Tigers, Blue Jays could be destined for a rematch of 1987

The Toronto Blue Jays and Detroit Tigers in a one-game showdown for all the marbles?

Yeah, they’ve done that before, and they might do it again.

Entering play Monday, and with 13 games left in the American League season, the Blue Jays hold the second AL wild card position with an 81-68 record. Baltimore, 82-69, sits in the first wild card spot, while the Tigers are two games behind the Blue Jays at 79-70.

It could end up a Detroit-Toronto wild card playoff game, or perhaps even a one-game playoff to see which of the two teams garners that second wild card spot.

The possibility is there, and for fans of both teams of a certain age, visions of the final day of the 1987 AL season are dancing through their heads.

On Oct. 4, 1987, at Tiger Stadium, the Tigers and Jays arrived to the ballpark for the final game of the season with Detroit holding a one-game lead over Toronto atop the AL East.

“It was, ‘Hey, you might win the East, we might win the East,’” former Tigers third baseman Tom Brookens recalled. “You had to go head-to-head against them if you were going to try and win the division.”

On that day, it was the Tigers who won the day, behind the masterful off-speed pitching of Frank Tanana and a solo homer by Larry Herndon that plated the only run of the game in Detroit’s 1-0 victory.

That game — that whole week — remains a bitter pill for the Blue Jays faithful to swallow.

“We’re trying to forget it, because we never beat them anyway,” remembered former Jays manager Cito Gaston, who was serving as Toronto’s hitting coach in 1987 under manager Jimy Williams, of that battle with Detroit.

No wonder the Jays would just rather forget. Theirs was an epic collapse in 1987. Toronto lost its last seven games of the 1987 season to squander a 3½-game lead to a Tigers team that as late as May 5 that year was mired in sixth place in the division, 11 games off the pace.

The 1987 finale ended when Tanana corralled Garth Iorg’s comebacker and flipped it to first baseman Darrell Evans for the final out of the Toronto ninth.

Major league baseball’s 1994 realignment sounded a death knell for the Tigers-Blue Jays rivalry. While many traditional rivalries — Yankees-Red Sox, Giants-Dodgers, Cardinals-Cubs — were maintained through the reconfiguration of divisions, Detroit and Toronto were not.

The Jays remained in the AL East, while the Tigers relocated to the AL Central.