Kerry Carpenter’s dramatic home run and bat flip hands AL Cy Young to Tarik Skubal

The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Guardians 3-0 on Monday afternoon to even the ALDS 1-1 as it shifts to Detroit. The hero was Kerry Carpenter, who in just his second AB of the ballgame cranked a go-ahead, three-run bomb with two outs in the top of the ninth inning. He smashed that moonshot off of none other than Emmanuel Clase, the best closer in baseball and a frontrunner for AL Cy Young.

Clase made the curious decision to hammer Carpenter with three straight sliders. The third and final hung over the middle of the plate a little bit too long and Carpenter, who has raked right-handed pitching all season (especially with runners in scoring position) went nuclear.

The bat flip — perfection. That's what it's all about. Baseball is an aesthetic pursuit as well as an athletic pursuit. Carpenter understood the assignment, as they say.

It was a beautiful swing, sending the baseball over 400 feet into the right field bleachers. It was a rare mistake from Clase and the perfect encapsulation of this Tigers season. A pair of two-out singles and a well-timed bomb to even the series and potentially take the upper hand ahead of two games at home. That Detroit crowd hasn't seen postseason baseball in a decade. Expect a rabid environment in Comerica Park.

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Kerry Carpenter smashes game-winning HR against Emmanuel Clase to tie Tigers-Guardians series

Clase has not made a mistake of this magnitude all season. He finished the campaign with a 0.64 ERA and 0.66 WHIP, notching 66 strikeouts across 74.1 innings. Many believe he is the primary Cy Young competition for Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, who happened to pitch an absolute gem on Monday — seven innings, three hits, zero runs, eight K's.

Skubal was perfect through 4.1 innings, then worked himself out of a couple jams late in the game. He delivered a 0-0 scoreboard to Detroit's top relievers and the Tigers were able to complete the combined shutout. It was not a flawless performance for the Tigers — waiting until the ninth inning to string together hits is not the ideal strategy — but it was, most appropriately, a gritty performance.

The Cy Young award is a regular season honor, but it's hard not to feel like Monday was the final feather in Skubal's cap. With all due respect for Clase, who put up the best numbers pitch-for-pitch, Skubal carried a starter's workload and helped elevate this Tigers team to the postseason for the first time in nine years. That is now 13 scoreless innings for Skubal across two starts in October. It doesn't get much better than that.

Detroit needs to recapture this magic for a couple more games in order to keep this run alive, and it's fair to assume that Clase won't slip up like this again. This series is far from over, but momentum is officially on Detroit's side as the series transitions to Motown.