Once upon a time, the 2024 Major League Baseball campaign was going pretty well for the Detroit Tigers. However, due to injuries and some poor performances by key players, AJ Hinch’s squad finds itself well below the .500 mark after crossing the season’s true midpoint.
The Motor City Kitties needed everything to go right this summer if they wanted to run with the big dogs in the MLB postseason. For a second there, it looked like the team had a shot to make its first playoff appearance in a decade, but that ship seemingly sailed after a terrible month of June. It does not help that a once-hapless American League Central division has turned out to be incredibly competitive as well.
As is our wont, the Bless You Boys staff convened to give their respective opinions on the first 81-plus games played by the Tigers. Suffice it to say, morale is pretty low among the group but frankly, there just is not much to be too excited about. Best record after 81 games since 2016? Yay?
Take a look below at what the crew had to offer and do not forget to drop your hot takes in the comments as well.
Mr. Sunshine: What makes me saddest about this team is how utterly inconsistent it is. Baseball is an inconsistent game, but it feels like true feast or famine with this team. Maybe the bullpen is on, maybe it gives up eight runs. Maybe the starter has Cy Young stuff, maybe they give up multiple home runs and hard contact. Maybe the hitters drop a 12 spot on good pitching, or maybe they get two-hit by a guy making his MLB debut. Maybe the defense makes sparkling plays destined to be web gems, or maybe the guys run into each other in the outfield.
That’s what’s made this season so weird. You can very clearly see the talent in a lot of the players, but with only a few exceptions they never seem to tap into it consistently.
David Rosenberg: Bring Miggy back.
Peter Kwasniak: I was very bullish on the team this year, predicting over 90 wins and a division title. Oh, what a fool I was. Granted, the division being this strong is something I don’t think anyone in baseball saw coming. That has been a terrible stroke of luck for the Tigers.
But the bigger concern is just how terrible key members of the team have been and their strategy of banking on the young core has really come back to bite them. Everything had to go right for this plan to work and boy has it not gone right. Torkelson completely forgetting how to hit has been a gut punch and Carpenter getting injured has completely shut down the offense.
On the pitching side, Maeda has been a disaster of a signing and Mize has shown struggles to generate swings and misses in his first year post TJS. And then there’s the bullpen, which had been a strength of the Tigers the last few years, posting the 27th worst ERA in MLB since May 1st, and the 19th worst ERA overall in 2024.
What I’m figuring out is just how far from contention the Tigers really are if this is going to be the plan every year. Signing a few short-term guys around a mostly young homegrown core. Our core is nowhere near ready and time is starting to run out on guys like Skubal. If the front office isn’t going to push the issue or be given permission to spend to push the issue, the rebuild has basically started over from the beginning of 2023 and it’ll be a long while till we can expect a winning season again.
Zane Harding: Now, I understand the sentiment from the “Matt Chapman contingency,” as I call them.
If you target guys like that, you can bridge the 8.5-game gap keeping us from the wildcard. Chapman is worth two wins already, a Kiner-Falefa or DeJong contingency plan at short adds some more, bring in insurance at outfield with Joc or a different one-year guy, maybe pick up an extra reliever… then we’re in the wildcard, even without Carpenter, even with screwing up by picking up Maeda. (I wanted Lugo and not Maeda, FWIW.)
We have five or six guys on this roster who are absolutely useless. And the frustrating part is that most of those dudes make no money and can be replaced or even optioned. I see a lot people out there who blame Hinch for mismanaging the bullpen and lineup. But remember: Hinch is usually at or better than our Pythagorean win percentage, and impacts the team’s overall potential the least beyond developing what he is given — and Fetter has been elite, even if Brdar seems to be struggling with turning AAA bats into major league guys.
This team, believe it or not, has had six above-average hitters on it this year by wRC+: Greene, Vierling, Perez, and Canha are active, Carpenter is hurt, and Buddy Kennedy posted a 116 wRC+, saved nearly a run defensively, and added 0.2 fWAR in the six games he received. (Kennedy, by the way, was given to Philly for free and is on a 14-game AAA hitting streak.)
If Chris Ilitch isn’t willing to spend, he’s the main culprit; if he is, it’s Scott Harris. The money seems to be for the Red Wings, and as it was in 2022 for ERod and Javy (RIP), so I blame Harris for half-baking this team his first two years. He gives Bob Quinn “smartest guy in the room” vibes in the most frustrating way. (And remember: Bob Quinn developed the Lions OL. He just sucked at everything else. Harris has been great at cobbling a #2 starter together and has a solid prospect type that he’s been infusing the farm with; has he done literally anything else?)
Cam Kaiser: This team blows so hard that I find myself unapologetically rooting for the Guardians (my local team) now because I don’t want to throw my remote at the TV when I watch. The organization stinks from the top down. Chris Ilitch has no interest in putting resources into the roster, and that culture of disinterest seems to be running rampant through all levels of the organization.
The most we hear of Chris adding to the organization is when he’s putting in a new scoreboard or more VIP seats that will inevitably sit empty. Fans do not care about that, buddy. If you win 95 games a year, the Tigers will be back to nightly sellouts and three million fans a year.
Scott Harris, who doesn’t seem to have a competitive bone in his body based on his interviews, is taking the most scenic route of all time to winning. Prospects are being called up and contributing very little. AJ Hinch might have the most job security of any manager who has done nothing but lose since taking over.
If there’s one saving grace, it’s that Chris Fetter seems to be able to get a lot out of pitchers, though the bullpen is back to being a total coin flip. With the trade deadline coming up, I’m sure Scott will turn the quality pitchers Detroit had into more prospects who will contribute nothing to the major league team now and more than likely ever.
Either extend Riley Greene or set him free. Maybe just set him free so he’s not doomed to be the next Bobby Higginson.
Brady McAtamney: This team had a chance to be competitive. They’re not. They’ve fallen off a cliff hard, and it was always going to be either an extended hot streak that made people buy-in or an extended cold one that made them tune out. Whichever came first. And here we are.
No, Matt Chapman would not have saved this team. I’m still giving Scott Harris time, because he took over a team with a bad roster and a good-not-great system where two 1.1 picks are underperforming. I’m still willing to give him an offseason to figure things out.
I think we need a new hitting direction. It’s clearly not working out. I’m not going to fearmonger and rage bait, but this offense objectively stinks and has for a long time. I know getting a new coach/hitting staff won’t be a magic key but damn, hopefully, it’s better than this.
Now obviously having league-worst production at SS and 1B are crippling — that’s part development, part Al Avila. I don’t think any amount of Matt Chapmans would overcome that.
This offseason must be where those get addressed if we’re going to seriously step forward.
Zane: I will add that losing Kerry Carpenter posting an >150 wRC+ was huge and him plus Meadows or Tork bouncing back could be a boon for the 2025 or even late-season offense, so there is stuff to build off of.
Just sucks that Scott was so conservative again! I do not believe in that style of team building. You have to be more active wheeling and dealing, in my opinion, to move quicker, otherwise, you’re basically just sticking your savings in a bank account, not even a high-yield one.
Frisbee Pilot: I mean, everything has gone wrong for a few key parts of this team — I could list them but we all know who they are — but I’m an optimistic guy. I think both (a.) at least one, or maybe several, of these key, underwhelming guys are going to unlock something at some time this summer, and (b.) we’ll get even more surprising and significant contributions. I mean, did anyone really expect Wenceel Pérez to look good in the 3-spot this season?
Something was mentioned on the Benetti/Dickerson podcast recently when Scott Harris was interviewed. It was well known that a lot of hitters would be streaky, months ago, in the major leagues. Well, here they are, streaky as heck.
Zane: I don’t even know what we are supposed to do without Javy’s bat.
Brandon Day: On the one hand, watching this team collapse over the past month has been really depressing. I can’t blame anyone for feeling like this team is years away from doing anything. Still, calls for another teardown would feel over the top if not for the passivity of this front office and ownership. They have a few key problems that don’t require star players as solutions. If they can’t manage to summon the will and the skill to deal with those problems, then this whole thing is DOA already.
If we step back a bit, this team has a lot of talented young players. The front office has failed to surround them with much help, and Spencer Torkelson’s flame-out left this offense far weaker than it should have been. Where you can take comfort, is that the Tigers’ main issues are so bad at shortstop, first base, third base and in the bullpen to a degree, that even a group of average players would take this team a really long way.
Their holes are just too deep to overcome night in and night out, and with Kerry Carpenter out of the lineup, they’re pretty much reduced to Riley Greene and otherwise just about the worst lineup in baseball. And so once again a Carpenter injury has sparked a total implosion from an already sub-par lineup over the past month.
They have Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter under control for the next few years, and they are two of the best-hitting outfielders in the game. A rotation of Tarik Skubal, Reese Olson, Casey Mize, Jackson Jobe, and Kenta Maeda sounds pretty good to me. I have plenty of confidence in Colt Keith finding his way to a power stroke as he gains experience.
The farm remains pretty deep with tradeable assets even considering — as I do — that Jobe is untouchable. And the payroll is going to be extremely low again to start the 2025 offseason. Even assuming they’ll keep it under $120M-125M, they have the space to let Canha and Urshela go, and actively acquire one good player that way, along with some help. A trade will have to be involved to solve one of these positional problems as well.
The big question is whether Harris, Scott Greenberg, and ownership, have the will to solve these problems effectively. They have a deep enough farm system, and enough payroll flexibility, to deal with these issues and put a lot better team on the field without “giving away the future” in the process. That should be the baseline expectation.
Solve the Javy Báez problem either at the deadline this offseason. Bo Bichette, Ha-Seong Kim, even a stopgap measure like Paul DeJong would likely add two to three wins to this team. Finding a good hitting 1B/DH type is the other big need. Solve those two issues and fix this bullpen and you should have a competitive team next year without either blowing up the payroll or decimating the farm system.
Will they actually get these things accomplished? So far Scott Harris has given no reason to trust him to make the kinds of aggressive trades the Tigers need to take the next step, but he’s not even through his second year yet. It’s time to show their cards, at the trade deadline and this offseason. If they’re not willing to make a real push to build up their infield, they might as well trade everything and call us in 2027. Wasting years more in spinning their wheels without really trying to make major improvements in the team is just unacceptable now.
If Scott Harris can’t solve these problems and put a winner on the field next year, then any early confidence I had in him is going to evaporate.
Ashley MacLennan: This team is bad and it should feel bad.
Brady: I agree that a complete tear-down is too drastic. The difference between the Tigers today and the Tigers of their darkest days is that there are real cornerstones on the roster now. The goal is that there are more on the way. But this offseason needs to be one where the engine starts moving — extend Skubal, trade for/sign a high-level player and let’s start moving this thing along.
Brandon: And if they keep dicking around like this, there isn’t the faintest hope of extending Tarik or Riley. They are going to get out of dodge when the time comes. Whatever people think of the Ilitch family’s low-expectation, low-commitment approach, they aren’t going to let them just blow it up either. I believe in that, at least, a little more on their end. So get it together. We’re not even asking that much here.
Patrick O’Kennedy: The Tigers had a chance to be contenders in what was a weak division last year and a league where any kind of a winning record keeps a team within striking distance of a playoff spot. The front office simply did not do enough to put the team in that position.
They sell us a program of draft, draft, draft, and add a cheap stopgap player here and there. It doesn’t work like that. Detroit is still in the bottom third of MLB in the important hitting metrics. I will do a more detailed breakdown at the break, of where they rank as a team, but the quick summary is that the Tigers have three-fifths of a decent starting rotation, but not enough offense to capitalize and a bullpen that is too weak in a game where six-inning starts are the goal and four to five innings are the norm.
As we look around MLB, we see teams that climbed up out of the basement into a pennant race, even right in our own division. The story is getting old.
Adam Dubbin: [gestures wildly] This is why I am still salty about not taking Wyatt Langford over Max Clark.
Now that the Bless You Boys staff have aired their grievances, it is time for our readers to also blow off some steam in the comments below! Hopefully, by the All-Star break, we can have the feats of strength as well.