Flanagan was burning up in the clubhouse after the game. He barely stopped short of throwing Williams under the bus and then backing up over the manager. “The only reason Williams was able to talk Flanagan into coming out of the game is that [Flanagan] thought Henke was going in,” Millson says. “Flanagan never forgave Jimy for that. He put it kind of cryptically after the game — he said, ‘There’s no one in this clubhouse that thinks it’s their fault.’ I knew what he was getting at without pointing a finger. He wanted to keep going [and] Henke could have gone more than one inning.”

On the last day of the season the Jays were down to their last shot. Their last hope. Just watching the six consecutive losses unfold was pure torture and you had to think that anyone who was optimistic about the Jays getting to the World Series was untethered from reality. A win would put them into a playoff game for the AL East. A loss was just too awful to consider.

Ernie Whitt had wanted to get into the game on Friday night or Saturday, but couldn’t go. He still held out hope on Sunday.

“[Before the first two games] I went out to try to do some things but even with the injections it was just too painful,” Whitt says. “I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to start anyways but I could possibly be used in a pitch-hitting role. On the Sunday, I could have possibly gone in and pinch hit and done something. In the fifth or sixth inning, I’d go in the clubhouse and the doctor would inject me with some numbing stuff just in case they needed to use me.”

Garth Iorg almost couldn’t believe that Whitt was game. “You see Ernie out there before the game, trying to swing a bat, and you know just how much it hurts,” Iorg remembers. “It was really gutty on his part.”

The Jays were not at a total disadvantage. The Tigers had home field but the visitors had their best pitcher going.

In discussions about Jays’ history, Jimmy Key probably gets short shrift. When you think of the franchise’s best-ever pitchers, Roy Halladay’s name is the first dropped. People will throw in Dave Stieb, whose sick stuff was just about unhittable. And yeah, Roger Clemens won two Cy Youngs in his brief stint. Yet Jimmy Key’s 1987 season was up there with anyone.

Key finished second to Clemens in the Cy Young voting and, yeah, Clemens had 20 wins to Key’s 17. Still, Key’s run support was spotty. An example: Key pitched back-to-back complete games against the Tigers and Brewers in June, gave up three runs across 18 innings and came out of it with two losses. Key led the league with a 2.76 ERA and a WHIP of just over 1.00. The Jays had their man.