DETROIT – The fate of the Detroit Tigers’ season rests in the hands of Jack Flaherty.
Flaherty will start Game 3 of Detroit’s wildcard series against the division-rival Cleveland Guardians on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025.
The winner moves on to play the Seattle Mariners. The loser’s season is over.
Flaherty isn’t alone, of course. A dormant Tigers offense needs to finally wake up, and the bullpen will be asked to shoulder a heavy load should Flaherty get in early trouble.
But Tyler Holton got seven outs on Wednesday. Kyle Finnegan got five. Those are two of the team’s three best relievers, and they’ll likely be limited in this winner-take-all contest.
And it doesn’t feel like the Tigers are capable of scoring more than two or three runs at the most.
So Flaherty needs to be excellent for the Tigers to have a chance.
Ironically, Flaherty found himself in almost this exact same position five years ago to the day, on Oct. 2, 2020.
Because of the shortened COVID season, MLB had a best-of-three wildcard round that season, and Flaherty’s St. Louis Cardinals matched up with the San Diego Padres.
Flaherty, the team’s ace at the time, got the nod on the road in an afternoon Game 3.
And he was magnificent.
A Padres lineup that featured Fernando Tatis, Manny Machado, Wil Myers, Jake Cronenworth, and Tommy Pham managed just one run on six hits and two walks against Flaherty across six innings. He struck out eight batters and threw 110 pitches.
Unfortunately for Flaherty, the Cardinals couldn’t score a single run against nine Padres relievers that day -- a fate that sounds all too possible for Tigers fans as they await first pitch today.
What was long one of the top teams in the American League has turned into perhaps the most frustrating. The Tigers went 1-for-15 with men in scoring position on Wednesday, stranding 15 runners in a crushing loss.
They haven’t scored more than four runs in a nine-inning game since Sept. 10 -- a full three weeks ago.
There’s no sign of this Tigers offense breaking out of its funk, so it’s going to be up to Flaherty, who led the AL in losses, to come through in the biggest start of his Tigers career.
While the surface numbers for Flaherty are a bit worse than his actual performance, there’s no denying he’s a less consistent pitcher than a year ago. Yes, he can miss bats at a high level, but walks and hard contact could be a dangerous combination against an opportunistic Cleveland lineup.
Flaherty rose to the occasion for St. Louis after a rocky 2020 season. Can he do the same for Detroit?
We’re about to find out.