Tigers Steal One on a Ninth-Inning Error, 6-5
Detroit won this game the ugliest way possible — on a ninth-inning error by Toronto's pitcher that scored McKinstry with the go-ahead run. Kazuma Okamoto had already swung the night on its head with a 390-foot three-run shot, and then the Tigers turned around and took it right back.
Toronto looked in control early. Kirk singled to left in the first to score Bateman, and then Troy Melton — pitching for Detroit — threw two wild pitches that let Springer score, putting the Blue Jays up 2-0. The Tigers' bullpen was doing them no favors, and for six innings, that two-run cushion held. Jose Soriano worked 6.1 innings for Toronto, allowing 5 hits and 4 earned runs with 5 strikeouts — a solid enough line that should have been good enough to win.
The seventh inning is where this game got genuinely strange. Detroit strung together three straight hits — Dingler singled to score Torres, Clark doubled to score Dingler and Greene, and Torkelson doubled to score Clark — turning a 2-0 deficit into a 4-2 lead in what appeared to be a complete momentum reversal. Then Okamoto happened. With Springer and Kirk on base, he launched a 390-foot homer to left that flipped the win probability from 20% to 77% in Toronto's favor — a 57-point swing on a single swing. Just like that, the Blue Jays led 5-4, and the Rogers Centre looked like it had its answer.
It didn't. Detroit tied it in the eighth when Callahan singled to left to score McGonigle, and then the ninth delivered the kind of ending that makes baseball genuinely maddening. McKinstry scored the go-ahead run on an error, with Lee reaching first on an error by Toronto's pitcher Varland. Detroit wins 6-5. The story of the night was a game that changed leads three times in three innings, with Okamoto's homer as the most electric moment and a pitcher's error as the final word. Riley Greene and Kevin McGonigle each went 2-for-5 for Detroit, and Max Clark's two-RBI double in the seventh looks like the at-bat that started the comeback — but it was Varland's miscue that actually ended it.