Sweep.

Detroit sat there with the second pick in the draft, its highest slot in the last two decades, and was on the clock as San Diego went with local high school shortstop Matt Bush.

And with the second pick in the 2004 Major League First-Year Player Draft, the Detroit Tigers select Old Dominion University righthander Justin Verlander.

Bush signed his Padres deal right away. Verlander, on the other hand, would hold out for nearly five months, delaying the start of his pro career until 2005.

Midway through Verlander’s holdout, Texas, which had lost seven of nine and fallen from 4.5 games up in the division to 1.5 games out, visited Detroit.

The Rangers swept Pudge Rodriguez’s Tigers on August 3, 4, and 5, with local radio personality Mike Bacsik throwing seven scoreless in the middle game, the best effort of his five-year big league career. Texas reclaimed first place in the West, for the final time that year.

It was the last time Texas swept Detroit in a series of at least three games.

Until this weekend.

In yesterday’s series finale, Verlander shut Texas down through his own seven scoreless, scattering three singles and two walks while punching out nine and handing a 2-0 lead to the Tigers pen. Martin Perez’s Quality Start wasn’t especially clean, and in fact he was one hitter away from being lifted in the third inning. As the eighth got underway, the Rangers’ two-run deficit felt greater.

Texas would collect nine hits in the final two innings, and score eight runs.

Half came in when Bobby Wilson, who was a 48th-round Angels draft pick in his second minor league season back when Verlander went second overall, and who has changed organizations seven times, turned a bases-loaded Mark Lowe slider around and deposited it over the left field fence.

After the game, Wilson would say: “I knew he was going to throw me a slider. I haven’t handled sliders this series very well. So that’s kinda what I was sitting on. I know he’s a high-percentage slider guy, and I just got the barrel on the ball.”

Wilson caught Lowe in just one of the five games in which he appeared behind the plate for the Tigers last month. Lowe faced six batters that afternoon. He threw 22 pitches to six Pirates. Four of them hit from the right side, and to those four Lowe threw 10 fastballs and eight sliders.

Speaking of Lowe: Game 6 in St. Louis tonight — what could go wrong?

A few minutes before Wilson’s bomb, Jeff Banister had inserted Drew Stubbs as a pinch-runner at first base for Nomar Mazara, who had singled after a Rougned Odor single to start the frame. I didn’t love the move under the circumstances. It turned out to be crucially fantastic.

After Adrian Beltre singled Odor in, Prince Fielder hit a high-bounding ball to first with men on first and second, a happily productive out for the struggling cleanup hitter. With one out, Stubbs now on third and Beltre on second, Ian Desmond lobbed a medium-deep fly to right fielder J.D. Martinez, who camped under the second out.

There’s almost no chance third base coach Spike Owen would have sent Mazara home, even though he was the tying run. If he did send Mazara, the inning would have ended with a 9-2 double play.

But Owen had Stubbs to work with, and the fleet Saturday re-acquisition tagged up and scored on a close play at the plate that Tigers manager Brad Ausmus considered challenging.

After that: Intentional walk, hit-by-pitch, Wilson grand slam on the Lowe slider.

Tigers closer Francisco Rodriguez pitched the ninth, because Texas never gave him the chance all weekend to close a game and he needed the work.

That’s awesome.

Two walkoff losses and a blowout defeat against the Blue Jays, and the Rangers end up winning the seven-game road trip in Toronto and Detroit?

That works.

Texas and Detroit will tee it up one more time this regular season, when the Tigers come here August 12, 13, and 14. Maybe the Rangers will draw Verlander again. Matt Bush may even be here by then, not as a Padres shortstop but instead as a Rangers reliever with a power arsenal not unlike the one Verlander used to take to the mound.

Maybe Wilson will again face Lowe, who this time will start him off with a four-seamer up, or a chase slider that doesn’t catch the zone.

And maybe Wilson will be ready for that one, too, and Bacsik will be talking about it the next morning on the air.

Can’t predict ball.