David Fry blasted the go-ahead two-run home run and the Cleveland Guardians held on for a 5-4 victory over Detroit Thursday to force a decisive game five in their Major League Baseball playoff series.
The Guardians leveled the best-of-five American League division series at two games apiece and will host the deciding game on Saturday.
Cleveland, shut out by the upstart Tigers in games two and three, were down 3-2 when Fry was called in to pinch hit with one runner on and two out in the top of the seventh.
He deposited a 97 mph fastball from Tigers reliever Beau Brieske over the left center field fence to put the Guardians ahead for good.
“I was just trying to get a pitch to hit,” Fry said. “I had some opportunities yesterday to drive some runners in and didn’t get the job done. So I was looking to get it done for the boys and luckily it went out.”
Cleveland added a run in the top of the ninth, Fry laying down a bunt that allowed Brayan Rocchio to score from third base. Rocchio had singled with one out in the inning and reached third on Steven Kwan’s base hit.
“Luckily it worked,” Fry said of the bunt.
That insurance run proved necessary when the Tigers clawed one back in the bottom of the ninth. Justyn-Henry Malloy opened the inning off Cleveland closing pitcher Emmanuel Clase with a double to left field. He reached third on a ground out by Parker Meadows and scored on another ground ball by Jace Jung before Clase recorded the final out.
Cleveland ended a streak of 11 defeats in playoff elimination games, a skid dating back to game six of the 1997 World Series.
Jose Ramirez also homered for the Guardians and Zach McKinstry homered for Detroit in a tense battle that twice saw the Tigers rally to tie it before they took a 3-2 on Wenceel Perez’s run-scoring single in the sixth.
The winner of the series will face either the New York Yankees or Kansas City Royals for a place in the World Series.
The Yankees took a 2-1 series lead into game four in Kansas City on Thursday, hoping pitching ace Gerrit Cole can recover from a lackluster performance in a game one loss and still waiting for slugger Aaron Judge to come alive.
Judge, who led the major leagues with 58 home runs in the regular season, is 1-for-11 at the plate in the first three games of the series.
Giancarlo Stanton was the hero of the 3-2 game-three win that put the Yankees on the cusp of advancing, belting a go-ahead solo homer in the eighth inning as part of a three-hit night.
Stanton was confident that Judge would break out of the doldrums.
“He’s definitely going to do damage,” Stanton said. “It’s only a matter of time. He’s had good at-bats, so, yeah, it’ll come when we need him most.”
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