A bullpen disaster at Pittsburgh invites the Tigers to ask: When will too many thrown-away games cease?

One factor pro sports can’t wish away:

Age.

The deeper the years for an athlete, or a roster, the more vulnerable a team is to breakdowns.

Kenley Jansen, 38, has been Exhibit A this season in the risks of trusting in baseball elders. He proved it again Wednesday in a deplorable 4-3 giveaway to the Pirates at PNC Park.

Jansen threw a pair of home-run pitches in the ninth, the first on an 0-2 count. Two pitches, two homers, another blown save, all as the Tigers prepared to leave Pittsburgh with yet another road-series pelt and ongoing life in the ever-charitable AL wildcard chase.

An inning earlier, Kyle Finnegan, who is 34, was rapped for a run (and nearly more) that cut Detroit’s hard-crafted 3-1 lead to 3-2 and set up Jansen’s final-frame disaster.

Over and over in 2026, bad back-end work by the Tigers has undone what a team has spent seven or eight innings building. The Tigers can look at their distinction of having blown the second-most saves anywhere but in Washington and think about where they might be sweetly sitting had the late-innings gang not so often disintegrated.

These were defensible signings, both Finnegan and Jansen, last offseason — with an asterisk on Jansen.

Jansen was an obvious gamble as he turned 38.

It was believed here the front office had a handle on him. That metrics, and science, and super-analysis, which these days are part of the Tigers’ hyper-detailed evaluations, probably could be trusted.

And many times this season, that’s been the case.

But not often enough. Not nearly often enough has Jansen delivered.

Finnegan was a slightly different case.

He had pitched well for the Tigers after last summer’s deadline arrival at Detroit and then hit free agency. The Tigers liked him, he liked Detroit, and no one complained about a two-year return for $19 million.

But, again, mid-30s relievers are closer to their expiration dates and carry that much more potential to be risks in the mercurial realm of relievers.

These latter-inning blow-ups have been the most crushing of the Tigers’ failures in 2026. Bullpen meltdowns destroy confidence, fundamentally, in a team’s psyche. They ruin all that had been invested by starting pitchers, by a lineup, and by defenders in building leads that shouldn’t be as susceptible to collapse as they’ve been for the Tigers in an exasperating season of baseball in Detroit.