Tigers should be grateful a different historic collapse is distracting from division loss

With the Tigers' loss to the Red Sox and the Guardians' win over the Rangers on Sunday, Detroit officially lost what was a 15.5-game lead on July 8 and finished a single game shy of their first AL Central title since 2014. The 2025 Tigers' September was brutally ugly; they posted a .292 winning percentage — their worst in a full month of play since April 2021 — and won just a single series.

But with their narrow 2-1 victory over the Red Sox on Saturday, they clinched a spot in the postseason. The wins they'd banked in the first half were able to carry them, even if the second half gave fans little faith that they'd be able to make a deep postseason run.

Detroit narrowly avoided what would've been an historic record in baseball. To be fair, a lot of things can be spun into records in baseball when you really get down into the minutiae, but this was a big one. A 15.5-game blown lead and failure to make the postseason would've been the biggest collapse in the modern era. Even though the Tigers only ended up doing the former, their drop off of a cliff in the second half was still mortifying.

Luckily, there's a different collapse sucking all of the air out of the room.

The Mets had a 5.5-game lead over the Phillies and a .652 winning percentage (the best in baseball) through June 12. Their loss to the Marlins, of all teams, on Sunday means that they'll be staying at home in October.

Mets' utter failure is distracting from Tigers' embarrassing blown division lead

Everything went downhill for the Mets after June 12. Just a week later, the Phillies had caught up with them, and though the two teams battled at times for the top spot in the AL East, New York was never able to bring their lead over 1.5 games after that. They trailed from Aug. 3 through the end of the regular season and were gunning it out with the Reds for the final spot in the NL Wild Card race. The Reds and Mets had identical season records, but the Reds held the tiebreaker. All they needed was for the Marlins to give their division rivals some grief.

On Sunday, the Mets got five hits and seven walks off Miami's pitching staff, but couldn't score a run. Closer Edwin Díaz came out to pitch in the fifth. The game ended on a Francisco Lindor double play, and from Marlins announcer Kyle Sielaff's call, you'd think that Miami had just won the World Series.

Pete Alonso already said he'll be opting out of his deal to become a free agent again, owner Steve Cohen issued a long apology to fans on Twitter, and the Mets are the laughingstock of baseball.

Tigers fans know that we could've very easily been on the receiving end of that kind of ridicule (though maybe to a smaller extent, given that the Mets managed to miss with the second-highest payroll in baseball and the richest man in sports on their roster), and really just have to thank New York for the distraction.