Jerry Green

While dramatic, Tigers-Twins race far from legendary

Champagne? The beverage of champions!

Prune juice would be more appropriate.

From my years as a toddler to my time as a tottering curmudgeon, it has been my pleasure to observe more than 70 so-called pennant races. Some have been bittersweet, but they have seldom been comical. There have been flops and disasters and pratfalls -- and wondrous rallies from long distance to win the journeys to the World Series or nowadays to just finish first in a division.

The pennant race can be the most classical event in all of sports, in my jaded opinion anyway. It is sustained over months and it can be dramatic, packed with suspense.

There is suspense now in the American League Central. Suspense flecked with tragicomedy.

Here it is tied -- all even -- on the final day of the schedule, Sunday, and perhaps destined for a one-game playoff Tuesday night. The self-destructive Tigers and the mediocre Twins, benefiting from largesse of a ballclub that is struggling still to finish what it started.

The Tigers now are in danger of giving away what they should have clinched days ago. The Twins, a baseball mediocrity, obviously grateful that they retain a chance to win this sad-sack division. The Tigers again losing to the White Sox Saturday and the Twins again defeating the Royals.

A three-game lead frittered away by the Tigers in three days.

Let 'em drink prune juice.

How'd this happen?

This has not been a pretty pennant race.

On Sept. 6, the Tigers boasted a seven-game lead in the division. It culminated as two ugly ballclubs locked in an ugly struggle.

The Tigers held first-place for months during the summer despite their multiple flaws:

• Their lack of run production.

• The unreliability of the bullpen.

• The necessity of starting pitchers fresh from the minor leagues in the final week of the race.

• The inability to defeat the Royals in September, destroyed by the same rinky-dink ballclub for the second time in four seasons.

• And slapstick in the outfield -- the failure much too often to catch flyballs that major league outfielders must catch.

All that, plus some quirky plays.

A strange season, for sure.

As it boils down to a conclusion, there is one misadventure that becomes the symbol of an ugly season with an ugly pennant race. One soft, routine flyball to left field. A flyball that vanished -- it seemed -- into the white roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis two Saturdays ago. The Tigers, and Justin Verlander, lost a ballgame to the Twins when gravity ruled.

Jim Leyland had stuck Don Kelly, a rookie brought up in September, into left as a defensive replacement. And there it was, with a national TV audience watching -- Kelly, arms raised in confusion, playing in a crazy ballpark in a strategic situation. The ball just disappeared, and then reappeared, hopping on the ground. Two batters later, the Twins took the lead.

Look back on that. Look back on the catchable ball that struck the Comerica Park fence Thursday when the town anticipated the Tigers would clinch it. Look back on the routine flyballs that fell to the grass in the losses Friday and Saturday nights -- and throughout the ugly season.

With all their flaws, the most grievous -- again to me -- is that the Tigers attempted to play the entire season without a left fielder of major league quality. They attempted to fool their way into the pennant playoffs with Carlos Guillen or Ryan Raburn, infielders by profession, or designated hitter Marcus Thames or the rookie Kelly playing in left.

Where have you gone, Willie Horton?

Leyland was stuck with the ruinous situation.

He went into this final weekend with his ballclub spinning. What's a big league manager to do?

"This is not Knute Rockne," he said in his televised media session after Friday night's dreadful loss to the White Sox. "It's storybook stuff. It makes good reading."

How does this compare?

Oh, but there has been storybook stuff in the pennant races of years ago -- flops and drama, large leads vanishing. That word again.

The Phillies of 1964 losing 10 successive games and wasting away a 6 ½-game lead in the final 12 games.

The Red Sox allowing a 14-game lead over the Yankees to fizzle away in '78 and losing in a playoff game on Bucky Dent's home run.

And most vivid is the nightmarish and incredible collapse by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 -- squandering every bit of a 13-game lead mid-August on. And the pennant won by the Giants on Bobby Thomson's home run in the bottom of the ninth, Thomson's homer the most scintillating moment in the entire history of Major League Baseball. Again in my jaded opinion.

That was storybook stuff.

And also banked in my memory bank is Jackie Robinson grabbing his neck in Braves Field, Boston, sending a nasty message to the umpires after he was ejected in a vital game with the Dodgers. A pennant race lost.

This year, in Detroit and Minneapolis, what passes for a pennant race cannot compare to this abbreviated reflection into history. Neither ballclub possesses the quality of the Red Sox and the Angels. And most certainly neither compares to the Yankees, the divisional playoff foe for the survivor.

Let 'em drink prune juice.

Jerry Green is a retired Detroit News sportswriter. Read his Web-exclusive column every Sunday at detnews.com.