Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) – Dillon Dingler hit a go-ahead home run and Javier Baez sparked a four-run seventh inning as the Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Guardians 6-3 on Thursday to advance in the Major League Baseball playoffs. The Tigers turned the tables on the Guardians, extending a topsy-turvy season in which they led Cleveland by a massive 15-and-a-half game margin in July only for the Guardians to pip them for the American League Central division title.
The Tigers’ epic mid-season collapse — which included five losses to the Guardians in the last two weeks of the season — helped Cleveland author the biggest regular-season comeback in baseball history. But it’s the Tigers, who won game one but lost game two of the best-of-three wild card series in Cleveland, who will face the American League West champion Seattle Mariners in a best-of-five AL division series starting on Saturday.
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“It was very satisfying,” said Dingler, who grew up in Ohio. “You know, we played this team way too many times in the later part of the season.” Designated hitter Kerry Carpenter gave Detroit a 1-0 lead with a third-inning double. Cleveland tied it up in the fourth, but Dingler’s solo homer put Detroit up 2-1 in the sixth.
Baez then led off the seventh with a double and reached third on a bunt by Parker Meadows. Wenceel Perez smacked a single that scored them both before Spencer Torkelson and Riley Green added run-scoring singles to push Detroit’s lead to 6-1. Cleveland clawed back two runs in the bottom of the eighth but couldn’t conjure more comeback magic.
Two other deciding game threes were on tap on Thursday. The New York Yankees, who fell to the Los Angeles Dodgers in last year’s World Series, were also looking to advance in the American League playoffs when they hosted the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees edged their archrivals 4-3 in game two to force the decider, which will send the winner to face the top-seeded Toronto Blue Jays.
The Chicago Cubs, in the playoffs for the first time since 2020, beat the San Diego Padres 3-1 to advance to a National League division series meeting with the top-seeded Milwaukee Brewers. The Cubs chased Padres starting pitcher Yu Darvish in the second inning, loading the bases with nobody out and scoring two runs on a Pete Crow-Armstrong single and a walk by Dansby Swanson. Michael Busch belted a solo home run off reliever Robert Suarez to push Chicago’s lead to 3-0 in the seventh, and Chicago survived a nervy top of the ninth which San Diego’s Jackson Merrill led off with a solo home run.
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