CLEVELAND — One baseball fairytale ends.
Another goes on.
Don’t let the Tigers’ enthralling run — as wonderfully out of nowhere as it was — diminish the magic in its own right of the scene Saturday at Progressive Field.
In a battle of old baseball towns — in the first-ever playoff series between two of the five youngest teams in the sport that season — it was ultimately the Guardians who were too precocious to know any better, blasting their way to a 7-3 victory in the winner-take-all Game 5 of the AL Division Series.
How’s that for an October surprise?
A Cleveland season that has defied expectations got another day and a moment to match, when in the fifth inning Lane Thomas blistered a grand slam off previously unhittable Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, setting off a stranger-hugging coronation that rattled the ballpark with joy.
Next thing you knew, the celebration was on, and the Guardians had a glamour party to crash.
How dumb and beautiful is this game?
As Cleveland heads to New York to begin the AL Championship Series on Monday, consider the season-opening payrolls of the four remaining teams:
1. Mets — $306 million
2. Yankees — $303 million
3. Dodgers — $250 million
…
28. Guardians — $93 million
No, one of those clubs is not like the others, and the Guardians — if not their fans — wouldn’t have it any other way.
Afterward, in a clubhouse sheathed in plastic, Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt — a bottle of champagne in hand — told his team: “I’m so proud of this group. Back against the wall. Never out of it. We answer and we shut them down. We’ve still got work to do. Let’s freaking go!”
Then …
Delirium, the Budweiser and bubbly raining down from every direction.
“This is incredible,” Thomas said.
Now, before we go on, let us properly appreciate the Tigers, who so captured the imagination of their fans the past two months.
From eight games under .500 in August to seven outs from the ALCS on Thursday, a team that featured 14 players who were Mud Hens regulars this season took Detroit on a ride no one will forget.
The Tigers will be back.
“I have a heartbroken team for all the right reasons,” manager A.J. Hinch said. “We left everything we could on the field against a really good team, and we didn't want the season to end as abruptly as it did. But I thanked them. I thanked them for everything that they're about in that room. I'm really proud to be the manager.”
What a story.
But, again, so are the Guardians.
Go back to the spring, and little was expected of a group that lost 86 games last year.
Cleveland was so young that even if Vogt — the 39-year-old rookie manager — had suited up, it still would have fielded the greenest club in the game.
It promised to be another long season.
Which, of course, it proved to be.
Just not in the way we predicted.
The Guardians — champions of the AL Central — played on into October, a tribute to the best bullpen in baseball, timely hitting and defense, and a couple well-placed midseason acquisitions, including starter Matthew Boyd and outfielder Lane Thomas.
And on Saturday it all came together beautifully.
With a 30 percent chance of evening showers and the game 100 percent not involving the Yankees, MLB moved the scheduled primetime first pitch up to 1 p.m. But the early start muted neither the crowd of 34,105 nor the Guardians.
Borrowing a page from the Tigers’ playbook, Cleveland rode a little pitching chaos of its own — Boyd and seven relievers — then got the hit you figured would never come.
Not against Skubal, the 6-3, 240-pound linebacker — sorry, left hander — who just five days earlier tossed seven scoreless innings and had not allowed a run since Sept. 18.
Finally, though, the Guardians made the soon-to-be Cy Young Award winner look human.
In the fifth, three singles loaded the bases with one out, and, after Skubal hit Jose Ramirez with a pitch to tie the game at 1, Thomas came to the plate looking fastball.
He got it on the first pitch — 97 mph down the middle — and didn’t miss, depositing the ball 396 feet over the big wall in left.
The crowd that Skubal had loudly told to shut the bleep up during the Tigers’ Game 2 win did not oblige this time. The place lost it.
“I don't even know if I have the words, but you dream of at-bats like that as a little kid,” said Thomas, acquired in a trade with Washington. “To do it at this stage, in this game and to come through for the guys in the clubhouse, it feels awesome.”
Vogt used the same word to capture the day, before stopping himself.
“But we know our work's not done,” he said. “We don't want to be satisfied with this. We want to keep it rolling. We're not done yet.”
No, the Guardians have a party to crash.
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