The WGOM

Detroit Tigers at Chicago White Sox

September 29, 2008

MINNEAPOLIS - There was dark talk in the Twin Cities, grumbling at water coolers and in watering holes and wire chatter on the newfangled Web logs of which the youngsters are so enamored these days. Those unencumbered by allegiance to the scrappy Minnesota club could reasonably assume those rumblings were symptoms of a sudden outbreak of mass paranoia. For on this day in latest September, with the playoffs looming as ominous as the storm clouds that would delay for three more hours the last scheduled game of the 2008 baseball campaign, the Tigers of Detroit were visiting Chicago to tidy up unfinished business with their White Sox hosts, and the fate of the Gemini hung in the balance.

A fortnight before, the remnants of Hurricane Ike - one of the more powerful forces of nature - blew in from the Caribbean and up from the gulf to drive torrents across the Midwest. The inclement weather postponed Friday and Saturday games between the Tigers and White Sox at the second iteration of Comisky Park and forced a Sunday double-header, with victory in both halves claimed by the Pale Hose. The third game of that set remained uncontested, dangling like an appendix for two weeks as the Twins and White Sox, like two punch drunk and arm weary pugilists, struggled mightily and failed just as mightily to put the other on the canvas and claim the title of AL Central champ. Meanwhile, the once proud Tigers, two years removed from their last division crown and favored by many sages in the spring to contend in the fall, were waging their own battle to finish the season out of the AL Central cellar.

On Sunday the Minnesota club wrapped up their season schedule, still clinging to the scant half game lead they had earned in the covered confines of their home field by sweeping a trio of matches from the White Sox just three day before. And so the stage was set. One day later, a Monday as dreary on West 35^th Street as it was on Wall Street, the White Sox and Tigers would play the postponement to make the season official and determine whether the Twins would hold bragging rights outright, or discover themselves knotted with the Sox atop the division, facing a single game playoff in Chicago with all the chips on the table at stake. On the tip of the Florida peninsula, the AL East champion Tampa Bay Rays also awaited the outcome to see if it would determine the identity of their playoff rival.

One can understand, then, the morbid misgivings of the Minnesota faithful in the hours leading up this pivotal tilt. The White Sox, after all, had everything to play for - a final, desperate grab at the brass ring to keep alive hopes of a division title and a potential playoff berth with its attendant opening for World Series grandeur. The Tigers, half a game in arrears to Kansas City, were playing for a meager smidgen of pride and the prospect of forcing the Royals to become their co-tenants for posterity at the bottom of the 2008 AL Central heap.

It helped not a bit that the Tigers would send to the hill a recently recuperated Freddy Antonio Garcia, holder of a 1-1 record in two games and just ten innings pitched for the season - and boon pal and countryman of White Sox skipper Oswaldo Jose Guillen. Or that Gentleman Jim Leyland would round out his injury depleted, under performing veteran lineup with cannon fodder from down on the farm. The fix must surely be in, the more demented denizens of the Twins Cities clamored. And who could fault them their paranoid delusions without walking a mile in their Red Wings?

But when the game itself at last commenced, those nagging doubts were dowsed as quickly and thoroughly as the customers that waited out the pre-game drenching in the Windy City. After a shaky first inning that kicked off with two free passes and an RBI single off the lumber of Jermaine Dye, Garcia shut down the dangerous White Sox lineup, holding them to that solitary digit through five frames. And by the time the game concluded, it was neither Garcia nor Leyland nor the Detroit farm hands that Minnesotans would find at fault, but rather the putrid performance of the Motor City relief corps.

Gavin Floyd, the young White Sox starter working on short rest, was clutching a precarious one run advantage after hurling four shutout frames. That's when the neophyte right-hander showed a narrow chink in his armor. With fellow infielder Ryan Raburn on base, Detroit third baseman Brandon Inge jolted a frosty lariat to left over the outstretched mitt of Dewayne Wise for a run batted in, a stand-up two-bagger, and a 1-1 deadlock. An inning later, with Miguel Cabrera planted on second, backstop Dusty Ryan nudged a breaking ball off the end of his bat just inside the first base chalk line. Floyd pounced on the ball, faltered in fielding it with his bare hand, and erroneously fired the pill into foul ground over a leaping Paul Konerko at first base. Cabrera lumbered home from second, Ryan scampered to occupy the sack Cabrera had vacated, and the Tigers roared into their first lead of the game, 2-1. The roar - and the lead - would not last long.

Freddy Garcia, auditioning for general managers in both leagues and slinging better with each passing frame, strode to the bump for the lower half of the sixth. After losing a battle to walk Wise, Garcia threw two pitches to Dye, both outside the strike zone. It was on the second toss that he felt a twinge in his surgically mended shoulder and left the game. Leyland, the senior statesman of junior circuit skippers, demonstrated that he was still determined to court victory by hailing the best right arm at his disposal, starter Armando Galarraga, from the pen.

Leyland's respect for the game and faith in Galarraga proved infinitely greater than the 13-game winner's composure when he promptly threw wild, allowing Wise to round second and reach third. His second pitch, as wild as the first, put Dye on first base and the tying run across the dish. Leyland reloaded, summoning reliever Bobby Seay, whose composure proved to be the equal of Galarraga's. His first offering to slugger Jim Thome went astray for the Tigers - third consecutive feral fling as Dye loped to second. Seay then somehow summoned enough fortitude and control to strike out Thome.

With one out and a hot swinging Paul Konerko stepping into the box, Leyland ordered an intentional pass to set up a potential double play. But the Thome whiffing had exhausted Seay’s reserve of moxie, and he walked Ken Griffey, Junior to load the bases. Leyland, with a dwindling supply of patience and the vocabulary to prove it, went once more to the bullpen, this time with Gary Glover getting the call to face the rail-thin Cuban rookie Alexei Ramirez.

"What Glover needs to do here is throw breaking balls down and away to Ramirez to get a ground ball so they can turn the double play,"said Orel Hirshiser, three-time All-Star, Cy Young award recipient, and winner of 204 major league baseball games to the national television audience. "He doesn't want to throw a fastball over the plate here. He doesn't want to challenge him, especially on the first pitch."

But Glover was not among the television audience, to the dismay of the Tigers, the Twins, and their collective aficionados. Glover's first offering to the Havana whippet, a waist-high fastball, split the plate in half. Ramirez - a Caribbean force of nature in his own right - raised a fresh tempest by clubbing the pitch from Broadway into the left field bleachers for his fourth grand-slam of the year, tying a record for major league rookies and sending the South Side devotees into a frenzy seldom matched since the repeal of Prohibition.

The rest is merely postscript. The White Sox padded their 6-2 lead with two more in the eighth, and the White Sox bullpen, a bane throughout the pennant race, did what Detroit's could not, hanging goose eggs on the scoreboard to send the Tigers back to Motown, tails tucked firmly between their legs, in sole possession of last place. In Minnesota, the Twins team boarded an airplane bound for northern Illinois instead of their preferred destination in south Florida. Their followers, down but not yet out, stormed the exits after a very tentative and painful ride on a broken-down bandwagon that Detroit fans had abandoned months before.