Tony Paul

One more at the Metrodome: Watch at your own risk

The baseball gods sure do have a sick sense of humor.

The Metrodome, a better fit for a flea market than baseball games, will host at least one more baseball game, after all.

It'll be the Tigers and Twins at 5 p.m. Tuesday -- a winner-take-all one-game playoff (or tiebreaker, since it's technically a regular-season game) to determine who wins the American League Central and advances to the postseason, where the Yankees are waiting oh-so-patiently for their first-round opponent.

Those prizes go to the winner.

The loser, well, the loser stays home -- just as the Tigers, certainly, would've preferred to do rather than having to play even one more game at the gray, gloomy morgue they thought they'd said their farewells and paid their disrespects to two weekends ago.

It's the greatest home-field advantage in all of sports -- at least, when it's baseball being played there, as it will be at least once more before the Twins move to the long-overdue Target Field in 2010. And while the Metrodome's been a nuisance for all visiting teams -- White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen last month even offered to be the special guest to remove the latest "Countdown to Outdoor Baseball" number, and he wanted to do this in the middle of his team's game! -- it's been an absolute nightmare for the Tigers.

And it's been this way -- "the loudest place I've ever been," Tigers manager Jim Leyland warned Tigers rookie pitcher Rick Porcello, who will get the start Tuesday -- since October 1987.

We all remember the 1987 American League Championship Series. It was the big, bad Tigers -- just three years removed from their latest World Series glory -- against the newly pesky Twins. Yet, with each fan waving their Homer Hanky, with each Tom Brunansky hit, with each scoreless inning from old friend Juan Berenguer, with the volume through the roof (the Metrodome, FYI, was not where the phrase "use your inside voice" originated), it was Twins in five. The Tigers' lone win, of course, came in Detroit.

Since that series, the Tigers' success in Minneapolis ... well, let's just say it's been as rare as SPF 30 sightings at the Metrodome.

In fact, it's been so maddening, so psychologically damning that the dome even made a conspiracy theorist of then-manager (and still mild-mannered) Alan Trammell, who once went public with his notion that the Twins actually had the air conditioning blowing out when they batted and in when the visitors batted.

Crazy, right? Perhaps, but then again, how else can you possibly explain the Tigers' misery in Minneapolis?

Starting with Game 1 of that ALCS 22 years ago -- the last time Detroit won a division championship, by the way -- the Tigers are a tough-to-comprehend 61-101 in the Baggy Dome. And this decade, the story's even scarier: 30-61 with 10 Twins sweeps. In fact, only once in the past 10 seasons have the Tigers had a winning record in that stadium that boasts all the personality of a Cheerio, and that was in 2007, when the two Tigers sweeps nearly matched their total from the previous 25 years playing there (three).

As for this year, the Tigers are 2-7 at the Metrodome, where, like there always is, there's been a Broadway's worth of drama. Just ask seldom-used outfielder Don Kelly, who, no doubt (and unfairly) will shoulder lots of the blame should the Tigers lose Tuesday and miss the playoffs, because it was him who lost that routine fly ball in that darn roof -- shaded, naturally, the color of a rubbed-up baseball -- turning another Justin Verlander victory and a four-game lead in the AL Central into another mysterious meltdown at the Metrodome.

The next day, Sunday, Sept. 20, the Tigers recovered nicely to win what they happily bragged was their last trip to the Bad Break Superstore.

Of course, as it turns out -- thanks to yet another Tigers' late-season slump and yet another Twins' late-season surge -- they were wrong. And that's not good news.

But those baseball gods have gotta be getting a kick out of it.

tpaul@detnews.com