It took Magglio Ordonez’s walk-off home run to send the Detroit Tigers back to the World Series for the first time since 1984, but it wasn’t essential. With a 3–0 series lead, the Tigers were extremely likely to win the series even if they hadn’t won Saturday’s game; League Championship Series collapses like that of the Yankees against the Red Sox in 2004 don’t happen every year. In fact, except for that series, they don’t happen at all. They certainly don’t happen against the kind of pitching the Tigers are getting right now.

Casey Stengel once said that good pitching stopped good hitting — and vice versa. By this he meant that the universe is random and unfair and on any given day you don’t know what’s going to happen. The Tigers make it seem as if he didn’t give pitching enough credit. The numbers from Detroit’s sweep of the A’s are extraordinary: 36 innings, 29 hits, nine runs, 14 walks, and 28 strikeouts. Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich were not involved, though the numbers are redolent of the pitching-happy era of the late 1960s rather than the debased, steroidal age of today.

The Yankees’ ardent search for scapegoats in the ALDS loss to the Tigers was not wholly ended by the retention of Joe Torre. Though it paused after the tragic death of Cory Lidle, there is every reason to assume that the hunt will resume after a respectful interval. The implications of the Tigers’ sweep of the A’s is that the fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in ourselves but in the stars — the Tigers’ pitching stars.

The Yankees and the A’s were defeated by a strong pitching staff which has clicked at the best possible moment. Even during September, the nadir of Detroit’s season, the Tigers’ staff posted an ERA of 4.30, far below the league average. A good deal of that “inflated” ERA was due to pitchers on the back end of the staff. The team’s best pitchers hardly flinched. Joel Zumaya had an ERA of 1.88 on the month; Nate Robertson, 2.76; Kenny Rogers, 2.79, Jeremy Bonderman, 3.90. The only struggling starters were Wil Ledezma, who would be relegated to the bullpen for the postseason, and the youthful Justin Verlander, clearly fatigued, whose ERA ballooned to 4.82 during that difficult month. In August, when the Tigers also posted a losing record, the staff ERA was a very strong 3.75.

Verlander’s fall ERA of 4.82 was a disappointment. For the Yankees, it would have been good enough for the no. 3 spot in the rotation. The problem with the Yankees was not how they were managed — although, as has been touched on numerous times in these pages, there were aspects of Torre’s performance that were less than ideal — but the way they were constructed.

Since 2003, when extremely poor strategic decisions cost the Yankees a World Series loss to an inferior opponent, Yankees pitching has been less than advertised. After that season, the Yankees lost four-fifths of their starting rotation; Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, David Wells, and Jeff Weaver left after the season. Weaver is just a journeyman, but Clemens is one of the top pitchers of all time, and Pettitte and Wells rate highly in whatever Hall of Fame is reserved for pitchers who aren’t elite but just very, very good.

This blow would have been hard for any team to overcome. In the Yankees’ case, a farm system that has consistently failed to supply the major league club with adequate talent and a thin free-agent market combined to put the Yankees in the position of cobbling together a staff that relied on hoping aging greats (Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown), one-hit wonders (Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano),journeymen (Shawn Chacon), and the rare prospect (Chien-Ming Wang). The Yankees required a lot of luck for this to work.

General manager Brian Cashman wisely compensated for the lack of pitching by adding offense wherever possible. It’s a one-sided solution that can lead to self-deception. A good offense is as vulnerable as any other to good pitching. It will, or should, still score runs, but at reduced rates, and of course if it runs into a hot pitcher or staff, it can be shut down. Simultaneously, a mediocre staff like the one the Yankees ran out has less potential for getting hot and a greater potential for being abused, especially against the superior offenses of the postseason.

The Tigers’ offense is not one that would have been classified as outstanding during the regular season, but it had as much power potential as any team in the American League. Normally this might not be enough, but given the way their pitching staff has been executing, power has been enough to carry them.

The lesson for the Yankees is this: It’s time to stop pointing fingers and start pitching.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for www.yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.