Are the Detroit Tigers on the Verge of MLB’s Worst Collapse Ever?

After a year spent mostly on top, Detroit is somehow in danger of making the wrong kind of history. (And the Astros and Mets aren't far behind.)

Detroit Tigers relief pitcher Will Vest walks to the dugout after being relieved in the ninth inning of a regular season Major League Baseball game between the Atlanta Braves and the Detroit Tigers on September 20, 2025. (Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Perhaps the quintessential Detroit Tigers team came around in 1984, when Alan Trammell, Chet Lemon, Kirk Gibson, Willie Hernández, Dan Petry, Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris, Lance Parrish and friends leapt out to a 35-5 start on the season and never looked back — reaching a playoff probability of 80 percent by May 9 and never dropping below that again en route to winning the World Series.

For a little while, it seemed like the 2025 Tigers could replicate a modern version of that arc. Despite my misgivings in preseason, they opened the year with a 33-17 record through 50 games — not too far from the ‘84 team’s 39-11 mark at the same point in the schedule — and their playoff odds rose above 95 percent (according to both mine and FanGraphs’ models) by the end of May.

While things didn’t quite go off perfectly without a hitch after that — they actually went on an extended stretch of slightly sub-.500 play over the following 60 games — the Tigers got back to a solid record in August and pushed their playoff odds to essentially 100 percent (I guess we’d call it “>99.9%” in our old FiveThirtyEight parlance) by month’s end. Detroit led the AL Central by 9½ games on September 10, and they had a 6-game lead in the wild card if they needed it for some unlikely reason as well.

Outside of the truly bad collapses from baseball history — your 1995 California Angels, 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers, 2011 Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves, or 2007 New York Mets — that type of cushion ought to be enough to nurse yourself home to the playoffs. But barely a week and a half after the Tigers’ de facto certain playoff probability, things are now anything but certain:

After losing again to the Atlanta Braves on Sunday, their sixth straight loss and ninth in 10 games, the Tigers are now just 1 game ahead of the surging Cleveland Guardians in the AL Central, and their wild-card fate is very much in flux if they don’t win the division. With under a week left in the regular season and a massive series looming against Cleveland, starting Tuesday, the Tigers need a good showing against their upstart rivals on the road to avoid what might be, statistically, the single worst playoff-odds collapse in baseball history.