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By Ben Watanabe
Contributing Sports Writer
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Baseball is a funny game.
One week you've got one of the best pitchers in the game, you're wallowing near the bottom of the standings and all the mojo around the team is bad.
The next week, that pitcher is gone, you're hot on the trail of first place in your division and it's nothing but good vibes.
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This is where the Detroit Tigers find themselves.
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The Tigers topped the San Francisco Giants, 3-1, on Sunday to pull within 3 1/2 games of the Chicago White Sox in the AL Central and, improbably, within a single game of an AL Wild Card spot. They entered Monday 5-2 since the trade that sent ace Tarik Skubal to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and what was once trending toward a lost season in the Motor City is now teasing a storybook finish.
"The way that we're playing, the at-bats we're having, the way these guys are throwing the ball right now, I think we could play with anybody," Detroit centerfielder Zach McKinstry said, per MLB.com's Henry Schulman.
Does seven games matter in judging whether Skubal's departure fueled the turnaround? Certainly not. That's far too small a sample size -- particularly against the Athletics, Seattle Mariners and Giants, who are hardly world-beaters -- to draw any strong conclusions about one man or even an entire team. The Dodgers, after all, entered Monday 1-6 since the Skubal trade, but nobody in LA would willingly trade places with the Tigers. Plus, this string of three consecutive series victories technically began while Skubal was still in orange and blue.
Still, seven games very much matter in the scope of the season, where every win counts. The Tigers were recently is the same boat as the A's, Mariners and Giants, so credit them for rebounding. And as much was they've limped through a mediocre season, they've never been as buried as the Guardians were last year before wiping out a 15 1/2-game deficit to win the division.
The Tigers likely still have the sour taste of that collapse in their mouths. Nobody will be putting their turnaround this season in the 2025 Guardians' category, but the fact that they're back in the hunt means that they can make the final two months as interesting for the Guardians as Cleveland made it for them last fall.
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