Baseball is Always Old and Always New

A hundred images linger from Friday night’s epic, glorious, infuriating, draining, joyful, stressful, punishing, thrilling, and altogether exhausting 15-inning, five-hour winner-take-all playoff game between the Detroit Tigers and Seattle Mariners. The wonder of baseball is that it’s always old and always new, and there has never been a baseball game exactly like this one. 

At 1:07 a.m. Eastern Time, the most devoted and wholehearted baseball fans across America and the world all ran to the bathroom at the same time.

There is one image that stands apart, though, at least it does for me on this foggy morning. It is not an image from the field. It is not one of the 37 strikeouts in the game. It is not one of the two soul-crushing double plays the Mariners hit into when the game seemed theirs, nor the routine fly ball the Gleyber Torres hit with the bases loaded when the game seemed to belong to Detroit. It was not announcer (and fellow member of the Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame!) A.J. Pierzynski screaming and pleading for bunts in the most delightful 1960s way, nor the four intentional walks the managers threw at each other just to keep the game going.

It is not even the ending, the Jorge Polanco single that scored J.P. Crawford and sent the Mariners to the American League Championship Series for the first time in almost 25 years. This was, per our friend and hero Sarah Langs, the second walk-off hit ever to send a team to the ALCS.

The first was Edgar’s Double, thirty years earlier.

Baseball. Old and new at the same time.

But, no, the image that lingers most comes from the Tigers’ dugout after the sixth inning. In the middle of the scene is Tigers ace and Marvel superhero Tarik Skubal. He has thrown perhaps the six most dominant innings I have seen in my lifetime. I can’t imagine that Koufax or Pedro or Unit or Rocket or Lefty or Gibby were ever more electric than Tarik Skubal on Friday night. He faced 20 batters. He struck out 13 of them — seven in a row at one point — all swinging, all flailing, all hopelessly overmatched. 

He did allow a run when Seattle’s Josh Naylor poked a half-swing oopsie double down the left-field line, perfectly timed Skubal’s windup, and stole third and came home on Mitch Garver’s sacrifice fly. If any mistake was made in the sequence, it was the 99-mph fastball Skubal threw up and out of the zone to Garver after making him look silly on a couple of changeups. But can a 99-mph fastball up and out of the zone really be a mistake?

Anyway, the run was overcome when Kerry Carpenter blasted a two-run homer — off a lefty, no less! — and as the locker room scene plays out, the Tigers lead 2-1. The celebration is pure delight. Tigers coaches and players shower Skubal with applause and acclaim and praise. They pat him on the back. They bang him on the chest. They hug him the way people hug heroes returning from war. Skubal has an enormous and wonderful grin on his face, a “Did I really just do that?” grin, and it’s infectious and irresistible and makes your heart try to thump its way out of your chest.

Here’s the thing, though. It was only the seventh inning.

And Skubal, after 99 pitches, was done.

“He gave us everything he could,” Tigers’ manager A.J. Hinch said after the game. I believe that to be right. This is not some “in my day, pitchers finished what they started,” Jack Morris/Goose Gossage rant — baseball is old and new, remember? Baseball in 2025 is not Baseball in 1984. Skubal threw SIXTEEN 100-mph fastballs in this one game. One game! Can you imagine what throwing even one 100-mph fastball does to the arm and the body and the soul?

This is who Tarik Skubal is. This is what pitching today is. You give all you have on every single pitch and go until the body gives in. In his already magical career, Tarik Skubal has never thrown more than 108 pitches in a game … and that 108-pitch game was back in 2022, two years before the radioactive spider bit him. Skubal has made 68 starts these last two remarkable seasons, including the postseason. Guess in how many of those he threw 100 pitches.

If you guessed eight, you would be correct.

So, sure, I would have loved to see Skubal come out for the seventh since this was an elimination game and all that jazz. But Skubal is also one of the few great pitchers who has made all his starts the last two years, and he knows himself better, Hinch knows him better, I have no second guesses.

But what I can’t stop thinking about is how happy they all were in that dugout, how happy Tarik Skubal was in particular, how unreasonably sure they all were that the lead would hold up and Skubal’s performance would become legend and the Tigers would be headed to Toronto.

As it turns out, there was still a FULL NINE-INNING GAME left to be played.

And, whoa, those nine innings, so filled with suspense and frustration and near misses. The Mariners tied the game in the seventh after an odd series of moves led to an epic battle between a 29-year-old lefty reliever named Tyler Holton (who allowed an astonishing 15 home runs in 79 innings) and a 27-year-old utility man named Leo Rivas (who hit the first two home runs of his career last month).

Here’s how it happened, for those who like receipts: The Tigers sent in Kyle Finnegan to relieve Skubal. He gave up a couple of hits and was set to face the Mariners’ designated hitter Mitch Garver, who doesn’t hit righties all that well. So Mariners manager Dan Wilson called for pinch-hitter Dominic Canzone, who does like hitting righties a little bit. This led Hinch to call for Tyler Holton because Canzone can’t hit lefties. This led Wilson to call for Rivas.

Naturally, this was called chess. They always call baseball strategic moves “Chess.” It ain’t chess. But it is interesting enough.

And Rivas knocked the single that scored the tying run.

Then, the Mariners left runners on first and second.

In the eighth, the Tigers left runners on first and second.

In the 10th, the Mariners had runners on first and second when Julio Rodriguez — who, after Game 2, went into a sudden and devastating Memo Paris slump — grounded out. In his last three games, Julio went 0-for-14 with seven strikeouts.

In the 11th, the Tigers had runners on first and second when Logan Gilbert — oh yeah, the Mariners had to use everybody — struck out Colt Keith to escape the jam.

In the top of the 12th, the Tigers had runners on second and third when Javy Báez hit a ground ball to third. Eugenio Suarez came home and nailed Zach McKinstry at the plate. Then, after an intentional walk to load the bases, Gleyber hit that fly ball to right I mentioned earlier.

In the bottom of the 12th, the Mariners had runners on first and second when Randy Arozarena bounced the ball back to the pitcher for the inning-killing double play. At one point, the broadcast showed Arozarena’s remarkable postseason numbers — .309/.390/.610 with 11 home runs in 38 games — but it has to be said that basically ALL of that was his magical 2020 run. Since 2020, he’s hitting .236/.333/.345 with one home run in the October heat.

In the bottom of the 13th, the Mariners AGAIN had runners on first and second — after back-to-back walks to Cal Raleigh and Julio — it was Suarez who ended the inning with the double play grounder.

“Neither side will blink,” announcer Adam Amin shouted, and though I think it was actually the other way around — neither side would STOP blinking — I do want to pause for a moment to say how entertaining I found the Amin-A.J.-Adam Wainwright crew. 

There was this fantastic shot of the booth before the 15th inning, and all three of them looked gloriously wiped out (A.J., in particular, looked like he had been through a 15-round fight with Ernie Shavers), and I realized that’s what I want from my announcers. I want them to give their all. I want them to come at us with energy and knowledge and curiosity and self-effacing modesty and a deep love of the game. These guys had a blast. They shouted out their opinions. They talked about how amazing it was to be there. They didn’t constantly remind us of their own accomplishments or berate us for liking the game the way it’s now played, or bedazzle us with their sports intellect. 

No, they just gave us the messy, spirited, heartfelt, and exuberant commentary that this messy, spirited, heartfelt, and exuberant game deserved, and it was lovely.

In the 14th, the Tigers got a runner on second with one out but went down with a strikeout and a pop fly.

And then finally, in the 15th, the Tigers had to send 35-year-old Tommy Kahnle to the mound. That obviously wasn’t the plan — it has been a rough year for Kahnle — but it was the 15th, and the Tigers had already used seven pitchers and, as Forest Gump said, “Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.”

Kahnle is known for throwing his changeup over and over and over and over again. He threw 61 consecutive changeups in the playoffs last year for the Yankees, and he started this playoff with 19 consecutive changeups. But then he struck out Luke Raley on a fastball, which probably felt pretty good (not to Raley).

In all, he came into this game having thrown 34 pitches in the postseason, and 31 of them were changeups. So it was a surprise when he started off J.P. Crawford with a fastball. In fact, he did pepper in a few fastballs in a desperate attempt to keep the game going.

But in the end, J.P. Crawford singled on a changeup.

Kahnle hit Randy Arozarena with a changeup.

Cal Raleigh hit the fly ball that moved the winning run to third on a changeup.

And, finally, Jorge Polanco ripped that changeup for a single that won the game.

All was mayhem in Seattle then. Now it’s the Mariners and Blue Jays, fraternal twins that came into the majors in 1977 and have each bumped along ever since, playing for their World Series shot. It has been 32 years for the Blue Jays. It has been forever for the Mariners. That starts on Sunday; the Mariners will undoubtedly still be jetlagged after this endless night. But they’ll be happy.

And all was crushed silence in Detroit. The television cameras picked up a lovely scene in the Seattle crowd — or at least it was lovely in my imagination. The camera focused on two Tigers fans after the game ended; one was literally wearing a Tiger costume. They were obviously heartbroken, but at some point it sure looked like — and I will believe this until the day I die — that they were being comforted by … Mariners fans. Don’t tell me there’s no hope. There’s always hope. There’s something haunting, but also something sublime, about a game neither team deserves to lose. This was such a game.