CLEVELAND >> Zach McKinstry isn’t an excuse-maker. When he boots a ball, he owns up to it. When he’s scuffling at the plate, he owns up to it.

And after the Tigers were buried by a five-run first-inning avalanche Saturday, losing Game 1 of the American League Division Series 7-0 to the Cleveland Guardians, McKinstry took accountability for the his error at third base that helped open the floodgates.

But with one qualifier.

“They hit a ball hard down the line and I just tried to make a play,” he said. “I thought it took a weird hop and I just tried to block it. I just tried to get in front of the ball.”

The ball proved elusive.

“They watered the field when we came in to take ground balls,” McKinstry said, which would’ve been an hour or more before the game. “But they didn’t water it for the game. It took a weird hop off the dirt on the first kick. You hope to make that play. Didn’t. And we end up losing the game because of it.”

There were plenty of factors involved in this loss. For starters, the Tigers’ offense was limited to four hits and endured 13 strikeouts against a fleet of Guardians’ pitchers, starting with starter Tanner Bibee, who struck out six in 4.2 innings.

“I think this is a lot about how Cleveland came out,” manager AJ Hinch said. “Obviously they’re good. And this is their best. I mean, Bibee has been really good. We saw why. Their lineup from the top, you got an All-Star at the top who sets the tone and a beast in the middle and a lot of different guys throughout that put pressure on you, and then we saw their big bullpen.

“So this is obviously Game 1, and we get a day off to reset. We’ve been really good at doing that.”

The Tigers didn’t get a hit off the Guardians’ bullpen — Cade Smith (four batters, four strikeouts), Tim Herrin, Hunter Gaddis and All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase. There wasn’t much push-back from the offense. But, to McKinstry’s point, the fatal blows came in the first inning when, for one of the few times all season, their opener-bulk reliever strategy got capsized.

“Two things from a team standpoint,” Hinch said. “Against this team, as good as they are and as much pressure as they put on you, extra bases and extra outs are really hard to overcome with as good as their lineup is, the way they can move the ball forward and put it in play.

“When they punch you with five in the first, it’s hard to overcome.”

It was just the second time since Sept. 1 that an opponent put up a crooked number against a Tigers’ opener. But lefty Tyler Holton, who had allowed just four earned runs in three months, faced four batters and didn’t record an out. All four scored.

Lefty-swinging Steven Kwan lined a 1-0 sinker off the right field wall for a double to start the inning and David Fry walked. That brought up perennial All-Star and Tiger-slayer Jose Ramirez, that beast in the middle Hinch mentioned. After getting a favorable ball call on a 2-2 pitch at the bottom of the zone, he hit a bounding ball, 93 mph off his bat, behind third base that got by McKinstry.Kwan scored on the error and Fry scored on a softly-struck single through a drawn-in infield by Josh Naylor.

“In-between hop,” Hinch said. “You get greedy a little bit and want to make a great play as opposed to just make the standard play, and the ball didn’t carry to him probably as far as he thought it was. And then all of a sudden he caught himself on his heels with no real ability to make an adjustment, and you’re at the mercy of that next hop, and it looked like it ate him up.

“Obviously, as things were snowballing a little bit, the energy in the park, not recording an out and stopping or at least limiting some of the momentum is key. But the in-between hop is a do-or-die play, and that’s the die part.”

After Naylor’s single, there were still two on and Hinch went to right-hander Reese Olson. It was his first relief appearance of the season and he had never before entered a game mid-inning. Hinch had informed Olson before the game that he was targeting him to face Cleveland right-handed slugger Lane Thomas.

He got the matchup but his first pitch to Thomas, a hanging slider, was slammed into the left field bleachers. The three-run homer put the Tigers in a 5-0 hole.

“I threw a really bad slider and he was probably looking for it,” Olson said.

Olson said it wasn’t about the situation, it was about the execution of the pitch.

“Yeah, it’s still the same game, he said. “You have to make a pitch. I didn’t execute the pitch that was called. I hung a slider. That’s going to get hit in any situation.”

Olson settled in and ended up allowing only one other hit over five innings. He got Thomas out the next two times, striking him out with a changeup and getting him to fly out with a slider.

“There was no hesitation,” Hinch said of going to Olson in the middle of the inning. “We told him early in the day that the Lane Thomas at-bat was going to be it. And if you look at the next two Lane Thomas at-bats, that was a little more what we drew up. I mean, sometimes their guy beats our guy. Reese was ready, and no excuses, and we’ve been doing this with virtually our entire roster.

“When it doesn’t work, you wonder. But we can’t fault really anybody other than a good swing on a pitch that separated the game for them and a punch that we didn’t recover from.”

The Guardians, essentially, banged their way through the Tigers’ matchup strategy.

“You look at Lane and David doing the majority of the big blows, and they’ve faced righties all year,” Guardians’ manager Stephen Vogt said. “And we do look for the platoon advantage as much as possible, but in those situations Lane has hit righties his whole career, and David has had a great year versus righties as well. So it was nice to see those guys come through.

“We don’t just blindly play the numbers. We use our judgment in-game. But I couldn’t be more proud of our guys.”

The Tigers had 36 comeback wins in the regular season and they came back to beat the Astros in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series. But coming back against the Guardians is going to be a tough ask. They were 71-2 in the regular season when leading after six innings.

“We just have to flush this one quick,” said Parker Meadows.

One potential saving grace for the Tigers: They will have presumptive Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal on the mound to start Game 2 on Monday.

“We’ll come back on Monday,” McKinstry said. “Skub’s going. We’ve got all the faith in the world in him.”