Storylines for Tigers-Guardians ALDS Game 5

After Friday’s win-or-go-home Game 5 in the NLDS, we get another one on Saturday. Two AL Central foes who have battled for years, but never in the postseason, get one game to decide who heads to the Bronx for ALCS Game 1 on Monday … and who goes home for the winter.

1. Can Skubal just win this by himself?

As has been mentioned ad nauseum throughout this postseason, the Tigers’ strategy for winning this ALDS has been clear from the beginning. Sneak out one win from the three “pitching chaos” games that Skubal doesn’t pitch, and then win both the Skubal starts. Two of those three legs of the strategic stool are in place: The Tigers won Wednesday’s non-Skubal Game 3, and they won Skubal’s Game 2 start.

So, now comes Game 5. Skubal has been unquestionably the best pitcher in baseball this year, and he was dominant in Game 2. It nevertheless should be noted: The Tigers didn’t have the lead when he left the game after seven innings. It was Kerry Carpenter’s three-run homer in the ninth inning, when Skubal was long gone that provided the final 3-0 margin. That is to say: Skubal can shut out the Guardians the whole live-long day, but the Tigers will still need to score.

The reason the Tigers didn’t have a lead when Skubal left Game 2 was largely because of Boyd, Skubal’s mentor when he first came up with the Tigers. Boyd threw 4 2/3 scoreless innings, albeit far more stressful innings than Skubal, dancing in and out of trouble and ultimately escaping.

He’ll obviously be on a shorter leash than Skubal, to the point that the Guardians considered potentially going with a bullpen game in this one. Either way, Boyd will be leaned on in this one, and it’s fair to say that if the Guardians got 4 2/3 scoreless innings from him again, they’d be downright ecstatic.

3. Have these offenses woken up?

With a 5-4 final score, Game 4 was the first in this series that wasn’t a shutout after the Guardians threw one in Game 1 and the Tigers did so in both of the next two. When Cleveland’s Lane Thomas hit an RBI single in the top of the first on Wednesday, you could hear the sighs of relief from Guardians fans all across the country. At last, they seemed to collectively exclaim, we are in fact capable of scoring. The Guardians had gone a shocking 20 straight innings without scoring before Thomas’ single, and while the five runs they totaled isn’t exactly the stuff of the 1927 Yankees, it had to feel like a great eruption. David Fry, who hit the big two-run homer in Game 4, is back in the lineup against the left-handed Skubal, batting second. Guardians fans, one suspects, will be very happy to see him.

While Cleveland’s scoreless streak got attention, these offenses actually have been about equally weak overall. The Guardians have outscored the Tigers, 12-10, while Detroit has a slightly higher OPS (.611 to .606). Whenever Detroit faces Boyd in Game 5, it will be an opportunity for right-handed bats such as Justyn-Henry Malloy, Matt Vierling and Andy Ibáñez to make an impact. Malloy, in fact, had two hits off Boyd in Game 2 and is 3-for-4 in the series.

4. Will J-Ram have a superstar moment?

José Ramírez is one of the best hitters in baseball, and has been so for nearly a decade now: He has finished in the top 10 of MVP voting six times (and will surely make it a seventh this year) and probably should have won in 2020. He is building a stealth Hall of Fame case, and he has been the centerpiece of multiple Guardians division championship teams. What he hasn’t had yet is a truly breakthrough moment when he is discussed among some of the game’s more boldfaced names.

But he’ll never have a better chance than the one he has right now. Coming off a mammoth homer to help win Game 4, he is facing the best pitcher in baseball, in front of a roaring home crowd, with the opportunity to advance and play MLB’s signature franchise in the Bronx for the next week. One of the reasons Ramírez hasn’t quite broken though is that he hasn’t always been his best in the postseason: He’s a career .232 hitter in the playoffs, including 2-for-14 in this ALDS. But all it takes is one or two blasts to turn that around forever. Is this at last Ramírez’s moment?

5. Who can carry the AL Central torch?

The AL Central is often maligned, and it’s not too difficult to understand why. Remember, the last time the AL Central even had a team reach the ALCS was 2016, when Cleveland beat the Blue Jays to advance to the World Series (and, as you may remember, almost win it). We didn’t realize it as the time, but that was the end of a grand run for the AL Central: They’d had a team reach the ALCS six straight years, counting that season, before the current drought.

Obviously, that streak is ending this year. It helps when you have three teams in the division make the ALDS. But there may be some sort of generational handoff happening here. The Guardians have won two of the last three divisional titles, and five in the last decade, and while they do have an exciting farm system, they’re getting older on the big league roster. Meanwhile, the Tigers are full of young players (and have a solid farm system themselves) and sure look like a team that’s going to make some aggressive offseason moves. Are the Tigers going to take the baton from the Guardians and run with it? Or are the Guardians going to hang on for dear life? Years from now, we may look back at this series — and this game — as a pivot moment in this whole division.