It’s likely not too many people have heard of or seen the movie Wolfs, even though it features Brad Pitt and George Clooney in a crowd-pleaser action movie, throwing witty banter at each other for two hours. However, the film dropped three weeks ago on Apple TV+. No wide release, little marketing power behind it, and available only on a streaming service that lags behind Netflix, Hulu, and other platforms. Likewise, the MLB playoff picture began to take shape around the same time, and casual fans of the sport probably hadn’t heard or seen much of the Detroit Tigers or the Cleveland Guardians, who play in the AL Central and don’t receive much national media attention.
Nevertheless, the two teams met in an ALDS that spanned the full five games. The Guardians outlasted the Tigers 7-3 in Game 5 on Saturday to earn a trip to the ALCS, where they’ll meet the New York Yankees in a best-of-seven series with a World Series berth on the line.
In Wolfs, Pitt and Clooney play fixers who are sent in to clean up messy situations created by people with enough money and power to avoid facing consequences for their actions. The two are assigned to the same job despite this being the type of work better suited to a lone wolf. The dual fixer scenario highlights how the two men who have never worked together still generally follow the same playbook. They ask the same questions, follow the same procedures, and tap into the same network of resources. Both fancy themselves not only the best at what they do, but Clooney declares, “No one can do what I do,” mere moments before another character proclaims, “No one can do what he does,” in reference to Pitt.
Meanwhile, many have used the Spider-Man meme to characterize this series between the Tigers and the Guardians, noting the similarities across the two teams’ roster construction, styles of play, and strategies. Both teams reside in small markets, run payrolls in the bottom third of the league, and have a knack for turning waiver wire claims into successful restoration projects.
On the field, the two clubs use their bullpens in aggressive and unconventional ways. They rely on openers, prioritize matchups over fixed roles, and, in the case of the Guardians in Game 5, bring in Cade Smith to start the third inning of an elimination game even though starter Matthew Boyd looked strong his first time through the Tigers lineup.
The teams also maximize their offenses by plugging lesser hitters with specialized skills into situations where they can succeed. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch deploys Kerry Carpenter to bat almost exclusively versus right-handed pitchers because his 176 wRC+ this season against righties was sixth best in the majors, compared to his putrid 18 wRC+ against lefties. For the Guardians, both David Fry and Will Brennan have posted well above-average numbers when pinch-hitting, a situational skill many sluggers struggle to master or even perform competently. And yet, in 16 plate appearances, Brennan had a 261 wRC+, good for fifth in the bigs (minimum 10 PA), while Fry logged a 135 wRC+ over 35 PA, a number only two other hitters with at least that many PA were able to top (Randal Grichuk and Romy Gonzalez). A likely part of Brennan and Fry’s pinch-hit success is the scenarios selected for them. Brennan sees right-handed pitching significantly better, while Fry favors lefties, and both hitters do particularly well against four-seam fastballs and sliders, meaning Cleveland manager Stephen Vogt can cherry pick opportunities to optimize their strengths.
For two mirror-image teams, a series win comes down to finding an edge – that one trick their opponent lacks. In Wolfs, Pitt and Clooney’s characters (whose names are never revealed) are technically working together toward a common goal, but their egos have them constantly trying to one-up each other, to prove they have the edge the other doesn’t, that they truly are the best in this very specialized field.
For Clooney, his trick is a method for loading and transporting a dead body through a public space in a way that doesn’t make it obvious to onlookers that he’s moving a dead body. The task sounds simple, but becomes much more complex when working alone, as fixers do. Detroit’s trick is Tarik Skubal. The expected 2024 AL Cy Young winner makes the task of disposing hitters look easy using some crafty trickery of his own, as Michael Rosen wrote about a few days ago. The Guardians lack a clear ace, and their rotation this season was thinner than planned after Shane Bieber succumbed to a season-ending UCL injury following his second start of the season. Tanner Bibee solidified himself as a no. 1, but a no. 1 starting pitcher isn’t an ace. Skubal is an ace.
On Saturday, the Tigers wheeled out their luggage rack, their entire season riding on its sturdy frame, and things went as expected for the first four innings. But in the fifth, the cart hit a speed bump and everything tumbled to the ground.
In the bottom of the fifth inning, Skubal yielded singles to Andrés Giménez, Steven Kwan, and Fry to load the bases with one out. Then on his second pitch to José Ramírez, Skubal sailed a 100-mph sinker up and in, drilling Ramírez in the forearm and allowing a run to score. On the next pitch, a sinker aimed at the bottom half of the zone with the intention of inducing a groundball double play, Lane Thomas barreled a 400-ft home run into the left field seats.
Prior to the Thomas grand slam, Skubal was on a 32-inning homerless streak. He ranked eighth in the majors in HR/9 during the regular season, and he’d never allowed a grand slam. Moreover, Skubal allowed five or more runs in an entire outing only twice all season, never mind in a single inning. Those numbers suggest that it would’ve been unlikely for Skubal to hit such a large and disastrous speed bump; however, this speed bump was by no means camouflaged.
Skubal, who averaged 15 pitches and four batters faced per inning during the regular season, had already faced five batters and thrown 17 pitches in the fifth while notching only one out by the time Thomas stepped into the box. Skubal was struggling to execute the game plan, and Thomas meanwhile, owns a 146 wRC+ against lefty pitchers (compared to an 82 wRC+ against righties). Hinch saw the speed bump coming and assumed his ace could handle it. In his postgame comments, Hinch likened the scenario to a similar sequence in the third where Thomas popped up to end the inning. But Hinch failed to note that in the third Kwan reached on an error, as opposed to besting Skubal, and Thomas was batting with two outs rather than just one, giving Skubal more options for escaping the inning, rather than needing to hunt for a groundball.
Clooney’s luggage rack trick gives him the upper hand early in the mission, just as Skubal’s four shutout innings did for him, but as unexpected challenges arise, Pitt comes back with a trick or two of his own. When it becomes clear the pair will need the services of an off-the-books doctor, Pitt is the one who gets his contact to come through. For the Guardians, Kwan has been answering the call all series long. He was batting .500 coming into Game 5, and then he collected three additional hits and played a role in both of Cleveland’s scoring rallies. His 229 wRC+ in the postseason so far is fifth among hitters on divisional round teams.
Kwan’s profile as a hitter is incredibly consistent. He puts the ball in play in almost 80% of his plate appearances and his rolling wOBA rarely dipped below .300 over the course of the entire season. That said, Kwan is the Guardians’ second-best hitter behind Ramírez. That level of consistency and production from not even the best, but second-best hitter in the lineup, gives an edge to Cleveland’s offense that Detroit doesn’t have. The Tigers’ best hitter is Riley Greene, while their second-best option is Carpenter, who only hits well against right-handed pitching. After Greene and Carpenter, the rest of the hitters on the roster have been largely league average. Kwan’s consistency, paired with stronger contributions up and down the lineup than the Tigers can regularly deliver, gave the Guardians an advantage over their AL Central compatriots that paid off in a do-or-die game.
But Kwan isn’t the only trick the Guardians bring to the table, nor did Pitt’s character arrive on the scene with just the number for a doctor willing to treat patients without asking questions. When it comes time to question the only person who actually has the answers to get them out of their mess, he boasts an interrogation technique that always gets results. That technique turns out to be an aggressive brute force approach to overpower the witness. It’s not particularly mysterious or clever but it does get results, and so does Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase, who was called upon for a six-out save.
Clase entered the game after Eli Morgan walked Parker Meadows to begin the eighth, and Cleveland’s closer retired all six batters he faced, needing only 24 pitches. Clase’s dominance is a function of hammering left-handed hitters with his cutter that touches 100 mph and mostly mixing in his slider and four-seamer only to righties. When Carpenter took him deep for a three-run shot in Game 2 of the series, Clase had gone off book and thrown the lefty three sliders in a row, all of which were aimed down and missed up. With runners on, Clase opted to chase a swing and miss with the slider rather than trust his cutter (perhaps because lefty Trey Sweeney had just lined a cutter into center during the prior at-bat). In Game 5, Clase returned to his tried and true approach for interrogating hitters until they give him what he wants and provided the advantage Cleveland needed to advance.
Of course, the Tigers don’t have a Clase of their own, because no team other than Cleveland does. His performance this season is likely to earn him down-ballot Cy Young votes, a rarity for relievers. What the Tigers do have is a strong bullpen that is expertly deployed by Hinch to play to each hurler’s strengths. But as noted in recent postseasons, reliever familiarity can become an issue in long series. Both teams’ bullpens ceded runs in Game 5 after being asked to cover over 40 innings across the series (18 IP for Detroit and 25 IP for Cleveland). Part of what makes a trick effective is secrecy. Neither Pitt nor Clooney want to let their rival see their tricks. For the fixers, they don’t want another fixer borrowing their tactics; for the Tigers and Guardians, they don’t want their opponent examining their strategies for too long, lest they learn how to beat them.
Over-reliance on certain strategies meant neither team was without fault. Even after Thomas secured a lead for the Guardians, the Tigers chipped away at a bullpen they’d already seen for 18 innings, one that was then asked to cover an additional seven. The Tigers rode their ace a bit too hard and their offense buckled under the weight when asked to carry the load in his stead.
Throughout their misadventure, it becomes clear that both Pitt and Clooney are not operating at peak performance. Both spend time clutching at their sore backs, they forget to check that the dead body they’re moving is actually dead, and they neglect to notice the drugs they discover are rigged with a tracking device. Though elite in many ways, they’re not immune to making their own mess, and many of their ingenious strategies were developed to compensate for shortcomings.
By the movie’s end (sorry, spoiler alert), Pitt and Clooney realize the whole scenario was set up to “clean” them from the fixing industry. It’s not a job with a retirement plan, so cleaning them translates to whacking in a way that ideally doesn’t draw too much attention. Except they both survive their hush-hush whacking, and as a result, they’re facing a more overt execution as the final scene cuts to black and the credits roll. The Guardians survived and are now on to face the Yankees in the ALCS. The Yankees aren’t a perfect team either, but they’re not another AL Central lone wolf. The Yankees are a powerhouse operation, flush with resources. Were the Guardians and Tigers merely competing with one another for the opportunity to get cleaned by an organization known as the Evil Empire? Or does New York have a weakness that Cleveland can strategically exploit?
I guess we’ll have to tune in to the sequel to find out.
