Tigers' tense victory is payback for past heartbreaks

New York — Anniversaries are peculiar. They most often are celebrations, but they can also be commemorations of a date sad and bad.

Two years ago Thursday night, on Oct. 6, 2009, the Tigers played the Twins in the Metrodome. It was a one-game playoff showdown after the teams had played to a dead heat during the regular season.

That cinematic 6-5 loss to the Twins in a 12-inning classic, spiced by four lead changes, was as devastating, as cruel, as heartbreaking as any defeat the Tigers had known in more than 40 years.

Thursday evening at Yankee Stadium, precisely two years to the date, the Tigers played as if the gods owed them one for that agonizing October night 24 months ago at Minneapolis.

They won a baseball game against the Yankees at a public cauldron known as Yankee Stadium. They won, 3-2, in the fifth game of a divisional series that puts them four victories from a shot at the World Series.

"I'm thinking, 'Don't let it happen again,' " Dave Dombrowski said just after midnight Friday as he stood amid the noise and spray in Detroit's clubhouse, hoping to avoid drowning beneath hair and a T-shirt soaked in champagne

"I think it was the saddest day of my career," he said, recalling the Twins-Tigers epic. "It was so disappointing. So heartbreaking. It hurt."

A night for all

Thursday night belonged to Dombrowski, a president and general manager who pulled the lever on the players and deals that have delivered the Tigers to the World Series semifinals.

It belonged to players who not during one game or road-weary night this season played at less than full-throttle.

It belonged to a manager, Jim Leyland, who might someday say this season was the most satisfying he has known in 40 years of skippering baseball teams.

It was a personal trophy for an owner, Mike Ilitch, who has paid the freight for the stars who burned so brightly again Thursday and toppled the mighty Yankees.

And it was a night for fans who also endured that unbearable defeat two autumns ago and who this year beat down the turnstiles at Comerica Park to the tune of 2.64 million ticket-buyers. They might be worrying non-stop about jobs and college tuition and this month's rent, but they manage to love a baseball team and support it with dollars they somehow find.

In its assembly and beauty, Thursday night's game was emblematic of the Tigers' entire season.

They pitched and played artful baseball. They took a 3-0 lead. They cheated death a couple of times in the late innings.

But they won. They won with their calling card, solid starting pitching, a shut-'em-down back-end bullpen, and with just enough firepower to beat an immensely talented Yankees team that had won more games than any other American League club.

Now they head off to Texas for the beginning of a seven-game ALCS series against the Rangers.

They left for Dallas in Friday's early hours not only winners but as a new and respected member of baseball's elite.

"I would think so," Dombrowski said when asked if the Tigers had shaken their "Central Division softies" tag and were now getting that most luscious of words teams seek: respect. "I think people know who we are and how we play. We're a good team."

Getting it done

It was easy to say as the champagne spilled and the cigars were lit that Dombrowski had crafted this Tigers triumph. Leyland had said it again during his postgame press conference, praising Dombrowski's signing of Joaquin Benoit, who was like an executioner as he coolly put away the Yankees during Thursday night's hyper-tense seventh and eighth innings.

Dombrowski stopped when someone mentioned "his deals."

"Our deals," Dombrowski corrected.

He's right, of course. His scouting staff headed by Scott Reid did most of the legwork on scouting people like Benoit, Doug Fister, Delmon Young, and Victor Martinez, who were brought aboard either last offseason or during the July-August flesh feast that put the Tigers into high gear.

He made sure to credit Ilitch as the reason Dombrowski and his staff can make the moves for players an owner is obliged to pay.

But it is the GM's job to assemble and construct a winner. And no one had to tell Dombrowski in a champagne-drenched clubhouse that all the money, the scouting, the hopes, the risks, the reputations and jobs that were put on the line, had delivered a team one series closer to a championship.

They beat the Yankees with power and precision Thursday, using back-to-back home runs by Don Kelly and Young in the first inning, and later an RBI single from the master craftsman, Martinez.

Fittingly, the man who was paid $50 million last autumn to protect Miguel Cabrera from batting paralysis delivered. Martinez's winning hit was straight from a script the Tigers wrote when they signed him. He punished the Yankees after a walk to Cabrera just as during the Tigers' 95-victory spring and summer he had made managers and teams pay for putting Cabrera aboard.

The Tigers polished off their Thursday night party with another segment from their 2011 blueprint: scoreless relief by a bullpen that had been all but failsafe throughout the regular season.

They did it finally, by entrusting the game in the ninth inning to a closer, Jose Valverde, who was seemingly due for a spill at some point this season but who wouldn't yield Thursday, not even with 50,960 Yankees worshipers breathing fire down his neck in the ninth, and with extra gusto after Valverde had antagonized them with some silly remarks after Sunday's victory at New York.

And they accomplished it, as well, with a general in charge whom the Tigers civilians often seem intent on stripping of his stripes.

Leyland managed the series perfectly — not only tactically, but psychologically.

He kept his players grounded. He followed deep, solid, intuitive lessons he has learned during 40 years of managing.

And in the end, on a night in New York when the Yankees had every reason, every right, every expectation of winning, the Tigers prevailed.

You can forget all about the Metrodome and that bitter evening two years ago.

The Tigers compensated Thursday night. On a bigger stage, and with a bigger victory. And, just possibly, with more champagne on order.

lynn.henning@detnews.com