Minutes before the MLB July trade deadline, the Detroit Tigers traded their fourth player of the week, and arguably the best ever in the sport, when they traded right-hander Jack Flaherty to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Tigers then lost six of their next nine games. At 55-63 with barely a quarter of the season left, Detroit looked more or less like every year since Tarik Skubal joined the team in 2020: completely forgettable.

Six weeks later, after earning another victory in a season that will end with his first Cy Young Award, Skubal craned his neck in a crescent shape to survey the Tigers’ locker room. He saw members of MLB’s youngest regular lineup and a ragtag pitching staff that has turned bullpen play into an art. He stared at a team that is now tied for the American League’s final wild-card spot, a rise that has surprised the game — and even one of the people at the center of that surge.

“It’s not traditional and maybe not sustainable, but who cares?” Skubal said. “We have to win now.”

The Tigers have a 25-10 record since Aug. 11, the best in baseball, with a major league-leading 62-plus run differential. The Tigers win close games (10-2 in one-run games), they win road games (12-5), and they play the kind of baseball that manager AJ Hinch, who knows a thing or two about young, up-and-coming cores, has preached all season.

The Tigers were declared dead at the deadline, still doubted and dismissed when signs of life became much more. On Friday night they begin their most important series in a decade in Baltimore, where they face an Orioles team that, like the other two current wild card holders, the Kansas City Royals and the Minnesota Twins, has been on the brink of victory in recent weeks. Everything has contributed to Detroit, in first place since 2014, having a real chance of ending baseball’s longest postseason drought: three games at Camden Yards, three at home against Tampa Bay and a season-ending three-game home game against the worst team in baseball history, the Chicago White Sox.

“We’re young and just want to win,” said outfielder Riley Greene, one of the longest-serving Tigers at 23. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

What you have to do is simple: You have to finish at least one game ahead of Kansas City or Minnesota, both of which have head-to-head tiebreakers against Detroit. The Royals and Twins did their damage before this incarnation of the Tigers came along and started sweeping the sport. Detroit’s win over Kansas City this week and Minnesota’s loss in Cleveland on Wednesday and Thursday left the Tigers and Twins tied at 80-73.

On the surface, none of this makes sense. While their strengths made the Tigers a closet AL contender at the start of the season, they plummeted in June. The post-deadline exodus illustrated Detroit’s priorities: As many signs as they had shown and flashes of “we’ve done something here,” Flaherty, outfielder Mark Canha, reliever Andrew Chafin and catcher Carson Kelly were gone. Generally speaking, teams don’t part with productive players and Then find the best version of yourself.

“I said in July that I thought we were getting younger and better,” Hinch said. “And that wasn’t an attack on anyone. We believed in our young players.”

The August rescue operation came with an infusion of young talent over a period of about a week. Two days after a one-point win over San Francisco on August 11, Kerry Carpenter (27), their hard-hitting right fielder who had been out for nearly three months with a stress fracture in his back, returned. Three days later, Detroit called up shortstop Trey Sweeney (24) – a player they received in the Flaherty deal – and third baseman Jace Jung (23), another top talent. A day later, Greene returned from the IL and Spencer Torkelson (25), their downgraded 2020 No. 1 draft pick, joined a lineup full of other 20-year-olds: second baseman Colt Keith (23), outfielder Wenceel Perez (24), Justyn-Henry Malloy (24) and center fielder Parker Meadows (24), who bats first.

“Then things just started to take off for us,” said Matt Vierling, who is considered a veteran at 27. “And it hasn’t really stopped. This is the first time this group of guys has really experienced anything like this. And I feel like we’re just playing with the house’s money. Almost nobody thought we’d make it this far. What do we have to lose? Let’s see how far we can take it and keep it going. It kind of reminds me of a few years ago.”

A few years ago, Vierling was on a Philadelphia Phillies team that rode a wave of talent and spirit into the 2022 World Series. He senses a similar magic in this team, which he believes is due to how Hinch manages the roster. Tigers players know that Hinch will step in as a pinch hitter depending on the matchup (they have the third-most pinch-hit appearances in MLB this year) and that he will use his pitchers as outgetters rather than traditional starters and relievers.

During their record-setting 35-game streak, the Tigers’ starting pitcher has gone two innings or fewer 40 percent of the time. The only constants in the rotation have been Skubal — who is 17-4 with an AL-best 2.48 ERA and has 221 strikeouts and 34 walks in 185 innings — and rookie Keider Montero. With right-handers Casey Mize and Reese Olson returning to the rotation from the injured list over the past two weeks, Hinch hasn’t had to weigh his decisions in the bullpen quite as carefully. It’s become a simple operation: Whoever is best suited to succeed at a given spot goes.

“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Hinch said. “We’re just focusing on our strengths. How do we best utilize what we have? And we have a lot of pitchers. We have arguably the best pitcher in baseball and we’re creative in trying to make the most of what we do. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve seen that. We’ve just kept moving forward. We talk about winning series and winning weeks. We generally play good defense. We’re athletic.”

That dynamic ability was at the heart of the Kansas City series finale, from Meadows chasing everything in the sprawling center field of Kauffman Stadium to Jung’s acrobatic slide at home to avoid a tag on a play where the ball took him home by at least 10 feet. “It was just a crazy play,” Jung said. “If you told me to repeat it 100 times, I could probably only do it a couple of times.”

At this point, that’s all they need. A convincing pitching performance here. A decisive hit there. A wild crash. Most of the Tigers are too young to know better. What they do know is that if they secure the final wild-card spot, they’ll likely face a matchup with the American League West champion Houston Astros, a franchise with which Hinch once coached a burgeoning group of talented young players.

“We play hard every day,” Vierling said. “That’s how these guys are raised. That’s how I was raised. And that’s why we’re always on the right track.”