On Wednesday night against the Cleveland Guardians, Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson stood stunned as he watched a routine ground ball spin off his glove and into right field. Later, his teammate, catcher Dillon Dingler, doubled over in disbelief after an innocent foul pop up plopped off his mitt and on to the dirt. These were some of the low-lights of yet another Tigers loss, their eighth straight, a defeat which dropped them completely out of first place for the first time since April, shortly after the 2025 season began.
Collapse is not a powerful enough descriptor to characterize Detroit’s sudden and dramatic downfall, which we’ll get to momentarily. But first, some housekeeping. With three games to go of the regular season, the Tigers and the Guardians are tied for first place in the AL Central, but Cleveland own the tiebreaker as they have the better head-to-head over the course of the season. The Tigers do hold a one-game lead over the Houston Astros for the final wildcard place, but if their collapse continues and the Astros do well in their final games, Detroit would be in serious trouble. For the Tigers, who were skating towards the playoffs with a 9.5-game lead in the AL Central with just 16 to play as recently as 10 September, there are three ways their regular season could end. On Monday morning, their fans could wake up dazed but with a division title, sputtering “it was all just a terrible dream.” Or Detroit could be preparing for a humiliating but somewhat face saving wildcard series. The third option, in which the Astros overtake them and the Tigers miss the postseason altogether, is that the franchise becomes the holder of what is arguably the most catastrophic late season collapse in nearly 150 years of Major League Baseball.
