<\/p>\n
Tarik Skubal rarely every gives up home runs. He only allowed 18 in 195 1\/3 innings this season and was even better last year \u201415 in 192 innings, good for 0.8 and 0.7 HR\/9, respectively. Even before he had fully evolved into his two-time Cy Young-winning form, he was pretty good at avoiding the long ball and had gone five regular seasons without giving up a grand slam.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And then Lane Thomas happened. In Game 5 of the 2024 Tigers-Guardians ALDS, Skubal was on the mound to try to keep Detroit’s miracle run alive. He was great through four innings but fell apart in the fifth, when he gave up three singles with only one out and hit Jos\u00e9 Ram\u00edrez with a pitch to walk in Cleveland’s tying run.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Skubal served up a first-pitch meatball of a sinker to Thomas, who sent it out into left-center for a grand slam<\/a>. The Tigers ended up going home on a final score of 7-3.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thomas was absent during the Guardians’ playoff run this year, having undergone surgery for plantar fasciitis in late September, and he became a free agent at the end of the season.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But Tigers fans haven’t seen the last of him. On Thursday, Will Sammon of The Athletic<\/em> reported that he had agreed to a deal with the Royals to remain in the AL Central.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Skubal has since given up one more grand slam \u2014 to Shea Langeliers of the Athletics<\/a> (a team that the Tigers mystifyingly always seem to lose to) \u2014 but Thomas gets the individual honor of being the first to ever do it, and in a decisive postseason game, no less. He also hit .316 with a .917 OPS, two homers and nine RBI in the ALDS against Detroit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tigers fans should keep a side eye toward the Royals, who have been relatively active in a pretty dead offseason for the AL Central. After signing Thomas, they extended Gold Glove infielder Maikel Garcia<\/a> on a five-year contract, and they’ve reportedly been eyeing the Dodgers’ Teoscar Hern\u00e1ndez<\/a> in trade talks. Thomas’ presence should take some heat off of that particular rumor, but they could still use an offensive upgrade from Kyle Isbel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It isn’t that Thomas is even a particularly prolific hitter against the Tigers \u2014 he has a .238\/.286\/.405 career line against them in the regular season \u2014\u00a0but Detroit fans are never going to forget that grand slam, and he’ll have a lot more opportunities to do more of that now that he’s staying in the division.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source motorcitybengals.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tarik Skubal rarely every gives up home runs. He only allowed 18 in 195 1\/3 innings this season and was even better last year \u201415 in 192 innings, good for 0.8 and 0.7 HR\/9, respectively. Even before he had fully evolved into his two-time Cy Young-winning form, he was pretty good at avoiding the long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2197153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2197152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Mortal-Tigers-enemy-stays-in-AL-Central-after-leaving-Guardians.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2197152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2197154,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197152\/revisions\/2197154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2197153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2197152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2197152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2197152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Tigers killer Lane Thomas is staying in the AL Central after signing a deal with the Royals<\/h2>\n