Blown Away

In the wild-card era the baseball world can be turned upside down almost as fast as the bottle of champagne that lefthander Kenny Rogers emptied onto the behatted head of a uniformed Detroit police officer in plain view of a delirious Comerica Park crowd last Saturday night. It would have been preposterous to imagine such a tableau only a year ago, when the Tigers lost 91 games in a 12th straight losing season and Rogers, then a scofflaw Texas Ranger, was arrested on a misdemeanor assault charge for shoving a television cameraman. But now here they were, Rogers and the Tigers, wildly celebrating a dismantling of the New York Yankees in a American League Division Series that served as their get-out-of-jail-free card. Go ahead and try to make sense of this turn of fortune. You'd have had better luck trying to hit the 103-mph heat of bloody-eyed Detroit reliever Joel Zumaya under the cover of late-afternoon shadows. No team ever entered the postseason playing worse baseball than the Tigers, whose 19--31 stagger to the finish was unprecedented for a playoff team and relegated them to wild-card status on the final day of the season. And against the modern-day Murderers' Row lineup of New York, the team that had the greatest run differential in the majors in 2006 and tied for the most wins, Detroit brought a pitching staff with zero combined career postseason wins.

But if you've been paying attention to playoff baseball, especially since the labor agreement of 2002 created a luxury tax and increased revenue sharing, you've come to understand these postseason truisms: 1) the randomness of a short series mocks the established order of the regular season; 2) a pitcher's power is more important than his experience; and 3) the Yankees, losers of 10 of their last 13 postseason games, have become the game's emperor with no clothes.

All those realities were reaffirmed in the ALDS, which is how we arrived at a League Championship Series between Detroit and Oakland--two franchises that had not won a postseason series since 1984 and '90, respectively. The A's swept the Minnesota Twins, who made for yet another weird October turnabout in that they didn't look nearly as crisp as they had in the regular season. They flopped on defense, produced only one hit in 19 at bats with runners in scoring position and never held a lead. "We picked a bad time to have some bad ball games," Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said after the sweep was completed last Friday, summarizing the cruelty that a small sample of games can hold.

The unexpected has become the expected and the regular season increasingly less meaningful. Entering LCS play this week, wild-card teams had a much better record in postseason series (16--6) since 2002 than did the teams with the best regular-season records in their leagues (10--8). And if the New York Mets get past the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS (page 42), it will mean that the maximum of 10 different teams will have made the World Series in five years--an unprecedented churn rate among the 102 Series played.

Still, even Detroit manager Jim Leyland never anticipated his team would be part of an October like this when he took the job last fall. "Well, I didn't think we would be here this year," he said last Saturday night. "I thought that we would get better.... I thought that it would be a year or so before we got in a situation like this or would have a chance to."

The Tigers' profile is not unlike that of last year's world champion White Sox: deep in young power pitchers with little to no postseason experience, a breakout rookie throwing gas out of the bullpen, a middling offense that relies on the home run and an intense manager who is the dominant personality of the club. The players so admire Leyland that they carried him off the field on their shoulders after the clincher, a rare spectacle in this sport.

Through the fourth inning of Game 2, Detroit had lived down to what Leyland, this year's less-hyper version of Chicago skipper Ozzie Guillen, correctly surmised to be the popular view of the ALDS: The Tigers were the freshman team to the Yankees' varsity. New York had rolled to an 8--4 win in Game 1 and a 3--1 lead two days later with veteran Mike Mussina on the mound. But from that point on, the Yankees did not score another run until they were all but dead in the series, down 8--0 in the seventh inning of Game 4. In those 20 definitive innings Detroit outscored New York 17--0 and held the vaunted Yankees lineup to a .119 batting average. The Tigers did so with aggressive power pitching from starters Justin Verlander (whose fastball topped out at 100 mph), an uncharacteristically amped Rogers (hitting an uncharacteristic 94 on the radar gun) and Jeremy Bonderman (96). "We didn't do anything special," says Bonderman. "We just did what we always do: Be aggressive, throw strikes. We're going to do that against whoever we face."

The new faces chiefly responsible for Detroit's 24-game turnaround from last season are Leyland, who, after a six-year sabbatical from the dugout, replaced the fired Alan Trammell; Rogers, a 41-year-old veteran of six clubs, who signed as a free agent; Verlander, a 23-year-old rookie righthander who made only two major league starts in 2005; and Zumaya, a 21-year-old rookie righthander who, like Bobby Jenks did for the '05 White Sox, attacks hitters and life with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The Tigers drafted Zumaya in the 11th round in 2002 as a 17-year-old from Chula Vista, Calif., outside San Diego. He was a construction worker's kid who grew up playing baseball on shabby dirt fields across the border in Mexico and acting, by his own admission, like "a troublemaker" and "a punk." "I did a few things I regret," he says, though he declines to be more specific. "We were low-class, didn't have very much. My dad [Joel Sr.] gave me all my aggressiveness. He says, 'Don't back down from anyone, go after people, just like I taught you, and you'll be successful.'"

Leyland turned over Game 2 to Zumaya in the seventh inning, after the Tigers had scratched out a 4--3 lead against Mussina. The Yankees never had a chance. Zumaya retired all five batters he faced in the late-afternoon shadows of Yankee Stadium--including strikeouts of former MVP Jason Giambi and reigning MVP Alex Rodriguez, plus leading 2006 MVP candidate Derek Jeter. "Did you see any of those [pitches]?" Rodriguez asked home plate umpire Laz Diaz after striking out. "Because I didn't."