Well, you can’t say it hasn’t been an interesting start. The team has done reasonably well, but the offense has not. The Detroit Tigers have scored 133 runs through 34 games of the 2024 season. That ranks them 20th of 30 major league teams. Does it feel worse than that?
Despite a nice 18-16 record after three straight seasons of brutal starts, the Tigers offense is generating an awful lot of angst. On the one hand, that’s the burden of people finally having some modest expectations for this club. On the other, the production of several key hitters has been downright atrocious so far. It’s completely understandable that a long suffering fanbase looks at this in dismay. The high quality of the pitching, and at times, the defense, has only set the struggles of Spencer Torkelson, Javier Báez, Colt Keith, and Parker Meadows off in sharper relief.
No doubt the pitching staff deserves more run support. Tarik Skubal and Jack Flaherty have each posted absolutely dominant performances just in the past week while the team proceeded to lose both games. In the preseason I raised the specter of a team that pitches great and continues to be a pretty mediocre offense. We saw what that might look like in March and April, and it was surprisingly good, but the Tigers clearly can’t keep winning at this pace without getting a little more out of their offense.
For four months of baseball going back to July of 2023, they’ve had a legitimate ace caliber starting pitcher in Tarik Skubal. Another good start from Reese Olson and a masterclass level performance by Jack Flaherty against the St. Louis Cardinals served notice that Chris Fetter and his staff are going to prevent runs this season. Kenta Maeda had his typically shaky start in April, but is now posting more Maeda-like outings, while Casey Mize has been pretty solid overall and is still just six starts into his return from Tommy John. There’s a decent chance he gets better as he gets more reps under his belt. The rotation is at least pretty good, has Matt Manning for backup, and one of the best collections of upper level pitching prospects in all the minor leagues. This isn’t going to be the Tigers problem this season.
The bullpen lacks that one elite stopper, but overall it’s a deep group of solid to very good relievers, and we’ve seen A.J. Hinch and Chris Fetter produce quality bullpens out of less distinguished groups than this over the past three years. They aren’t going to carry the Tigers, but despite some rough outings recently as the hot start cooled down, they’re good enough to ensure that if the Tigers starters pitch like this, and the offense produces more, they’re going to win most of those games.
It’s a good time to remember that the word roster is a verb as well a noun. The April version of any club usually goes through a lot of different phases during the year. They aren’t the same team from month to month, even week to week. Baseball is weird. Upsets are a lot more the norm in baseball than in many other sports.
So, you can take the Tigers start one of two ways. Assume that they’re just going to go on like this as an offense or even get worse, or hope that they’ve managed to steal a bunch of games while several guys they were counting on slumped terribly this spring, and that the offense can really only get better. In that scenario, the Tigers are going to be in the playoff hunt all year, if not the favorite.
I tend to lean toward the latter scenario, partly because of my belief in Colt Keith, but also because he and several others have been so unproductive that replacing them with average utility players would be an improvement. It’s just not that hard to do better than this, and while players like Báez, Torkelson, and especially Meadows are already losing at-bats to supposed understudies, another month of this without a turnaround from a few guys might bury them in the standings by the time summer begins despite the strong start.
Point being, the Tigers could trade for a couple veteran castaways on the right side of the infield and get more production than they’ve seen from Torkelson and Keith so far. Meadows is already sitting a lot as Wenceel Perez and Matt Vierling gets reps in center field. While Jace Jung and Justyn-Henry Malloy are both still pretty vulnerable to better stuff down at Triple-A Toledo, either or both are capable of giving more than the right side of the Tigers’ infield has produced to date. Improving from here isn’t that hard, because it’s been that bad. They aren’t just going to let Torkelson and Keith drag them down for a couple more months. Change is going to come, even if it comes slower than many would prefer.
The Tigers ownership and front office clearly didn’t promise anything big this offseason. That was the subtext of their pretty modest moves to patch up the roster in the winter. They didn’t necessarily have a ton of conviction in the roster either. More to the point, they have several young players the franchise has bet on, and they need to work with what they’ve got and try to get them on track.
If, as I expect, Colt Keith settles in and gives the Tigers average or better production and solid defense at second base, the offense looks a lot better. If Torkelson gets past his timing issues and starts hitting like he did last summer, obviously the offense is going to look a lot better. The problem is knowing when to send them down if this doesn’t get better in May.
Colt Keith and Spencer Torkelson
The Tigers need these two players to develop. Colt Keith is 22 years old, was a better pure hitter than Torkelson as a prospect, and has developed plus raw power that was amply displayed over the last two years in the upper levels of the farm system. He’s hitting a terrifyingly meager .155 through 107 plate appearances with zero power. And yet, his strikeout rate is only 16.8 percent and he’s walking half as much as he strikes out.
Major league pitching is a major step up in competition, but the at-bats can’t be that good without him starting to square up more balls. He’ll settle in, the hits will drop and the power will show through, or, he’s going to start punching out a bunch more often, and then it’s time for a factory reset in Toledo. Right now, in terms of his development, there just isn’t much point to sending him down unless the approach falls apart or his confidence really comes undone.
Torkelson, while we’ve discussed his swing, his flexibility, and his approach a lot over the past month, just isn’t on time. The same swing mechanics in place when he hit 27 home runs from June 1 to the end of the 2023 season are in evidence. The quiet, explosive hands he had in college have given way too often to a busy load and late swings on fastballs. But for four months last summer it all worked because he was covering the pitches he needed to cover and hitting mistakes into the seats. Right now his timing is poor and he’s taking hittable pitches over the middle early in counts only to make weak outs on pitchers’ pitches last in the at-bat.
Rather than an overhaul, trying to give him some different looks in the box seems like the first step. Move around in there. Change posture and stance slightly. There have to be some tweaks at least. And if nothing is working, then it’s time for a pretty heavy conversation.
Once again we have a hitter who is actually striking out less this season than he did in 2023, and yet the hard contact just isn’t there. This time last season, there were at least a ton of loud outs that made forecasting a breakout pretty reasonable. He’s probably hit into some bad luck this season as well, but the hard contact is way down. Right now he looks more like the rookie who couldn’t catch up to fastballs and was constantly caught between for most of the 2022 season.
Allow me to phrase this on the bright side, but at least you can pretty easily upgrade from what Torkelson is giving them so far. Long-term, finding a better option at first base is one of the easier tasks a front office can face. In the short-term, they need to figure this out with Torkelson, and if that calls for an all hands on deck collaboration with the coaches and analysts and some work in Toledo to try to get him right, so be it.
It’s now year three for the first baseman, and the inability to pull out of these funks at the major league level has his future in real doubt. The Tigers are probably going to try and ride this out for a few more series, but it can’t go much longer without Tork doing more damage.
Javier Báez
Javier Báez is a unique problem of his own. The Tigers don’t really have an everyday shortstop to replace him with, and even their depth options at Toledo are currently injured. Add a lucrative contract with three more seasons, and it’s hard to believe the Tigers will move on any time soon. At some point though, Scott Harris and Jeff Greenberg are going to have to find a solution for this team to really be taken seriously as a contender. You can carry two or three players for their defense and still be formidable if you’ve got two-thirds of a good lineup and some solid pinch hitting options, but they still have to provide something offensively.
Zach McKinstry has started at shortstop three times in the past week. I would guess there are some intense discussions going on between A.J. Hinch and front office on all of these struggling players, but Báez remains the thorniest to navigate. For now, using him as a role player is probably all Hinch can do, and hope either he or McKinstry heat up a little.
Parker Meadows
Of all these players, Parker Meadows is the one struggling the most at the plate. Even hitting almost exclusively against right-handers he’s striking out a ton. On the other hand, he’s still contributing more than anyone else mentioned because his defense in center field is excellent, he’s taking his walks, steals some bases, and has two home runs.
Don’t get me wrong, his numbers at the plate are atrocious, but his track record suggests he’s a good deal better than what we’re seeing, and even as a role player he provides something to the team. It’s been a disappointing start but there was always a decent chance that he would end up a utility player. They may continue to use him that way a while longer, but ultimately if he doesn’t improve soon he’s better off returning to Toledo to play everyday and try and get himself squared away at the plate.
The offense will improve
So there it is. When a bunch of your players have been this bad, odds are that they can only get better. And if they don’t, upgrading from levels this low is pretty easy. The offense isn’t going to get worse than this, but right now it’s hard to see how they get a lot better either, unless the guys who are supposed to hit start really hitting.
They could shuffle some pieces around, maybe make a small signing or trade, and sit the coldest bats more often, but that still isn’t likely to make them even an average offense. The pitching staff is good, but they aren’t the 2012 Tigers either. With an average offense, they might sneak into the playoffs, but building a real contender is going to require that they get some of these guys going. They can’t just throw in the towel already.
The problem, is that the Tigers are trying to construct a team around guys like Torkelson and Keith in particular. Greene, Carpenter, and a yearly veteran pickup like Mark Canha isn’t nearly enough. Prospects like Jung and Malloy aren’t projected to be stars. They have help coming, but if the core group they’re depending on can’t get it done, the club is still a long way from fielding a real contender. This season is still largely about development and finding out what they’ve got in their players.
The Tigers will have options when they decide to make moves, but for now they’re going to try and ride this out a little longer and hope the current roster heats up and starts hitting more to baseline expectations. But if they go into the kind of team funk we saw at the beginning of June last season, their hopes this year may be long spent by the time solutions are found.