Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff

MLB

No Cinderella, but Red Sox-Tigers will ensure thrills

BOSTON — Picture scores of officials from Major League Baseball and Fox waking up Saturday morning in a cold sweat, stumbling to their hotel windows, identifying the Charles River and breathing sighs of relief.

“Thank heavens,” the many people will say simultaneously. “I had a nightmare that this series was A’s-Rays.”

Yeah, it would have been fun to see one or even two low-payroll, ugly-ballpark underdogs participating in the American League Championship Series. A Cinderella story always promises charm.

However, this ALCS, Red Sox-Tigers, starting Saturday night at Fenway Park, is the semifinal we ultimately want. It may not be the best story at the outset, but it’ll be the best series.

“If you watch the Red Sox, they have a tough club,” Tigers manager Jim Leyland said Thursday night, after Detroit outlasted Oakland in a five-game AL Division Series. [Dustin] Pedroia, [Jacoby] Ellsbury, Jonny Gomes, Big Papi [David Ortiz]. I’m not saying they’re tougher than Oakland. I’m saying they’re a more veteran team.”

If Leyland won’t say it, then The Post will say it: The Red Sox are tougher than Oakland. They have the best offense in baseball, a strong starting rotation and a strong clubhouse — overseen by first-year manager John Farrell — that rose from the ashes of the failed Bobby Valentine experiment of 2012.

Of course, the Tigers, the reigning AL champions, are no slouches themselves. They field the league’s second-best offense and second-best pitching staff [behind Kansas City’s], and they’re playing in their third straight ALCS with many of the same players as well as the same manager, Leyland, in place.

“Well, they’re not even swinging the bats the way they’re capable of doing it and beat us, 3-2,” Oakland manager Bob Melvin said Thursday, upon his team’s elimination. “Once they get hot again like when we saw them earlier in the season, there are points in the season they’re as dangerous of an offensive team as there is. … Any time they take the field, they’re one of the better teams in baseball.”

The Tigers’ best player, Miguel Cabrera, is hurting considerably, his lower half having betrayed him to myriad vague injuries. Yet he managed to deliver the ALDS-winning hit on Thursday when he turned on an inside fastball from A’s stud rookie Sonny Gray and pulled it over the left-field wall at cavernous O.co Coliseum.

For the Tigers to advance to the World Series over the favored Red Sox, they really could use more help from Cabrera’s fellow big fella Prince Fielder, who has been dreadful in four postseason series as a Tiger. They’ll also require some length from their excellent starting rotation, as it’s evident that Leyland doesn’t trust many of his relievers besides closer Joaquin Benoit.

The Red Sox’s Achilles’ heel also is their bullpen, so root for games to be decided late in order to drive up the fun quotient. For sure, the key matchup in this series will be how the Tigers’ vaunted starting rotation — in order, Anibal Sanchez, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Doug Fister — handles the multiple mashers in the Boston lineup. In addition to the quartet Leyland mentioned, there are newcomers Stephen Drew, Mike Napoli, David Ross and Shane Victorino and the blossoming Will Middlebrooks, Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Daniel Nava.

Big names, big bats, power arms, tradition-rich baseball cities. Big payrolls.

Big ratings, which will make the suits happy.