Orioles awaken Tigers to their ongoing nightmare in ALDS Game 1

With the return of the Kansas City Royals to the postseason, we've seen a plethora of, "Look at all the stuff that's happened since the Royals last made the playoffs in 1985!" pieces. We even did one here. That's fine and all, but if just making it through the regular season was the entire point, we could just stop the season after Game 162, congratulate the division winners, and go home. The real goal is a World Series championship, and in that sense, the Orioles and Tigers have been waiting longer than the Royals.

Both teams opened Game 1 of the ALDS as if they were aware of the lapse of time and wanted to solve the question of who would go to the next round in one inning. After Chris Tillman pitched a scoreless first to open the game, reigning AL Cy Young Award-winner Max Scherzer took the mound for the Tigers and and allowed a two-run home run to Nelson Cruz.

It's possible that Tillman was reflecting on such weighty matters in the top of the second, because he opened the frame by allowing back-to-back home runs to Tigers designated hitter Victor Martinez and left fielder J.D. Martinez. At that moment, if you were trying to think ahead as to how the story might end and you were operating mostly on what you knew coming in, your stream of thought might have gone something like this:

• Sure, Scherzer bent, but he hasn't necessarily broken. He'll settle down.
• The Orioles have decent starters, but Tillman isn't a Scherzer. His bending probably does predict some breaking.
• Besides, those Tigers can hit, so there's more where this came from. Tigers will be on top in a sec.

That prediction would have turned out to be almost totally wrong. Tillman staunched the wound, striking out two of the next three batters. He wouldn't be in trouble again until the top of the fifth, when two two-out singles and a walk loaded the bases. Tillman escaped via a Torii Hunter groundout, at which point his day was done, manager Buck Showalter letting his starter leave with his dignity intact and turning things over to his strong late-game options lefty Andrew Miller, whose strikeout rate of 14.9 batters per nine innings was one of the highest of all time, and sidearming righty Darren O'Day, one of the few relievers who truly deserves to have the adverb "consistently" preface the word "effective" -- except for on Thursday, except against one of the greatest right-handed hitters of all time in Miguel Cabrera.

It is worth noting that as a sidewinder, O'Day murders same-side hitters. Over the course of his career, right-handed hitters have averaged .193/.265/.283 against him, with but 14 home runs in 960 plate appearances. Cabrera was 2-for-7 against him in the regular season. That's .286 in singles. That's like holding anyone else hitless. Fortunately for the Orioles, an Ian Kinsler baserunning error on Hunter's line drive to short meant that Cabrera's shot went for one run instead of a game-tying two.

Meanwhile, Scherzer didn't break, but he also had more bend in him. A walk and a couple of singles in the bottom of the second put the Orioles up, 3-2. He held them there until the bottom of the seventh, when shortstop J.J. Hardy opened the frame with a solo home run -- and then Scherzer struck out the side.

The Cabrera homer moved Showalter to ask his relatively untested closer Zach Britton (if Cruz, who added another RBI late, helps puncture the exaggerations surrounding baseball and PEDs, Britton puts the lie to the idea that closers are born rather than made) to get four outs. That became a moot point shortly thereafter, when the Orioles drove a truck through the porous Tigers bullpen, aided and abetted by its chronically weak defense. The rally started with Alejandro De Aza, like Miller, a canny in-season pickup by O's general manager Dan Duquette. Duquette is an inveterate tinker whose love of ballplayer dumpster diving perfectly suits this franchise, which had failed to solve their problems through the farm system or free agency before the much-derided former Red Sox executive came along to patch things together with spare parts. See also: Steve Pearce.

One game doesn't necessarily prove anything, even if it so aptly points up the loser's weaknesses. The Tigers could still come back and ransack the Orioles over the next three games. Justin Verlander could extend his strong regular-season finish into Game 2, and the same goes for David Price in Game 3, though why Price and Verlander are pitching in that order, only Brad Ausmus knows.

What is certain, though, is that it's time for those preconceived notions to go in the trash. All the star-power is with the Tigers. That's true even if the Orioles had the better year on paper, winning six more games. It was easy to put aside their league-leading 211 home runs and think of their lineup, with its missing Chris Davis (2013 version, anyway), Matt Wieters, and Manny Machado and think of it as lesser-than, with the same going for the Cy Young-free pitching staff when compared with the Tigers' three winners. All of that may be wrong.