Clay Holmes, Yankees might've wreaked havoc on the AL by waking up Tigers

When Clay Holmes and the Yankees blew a one-run save at the end of swift-moving Marcus Stroman-Tarik Skubal duel on Sunday Night Baseball, it felt like the final straw in Holmes' closer candidacy. He proved, once more, that he simply could not be trusted with a one-run lead. A nationally-televised game against an ace that the Yankees had to have? Against the Tigers, of all teams?

A month and a half later, and the same script can be read with an entirely different tone. Yes, Holmes eventually was demoted, but it took a Wyatt Langford grand slam and a lonely star's extinguishment in the Lonestar State for a move to be made. And the Tigers? They don't seem quite so bumbling anymore, and they can win baseball games against the league's elite whether Skubal's on the mound or not.

They're occasionally down, but never out -- thanks, in large part, to Holmes and a confidence-breeding team meeting.

According to Beau Brieske, the Tigers held a "rare" team meeting surrounding an "inflection point" in their season, after losing several key veterans at the trade deadline and awaiting the arrival of a fleet of kids.

“And it wasn't us getting blasted. It wasn't anything bad," Brieske clarified. "It was more so just asking us and kind of having everyone look in the mirror and ask themselves, what am I doing to be a part of a winning team? Because right now, at that time, we were not a winning team."

This meeting, per the Detroit Free Press, came "after the trade deadline, right around the time they played the New York Yankees in MLB’s Little League Classic on Aug. 18." Nice.

Yankees losing to Tigers in Little League Classic led to Detroit's turning point, of course!

Pinning the blame for the Tigers' rise partially on Holmes still feels fair. After all, who knows if they would've been able to get off the mat in the same manner if they hadn't watched their vision be realized on a national stage?

According to those 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 helped them believe that an unprecedented in-season reversal was possible. At the time, Detroit likely thought they could set themselves up nicely for 2025, but nothing more. Joke's on the rest of MLB.

Hopefully, the Yankees encounter the monster they helped create in the ALCS next week.