Carpenter's 3-run homer off Clase sends gritty Tigers to 3-0 win over Guardians in Game 2 of ALDS

CLEVELAND (AP) — Kerry Carpenter hit a three-run homer off Cleveland's All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase in the ninth inning, and the Detroit Tigers stunned the Guardians 3-0 in Game 2 on Monday to even their AL Division Series at one game apiece.

Carpenter connected for a 423-foot shot with two outs off Clase, who had not given up a run since Aug. 30 and led the American League with 47 saves.

Detroit ace Tarik Skubal pitched seven shutout innings, increasing his postseason total to 13, before the Tigers put together a rare big inning against the almost unhittable Clase.

The intimidating right-hander has dominated hitters all season — he hasn't blown a save since May — and was making just his second multi-inning appearance of 2024.

Jake Rogers singled and Trey Sweeney hit consecutive two-out singles. Carpenter, who entered an inning earlier as a pinch-hitter, turned on Clase's third straight slider, sending the ball into the right-field seats and shocking Cleveland's rowdy home crowd.

“How about those three two-out hits?” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said.

Guardians manager Stephen Vogt didn't regret using Clase for more than one inning.

“Emmanuel has been locked down all year,” Vogt said. "He’s been nearly perfect. He’s human, too. These things are going to happen, and it’s unfortunate the timing of when it did, but at the same time he’s going to have the ball in the ninth again.

“This is the best closer in the game for a reason, and they just happened to get him tonight.”

The homer drove in the first runs of the series for the Tigers, who have been finding ways to win for months. Detroit went 31-13 after Aug. 11 to qualify for the postseason and then stunned the AL West champion Houston Astros in the Wild Card Series.

They're at it again and head home to Comerica Park for Games 3 and 4 on Wednesday and Thursday with a chance to advance.

After Skubal pitched seven innings and winner Will Vest got through the eighth, Beau Brieske pitched a perfect ninth for the save.

Skubal, who won the AL pitching triple crown by leading the league in wins (18), ERA (2.39) and strikeouts (288), allowed just three hits. The left-hander dominated the Guardians over the first 4 1/3 innings, striking out eight before Josh Naylor doubled with one out in the fifth for Cleveland's first hit. Skubal then hit rookie Jhonkensy Noel on the left hand.

But the 27-year-old Skubal, who has never pitched a complete game, got Andrés Giménez to bounce into an inning-ending double play and celebrated loudly as he left the mound and headed toward Detroit's dugout.

Cleveland also threatened in the sixth.

No. 9 hitter Brayan Rocchio doubled with one out and Kwan singled. Rocchio was held at third, and Skubal again got out of trouble as Detroit's infield turned a nifty 6-4-3 double play, prompting the lefty to raise his hands and ask the crowd for more applause like a conductor pushing his orchestra for volume.

TRAINER'S ROOM

Guardians: Utilityman Tyler Freeman was replaced on the ALDS roster after straining an oblique while taking a swing in a simulated game on Sunday. Freeman, who was replaced by rookie Ángel Martínez, was probably going to be in the lineup for Game 2. He batted .385 against Detroit this season and knows Skubal well after facing him in the minors.

UP NEXT

Guardians RHP Alex Cobb will make his first start since Sept. 1 in Game 3. He's been sidelined with a middle finger blister and only made three starts after coming over in a July trade from San Francisco. He'll be pitching in the postseason for the first time since Game 3 of the ALDS in 2013 for Tampa Bay.

Detroit manager A.J. Hinch had not announced his starter.

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Cleveland Guardians starting pitcher Matthew Boyd tips his cap to the crowd as he walks off the field after being taken out of the game in the fifth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Detroit Tigers' Parker Meadows (22) walks back to the dugout after striking out in the fourth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Cleveland Guardians, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. Guardians catcher Austin Hedges is at right. (AP Photo/Phil Long)

Cleveland Guardians starting pitcher Matthew Boyd shouts as he walks off the mound in the fourth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Cleveland Guardians shortstop Brayan Rocchio, right, prepares to tag out Detroit Tigers' Justyn-Henry Malloy (44) as Malloy attempts to stretch a single into a double in the fifth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Phil Long)

Detroit Tigers' outfielders Riley Greene, left, Wendell Perez, center, and Parker Meadows, right, celebrate after the Tigers defeated the Guardians in Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Cleveland Guardians' Steven Kwan watches his single in the sixth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Phil Long)

Cleveland Guardians' Tim Herrin pitches in the seventh inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Phil Long)

Cleveland Guardians' Brayan Rocchio gestures from second base after hitting a double in the sixth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Cleveland Guardians' Cade Smith pitches in the fifth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Cleveland Guardians' Austin Hedges, right, reacts after striking out in the third inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. Tigers catcher Jake Rogers is at left. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Cleveland Guardians' Josh Naylor doubles in the fifth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Tarik Skubal gestures after a double play ends the sixth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Cleveland Guardians, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Phil Long)

Detroit Tigers' Kerry Carpenter celebrates as he runs the bases with a three-run home run in the ninth inning during Game 2 of baseball's AL Division Series against the Cleveland Guardians, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

NEW YORK (AP) — Lore Segal, an esteemed Viennese American author and translator whose gift for words helped her family escape from the Nazis and who later drew upon her experiences as a Jewish refugee and immigrant for such fiction as “Other People's Houses” and “Her First American,” died Monday at 96.

Segal, a longtime resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her apartment after a brief illness, her publisher Melville House said in a statement.

After settling in the U.S. in 1951, Segal wrote novels, short stories, essays and children's books and translated the Bible and Grimms' fairy tales, which featured illustrations by her friend Maurice Sendak. Her life — filtered through memory and imagination — was her greatest muse. “Other People's Houses,” released in 1964 and originally serialized in the New Yorker, closely followed her childhood in Austria, her years in foster care in London during World War II and her arrival in New York, where the growing familiarity with the city’s sights and sounds — “charged thus upon the air” — makes the “alien into a citizen.”

“Her First American” continued her early experiences in the U.S., while “Lucinella” was a comic novella inspired by her time in the 1970s at the Yaddo artist retreat in upstate New York. Segal, who taught at Columbia University, Princeton University and several other schools, satirized academic life in “Shakespeare's Kitchen.”

In 2019, she compiled her fiction and nonfiction in the anthology “The Journal I Did Not Keep,” in which she summarized the importance and imperfection of recapturing the past.

“I believe that the act of remembering and telling the story of what we remember will always be to some extent fatal to the thing remembered,” she wrote. “So what really happened?”

Her many admirers included such author-critics as Cynthia Ozick, Vivian Gornick and Alfred Kazin. In 2008, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel “Shakespeare’s Kitchen.” The American Academy of Arts and Letters inducted her in 2023.

Gornick would cite her “ironic intelligence" and “gift for detachment.” In her fiction, Segal set a tone that was even, objective and occasionally cutting, like her description of an artist in “Lucinella” who “tends to mumble her words inside her mouth, so as to keep the option of eating them.” She could also be intimate and familiar, with such recurring characters as her alter ego Ilka, a Viennese refugee; and Carter Bayoux, a Black intellectual with whom Ilka has an affair in “Her First American.”

Her narratives were often sustained through passages of overheard conversation, whether at a literary cocktail party in Harlem or a gathering of faculty members in Connecticut. Several stories in her 2023 collection “Ladies' Lunch” were structured around the midday meals of friends in advanced old age who share memories, regrets, fears and everyday concerns.

“I like writing dialogue,” she told the online publication The Millions in 2019. “I like it better than explaining. I’d rather have a character develop and express him or herself through dialogue than explaining what they’re thinking. It’s a preference. I like how we discover and uncover ourselves through dialogue. I tell my students, you see any two people together, walk behind them, listen, get the tone of their voice.”

Besides her books, Segal wrote for The New York Times, The New Republic, the Forward and other publications. The children's story “When Mole Lost His Glasses,” with drawings by Sergio Ruzzier, was adapted into an educational video featuring Spike Lee and then-New York Knick Stephon Marbury.

Segal married the literary editor David Segal in 1961 and had two children. Her husband died of a heart attack in 1970.

She was born Lore Groszmann in Vienna in 1928, and grew up in a prosperous neighborhood until the Nazis annexed the country a decade later and antisemitism drove her family to ship her off on the Kindertransport to London, a time Segal and her mother would discuss in Mark Jonathan Harris’ Academy Award-winning documentary “Into the Arms of Strangers.”

Separation somehow empowered her. Inquisitive and often impulsive, she wrote so many letters to British authorities that they granted her parents the rare privilege of letting them join her in London, where they worked as domestic servants. Lore stayed with a series of families, including one whose incomprehension of her past inspired her first real storytelling.

“It seemed to me they had no idea of what it was like to live in Vienna under Hitler,” Segal told The Associated Press in 2011. “They were asking me questions that didn’t seem to be relevant. They had some profound lack of information. So I got hold of one of those little exercise books, homework books. I filled the 36 pages in German with the story, which is essentially the story of ‘Other People’s Houses.’”

After the war, Segal graduated from the University of London’s Bedford College and lived briefly in the Dominican Republic — where other family members had settled — until allowed in the United States. Before becoming a writer, she discovered the various careers she was not meant for: She was a “bad file clerk,” a “bad secretary” and “pretty bad textile designer."

Writing, at first, also didn't seem to work because she believed she had nothing to say. She had never been in love and thought “no big things” had happened to her, not even during the war. Her breakthrough came in a class at the New School for Social Research in New York.

“After the class we all kept meeting and doing our own creative writing class,” Segal told the AP. “And somebody said to me, ‘How did you get to America?’ And I began to tell the stories. And there was that experience, of people listening. It was lovely. Nobody had ever done that. Most people don’t have that experience, their story being valued.”

FILE - Author Lore Segal gestures during an interview in New York, Feb. 19, 2010. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)