who’s perceived widely enough as thinking about moving on. Even if this usually un-expressive fellow who prefers to let his game do his talking calls it “an honour” to play with this group of Cubs.

That group of Cubs needs a small, not major bullpen remake, and they need to romance and re-sign Tucker, whom they could and should have extended during the second half of the season. But maybe the Cubs need a front-office overhaul, too. The kind that brings in persuaders who can convince the Ricketts family that it’s time to open the purse strings but think about trying Lots 4 Less after that one Magnificent Mile splurge.

Finishing with their best regular-season record since 2018 shouldn’t be enough. Three straight second-place NL Central finishes shouldn’t be enough. But maybe watching the Brewers go forth and tangle honourably with the ogres of the National League West will give these Cubs—and their ownership that’s as endowed as Mercedes-Benz but prefers to drive indiscriminately off the Chicago Auto Warehouse lot—more than a little pause.

The Brewers couldn’t care less for now. They’re enjoying their first postseason series clincher since 2018, the year they shoved the Rockies aside in a division series sweep. And if they wanted any further incentive, they got it from cynics and Cub fans alike who snarked that they hadn’t won a postseason series yet as they took the Cubs on. As if their round-one bye meant squat.

So who has the next-to-last laugh now?

Once upon a time, the early rock and roll era included a novelty hit, “Beep Beep,” in which a little Nash Rambler (I always presumed it to be the anti-classic, two-seat Metropolitan) went tire-to-tire with a Cadillac in a daring little race. The Brewers are the Nash Rambler about to go tire-to-tire with the Dodgers’ Cadillacs.

And, unlike “Beep Beep’s” challenger, they know how to get themselves out of second gear.

The unsinkable Mariners

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Jorge Polanco

Jorge Polanco shooting the game and ALDS-winning base hit for the Mariners in the bottom of the fifteenth . . .

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” sang John Lennon on the last album he released in his lifetime. Instead of singing it in the middle of a sweet lullaby he wrote for his then five-year-old son, the former Beatle could have been singing about baseball.

He could have been singing, too, about such contests as the just-concluded American League division series between the Tigers and the Mariners. The one that came to a fifth game that came down to a fifteenth inning and, possibly, both teams wondering just whom was going to commit a fatal flub, flop, or faux pas, Phillies-like or otherwise.

“It felt the whole game,” said Tigers shortstop Javier Baez post-mortem, “like whoever made a mistake was going to lose.”

Well, nobody in either Tiger or Mariner uniforms made any truly grave mistakes Friday night. The Mariners punched their ticket to the American League Championship Series the old-fashioned way, a hair-raiser of a ball game they finished when Jorge Polanco slashed a single with two out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the fifteenth.

Until that half-inning, the Tigers and the Mariners threw everything at each other except the proverbial kitchen sink. The sink showed up in the bottom of the fifteenth. When Tommy Kahnle relieved a gutsy Jack Flaherty for the Tigers, and J.P. Crawford opened the proceedings with a base hit, the third Mariners leadoff runner in four innings.

But Kahnle followed that by plunking Randy Arozarena on the first pitch, before Cal Raleigh lined out but left Arozarena safe at second thanks to Tigers center fielder Parker Meadows’s errant throw. Then the Tigers ordered Julio Rodriguez walked on the house. In situations leaving first base open with a season on the line, it was the smart move after dodging a Raleigh artillery shell.

Now came Polanco. He and Kahnle fought to a full count with no place to put him. Then Kahnle threw a fastball Polanco shot on a line through the right side and into right field, Crawford racing home and jumping onto the plate and into the arms of teammates who might have been forgiven if they’d just been wondering how much longer this epic could play.

“The back half of that game is like a game in itself,” said Tigers manager A.J. Hinch post-mortem. “We dodged a few bullets, and so did they . . . I didn’t want it to end, certainly,  the way that it did, but I wanted to just keep giving ourselves a puncher’s chance, and they outlasted us.”

Until the bottom of the fifteenth, it was fair to say the Tigers and the Mariners outlasted each other.

From the brilliance of starting pitchers Tarik Skubal and George Kirby to the magnificence of both bullpens plus a pair of starting pitchers pressed into all-hands-on-deck relief service, this game made you wonder whether anyone from the big bats to the supporting cast really knew how to hit anymore.

Skubal in particular pitched like the Cy Young Award winner he seems destined to become this year. He surrendered one run but set a new postseason record with seven straight strikeouts, then set another one with thirteen total strikeouts in a postseason elimination game. He pitched six virtuoso innings and left with his tank below empty.

How could he have known at that moment that things would end up with him making grand, Hall of Famer-like showings in his two ALDS starts but his team ending up on the losing side?

Kirby was almost as brilliant as Skubal. In fact, the only run charged against him scored when he’d left the game in the bottom of the sixth, after surrendering Baez’s leadoff double. Gabe Speier took over and Tigers right fielder Kerry Carpenter hit a 1-0 service into the right center field seats.

That gave the Tigers a 2-1 lead lasting long enough for the Mariners in the bottom of the seventh to tie it up with a little shuck-and-shuffling on the part of skipper Dan Wilson.

He sent Dominic Canzone to pinch hit for Mitch Garver, whose second-inning sacrifice fly opened the scoring in the first place. Hinch promptly brought Tyler Holton in to relieve Skubal’s relief Kyle Finnegan. Wilson countered by sending Leo Rivas up to pinch hit for Canzone.

In the first postseason plate appearance of his major league career, measuring Holton for the cutters and changeups he was most likely to throw, Rivas took a strike, then lined a changeup for a base hit to left to send Polanco home with the tying run.

From that point forward, the bullpens, with or without starters pressed into emergency all-hands-on-deck duty, were brilliant, even when they were slithering, sneaking, or bludgeoning their ways out of jams you could charge were some of their own making.

“It was like (we) got them on the ropes, and then they wiggle out of it. They got us on the ropes, and we wiggle out of it,” said Finnegan postgame. “It was an absolute roller-coaster of a game. That’s the beauty of this sport.”

“A heartbreaker of a finish,” said Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson, who’d gone hitless in six Game Five plate appearances, “but an unbelievable baseball game to be part of.”

“My experience feels like the ground was shaking every inning,” said Rivas. He wasn’t exactly wrong. Especially over the extra innings, when it seemed nobody in T-Mobile Park dared to sit back down.

“We knew this was not going to be a football score, that it was going to be a tight pitchers’ duel,” said Mariners president of baseball ops Jerry Dipoto, himself a former major league pitcher, “and our general take was: keep it close until Skubal’s out of there and we’ve got a chance to win this game.”

Even if it took nine innings from Skubal’s exit to do it. But once Speier yielded to Matt Brash, what came out of the Mariners’ bullpen—including and especially starters who hadn’t relieved in either eons or since early minor league days, whichever came first—was magnificent.

Brash himself got six outs for the first time since 2003. Andrés Muñoz, the Mariners’ usual designated closer, walked a pair but escaped and then pitched a spotless ninth. Logan Gilbert, a starter, pitched a pair of scoreless innings. Eduard Bazardo landed eight outs, something he’d never done in his career until Friday night. Luis Castillo, who hadn’t relieved in almost a decade, got rid of all four batters he faced.

The problem was the group of people rooting and cheering even louder than the ballpark crowd: the Blue Jays. Broadcast announcers noted it until even they got sick of saying it, but as the extra innings accumulated the Blue Jays had to have been roaring with delight knowing that, whichever team would meet them in the ALCS, that team’s pitching might be depleted temporarily.

That’s not what you want to throw at the Blue Jays and their own howitzer offense in their own playpen to open. The ALCS may come down to first and second game survival for the Mariners before they can bring the set back to T-Mobile Park. But when they do, the Mariners have at least one comfort upon which to lean: the Blue Jays were a game below .500 on the road while playing .667 ball at Rogers Centre.

And both teams want to end pennant droughts expeditiously as possible.

The Blue Jays haven’t hit the World Series since they won their second of two straight in 1993. The Mariners haven’t hit the World Series at all in their 48 years of existence. The last time they showed up in an ALCS, they’d won 116 games on the regular season, had the 2001 Rookie of the Year in future Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki, another Hall of Famer in Edgar Martinez, and lost to the Yankees.

The Tigers haven’t reached a World Series since 2006 or won one since 1984. They wouldn’t mind ending a drought, either. But on a night when Carpenter went four-for-five while the rest of the Tigers managed only four hits, Carpenter becoming the first since Babe Ruth to reach base five times and homer in a winner-take-all postseason game probably made Tiger fans wish they could have run nine of him to the plate Friday night.

It’s hard to think, “What a year,” when thinking of the Tigers. Sure, they’re talented, likeable, and their own kind of resilient. But these are the same Tigers who became this year’s first to win thirty, then forty, then fifty, then sixty games . . . before the worst September win percentage of any postseason baseball team ever. They played September as if on crutches.

The Mariners won their division handily enough, playing September with controlled fury and rolling their best month’s record of the season, 17-8/.680, while earning a round-one bye in the postseason. They proved unbreakable when the Tigers took them to the bitter end Friday night.

And the game proved unbreakable without Manfred Man, the free cookie on second base to begin each half inning. Manfred Man’s extinction should not be restricted to the postseason alone. No mistake.