Tigers 8, Yankees 3

Yanks vanquished! Bonderman pitches Tigers to the ALCS

Tom Gage / The Detroit News

DETROIT - And that, baseball fans, is what sheer joy looks like.

There's a heck of a chance the Tigers set a record on Saturday - for the most places after a postseason game from which champagne was sprayed.

One top of the dugout. The fans got doused from there.

Next to the dugout. Looks like those people were soaked pretty good, too.

In the tunnel near the clubhouse. Todd Jones and Pudge Rodriguez uncorked a couple of bottles and drenched the family members who were waiting outside.

Everywhere you looked, there was spray. And everywhere you looked - well, almost everywhere; the team that packed up and left was none too jubilant - there was happiness.

The Tigers had just beaten the vaunted Yankees, 8-3, to win their American League Division Series, meaning they'll play Oakland for the AL pennant - and for the first time since 1984, a full generation ago, they were able to celebrate something special, something truly special, with their fans.

And did they ever.

Along with champagne, there was flowing gratitude - specifically the sight of manager Jim Leyland, after being carried off the field on the shoulders of his players, touching his heart and pointing to as much of the crowd in front of as many sections as he could after the game.

"I was saying thank you," he said.

Plain and simple. Thank you.

Just like the reason the Tigers won. They played better baseball than the Yankees in this series. For three games in a row, they did everything better than the Yankees, who could be facing huge changes this winter.

And who'll probably spend more money.

But it's not the money you spend. Neither is it the look of the lineup you put on the field.

"They don't hand out championships for that," Derek Jeter said, "you still have to do it on the field. and we didn't."

It's the way you play the game.

Suffice to say, the Tigers might not be able to play it better - nor might they have to - than how they played after the fourth inning of Game 2, when they trailed 3-1 in New York but started to bounce back.

They bounced back to win that game, plus the next game - then proceeded to dismantle the team of Mantle and Maris with a finishing triumph that was far more embarrassing to the Yankees than the five runs by which they lost.

Not to mention being far more gratifying to the Tigers than the five runs by which they won.

It was no contest. From the time the Tigers returned home to Comerica Park, the series itself, in fact, was absolutely no contest. That's how good the Tigers were - and that's how bad the Yankees were.

The Tigers held the Yankees scoreless for 20 innings - that great lineup for 20 innings. But as Jeter said, lineups are on paper. Games are won on the field.

"And we did nothing here," said Jeter.

The Tigers did something, though. Actually, they did it all.

They pitched - Kenny Rogers with his gem on Friday night, then Jeremy Bonderman stepping up - "with the same look in his eyes as Kenny", said general manager Dave Dombrowski - and retiring the first 15 hitters he faced.

They played defense - Craig Monroe with an outstanding sliding catch in the ninth on Gary Sheffield's dying liner after a leadoff single by Bobby Abreu.

It was 8-1 at the time, but there's no such thing as a guarantee the Yankees are beaten until they're beaten, which , and because it preceded Jorge Posada's two-out, two-run home run - is the reason Monroe's catch was still an immensely important catch.

They also hit - knocking Yankees' starter Jaret Wright out of the game by the third. There was never a time in this series, even Game 1 which they lost, that the Tigers didn't hit the ball well.

Compare that to the Yankees, who were blanked in Game 3 and were toyed with for much of Game 4 by Bonderman, who needed only 39 pitches to get through the perfect five innings with which he began the game.

Robinson Cano ended Bonderman's bid for whatever with a leadoff single in the sixth. The Yankees didn't score off him until the seventh, however - and after the second, in which the Tigers took a 3-0 lead on home runs from Magglio Ordonez and Monroe, the bubbly could have been icing.

Bonderman had seen the division title slip from his fingers, when he blew a 6-0 lead to Kansas City. But he wasn't about to squander this one.

"Kenny and me talked before his start," said Bonderman, "and I said 'you go out and do your thing and I'll do mine. We'll take care of this.'

"Kenny did, so I had to live up to my word. This is a great thing that happened to us."

"He was a pitcher's dream as far as doing what he was trying to do," said Yankees' manager Joe Torre of Bonderman. "He was a perfect example of keeping hitters off-balance."

The Tigers, for their part, were a perfect example, too - of how to topple a heavily-favored team, and also how to celebrate the fact that they did.

"It's kind of ironic, really," said Leyland, "because in spring training when we played the Yankees, I said to the players, 'I want you to get to where we take the field like the Yankees take the field.'"

He's done a good job of doing that. But the difference this time was how the two teams walked off the field.

Heads down for the Yankees.

Heads up, and corks flying for the Tigers.

You can reach Tom Gage at tom.gage@detnews.com.