Clay Holmes, the Yankees might have wreaked havoc in the AL by waking up the Tigers

When Clay Holmes and the Yankees blew a one-run save at the end of the fast-paced duel between Marcus Stroman and Tarik Skubal on Sunday Night Baseball, it felt like Holmes had been the last straw. He proved once again that he simply couldn't be trusted with a one-run lead. A nationally televised game against an ace the Yankees had to have? Against them tigerof all teams?

A month and a half later, the same script can be read with a completely different tone. Yes, Holmes was eventually demoted, but it took a grand slam from Wyatt Langford and the elimination of a lone star in the Lonestar State for him to make a move. And the tigers? They don't seem to be as clumsy anymore, and they can win baseball games against the league's elite whether Skubal is on the mound or not.

Occasionally they are down, but never at the end – largely thanks to Holmes and a trust-building team meeting.

According to Beau Brieske, the Tigers held a “rare” team meeting that marked a “turning point” in their season after losing several key veterans at the trade deadline and awaiting the arrival of a fleet of young players.

“And it wasn’t us who got beaten up. “It wasn’t anything bad,” Brieske clarified. “It was more about asking ourselves and having everyone look in the mirror and ask themselves, ‘What am I doing to be part of a winning team?’ Because right now, back then, we weren’t a winning team.”

That meeting, according to the Detroit Free Press, “took place after the trade deadline, around the time they played the New York Yankees in the MLB Little League Classic on August 18.” Pretty.

Of course, the Yankees' loss to the Tigers in the Little League Classic led to Detroit's turning point!

It's still fair to place some of the blame for the Tigers' rise on Holmes. Because who knows if they would have been able to jump off the mat in the same way if they hadn't seen their vision realized on a national stage?

According to people in the clubhouse, the Tigers' second-half vision was set in motion around the time they got Holmes' goat, and it certainly seems like the Yankees' failures have led them to believe that an unprecedented one Turnaround in the season is possible. At the time, Detroit probably believed they could prepare well for 2025, but nothing more. Jokes about the rest of the MLB.

Hopefully the Yankees will face the monster they helped create in the ALCS next week.