After a full, long day of playoff baseball, the American League takes center stage on Thursday, with two teams facing elimination: The Guardians, who ruled their division this year only to see a Midwestern rival bum rush them at the season’s end, and the Royals, who have reached the World Series the last three times they’ve made the postseason but feel awfully far from the Fall Classic right now. Will either team survive to the weekend? Thursday will tell us.

Here’s the top storyline for each team in each of Thursday’s ALDS games.

Guardians at Tigers (DET leads, 2-1)
6 p.m. ET, TNT
Tanner Bibee vs. TBD

Guardians: Seriously … are they ever gonna score?
If a team went 20 innings during the regular season without scoring, it would be a huge deal. Twenty innings is a really, really long time! But to go 20 full innings in the postseason without scoring? That is downright excruciating. That is a drought of Biblical proportions. The last team to be shut out in consecutive postseason games was the 2021 Brewers in NLDS Games 2 and 3 against the Braves. Their total scoreless streak in that series was 22 innings. At the risk of sounding overly obvious here, the Guardians’ chances of sending this series back to Cleveland -- or doing much of anything at all -- are zilcho if they don’t start putting some crooked numbers, or any numbers, on the scoreboard.

Theoretically, Game 4 is a real opportunity to do so: It’s another “pitching chaos” game for the Tigers, rather than a “Tarik Skubal” game, so there really isn’t any excuse at this point, especially since the bullpen will be taxed after Game 3. The Guardians have never been a great offensive team. But they’re not supposed to be this. They need to wake up, ASAP, or this is just the start of the offensive drought: It may just end up lasting many, many months.

Tigers: Will A.J. Hinch ever make a move that doesn’t work out?
It is one thing to say that your strategy is “pitching chaos,” which is really just another term for “matching up inning by inning, batter by batter, as if traditional pitcher roles never existed.” It’s another thing to pull it off the way Hinch and the Tigers did on Wednesday. Hinch used six pitchers, ranging from 3 1/3 innings (Brant Hurter) to one-third of an inning (Sean Guenther), to completely vex the Guardians hitters. Honestly, to watch it felt like being in the audience for a magic trick: Every lever Hinch pulled somehow miraculously paid off.

“Pitching chaos” is the plan again for Game 4, and while it might feel like the Tigers are playing with house money at this point -- considering Skubal is waiting in Game 5 -- it sure feels like it would behoove the Tigers to take care of this now rather than having to travel all the way back to Cleveland. Everything Hinch is doing is working. But these things tend to work … until they don’t.

Yankees at Royals (NYY leads, 2-1)
8 p.m. ET, TBS
Gerrit Cole vs. Michael Wacha

Royals: Can Bobby Witt Jr. get this series to the Bronx?
The sigh of relief you heard -- from Royals fans, from the Witt family, from anyone who has watched the man play this year -- when Witt finally singled in the eighth inning was palpable. This is one of the best players on Earth, playing his first postseason games for a franchise that has constructed itself around him, and until that hit, he had face-planted, going 0-for-12 in this series. That single at least got him on the board, but if he’s going to have a hero moment for this organization that is pleading, desperately, for him to be a hero, he needs to do so immediately. Did he break the seal with that single? The Royals are a team that lost 106 games last season and, in many ways, has been extremely fortunate to make it this far. Their upside, at this juncture of their competitive window, is almost entirely the fact that they have one of the best players on their team. Now’s the time for him to act accordingly. After all, you never know when you’ll be back here again. Ask Mike Trout.

Yankees: Can Gerrit Cole take it home?
Don’t get it twisted: Gerrit Cole came to the Bronx for one purpose: to win postseason series. The Yankees have won only one of those in a full season since Cole came to town, and they’ve yet to win an ALCS game since they signed him to that nine-year contract. Cole is here because he’s a big-game pitcher. You won’t find a lot of bigger games than this. The ramifications of the Yankees not winning this series -- with the Astros and Orioles both eliminated, with only AL Central teams standing in their way -- are difficult to calculate, for pretty much everyone involved. Winning a tight Game 3 in Kansas City put them in position to take full advantage of these ideal circumstances. Cole is here to take it home. He needs to take it home.