Since the All-Star break, the Detroit Tigers pitching staff has the best record in the American League at 28-21. They also have the best ERA in baseball. Those two facts are intimately connected, of course. At 75-71 overall, with 16 games left to play coming into Thursday’s matchup with the Colorado Rockies, the Tigers still need to pull off something like a 12-4 closing record, if not better, to overtake the Minnesota Twins. It’s a longshot, but the Tigers second half run is sending great long-term signals to the fanbase even if the task at hand is daunting.
What’s fairly incredible though, is that the Tigers have managed this with only one bona fide major league caliber starting pitcher on the roster.
Granted, the starter who has anchored the whole project is Tarik Skubal, the likely AL Cy Young winner. Still, other than a few good starts from Jack Flaherty before he was traded to the Dodgers, and a couple of mediocre Casey Mize outings, manager A.J. Hinch and pitching coach Chris Fetter and his staff have worked minor miracles with a mix of average relievers and not quite ready for full-time duty rookie starters for two months now.
Beyond Skubal, rookie Keider Montero has been the only other consistent presence as a conventional starting pitcher. The 24-year-old right-hander has great stuff and appears to be coming into his own, but he’s still a work in progress holding an ERA of 4.88 with a 4.85 FIP. He’s at least given the Tigers a stabilizing presence and several good outings even if his performance has swung a bit wildly from start to start. That’s about what you can expect from a young starter with good stuff who is just putting it all together in terms of command.
I’d rather not, but we could certainly have a debate as to how to term the methods the Tigers have employed. The simplest description is just to call the games without a traditional starting pitching just pure bullpen games. Teams have used bullpen days throughout the game’s history based on necessity, and the Tigers have certainly gone this route from a place of need. This isn’t really anything new, but it is worth calling part of their strategy an “opener” or the “appetizer” as some sarcastically have referred to it, because it’s not exactly true that the Tigers have only had Skubal and Montero as starters for most of the second half.
They’re using starting pitchers, they’re just using them sparingly and protecting them with short outings from relievers. Having a short reliever take on the top of an opponent’s lineup has set up the “starter” for success by allowing them to get into the game against the back half of an opponent’s lineup. Not only does this let them start their outing without facing the heart of the opposing lineup in the first inning, it forces some awkward decisions for an opposing manager. It’s hard to match up with the Tigers because you don’t really know who is going to pitch, or when.
Do you spread out your best hitters throughout the lineup? Do you stack left-handed hitters against a right-handed opening pitcher? You might ambush the opener and blow up the Tigers whole plan, but if you don’t, you’ll probably have the worst of the matchups all game long with tough decisions as to when to burn your bench in pinch-hitting appearances.
Or, do you simply ignore the pitching matchups, set your lineup, and then watch Hinch and Fetter plan out their bullpen to optimize the matchups in their favor throughout the game? Either way, your hitters may never see the same pitcher twice, and as we know, the more chances hitters get against a pitcher in a game, the more likely they are to dial into their rhythm and start doing damage. The Tigers have been able to short circuit that advantage and really put opposing managers in a difficult spot.
Rookie left-handed starter Brant Hurter has been used after an opener, taking over after a right-handed reliever gets the first three or four outs, as has rookie right-hander Ty Madden. Kenta Maeda, who struggled badly as a starter for most of the first half has a respectable 3.58 ERA since the Tigers starting using him in long relief. In essence, they’re just protecting their lesser starting pitchers and using them as a classic long man out of the bullpen. An atypical situation and strategy, but not so unfamiliar either. The genius lies in how successfully the Tigers have pulled this off.
Hurter is a solid left-hander with a quality sinker and a good sweeper, but he had a 4.46 FIP and a 5.80 ERA at the Triple-A level before his call-up on August 4. We liked Hurter as a future lefty backend starter or reliever as a prospect, but he wasn’t really at his best when he came up. He has a 3.00 ERA and 2.97 FIP in 33 innings since.
Likewise Madden had a wildly erratic year in Triple-A, struggling to command a new split-change and mixing in far too many blow up innings in between bursts of good performance.
Bryan Sammons, a 29-year-old journeyman making his major league debut, also threw a few long relief appearances without hurting them. This has not been a tale of calling up a bunch of red hot pitching prospects who immediately made an impact. Instead, the coaching staff has quickly polished up just about everyone they’ve been handed from the farm system, none of them particularly well heralded as prospects.
Even more incredible is the relief core Hinch and Fetter are doing this with. Many of their actual relief options are call-ups without much track record, like Brenan Hanifee or Sean Guenther. Meanwhile, the core of the bullpen is Tyler Holton, Jason Foley, and Will Vest.
Holton and Foley are very effective relievers, with Holton’s ability to throw a ton of innings and handle either-handed hitters well making him more valuable of the two, but neither of them strikes anyone out. Foley holds a 2.87 ERA on a 17.9 percent strikeout rate. Holton has a 2.23 ERA with a 20.4 percent strikeout rate. League average for all relievers combined is 23.3 percent, and the majority of the best arms have a strikeout rate close to 30 percent or above. Anyone vaguely familiar with FIP can tell you that high levels of contact is typically a recipe for disaster eventually, but they’ve both defied the odds for multiple seasons at this point.
Finally, Will Vest has a little more of a classic power reliever look with a riding high-90’s fastball and a sharp slider, and he’s been a key lynchpin in the second half as well, but he’s still not much of a strikeout artist by current standards. Overall, this bullpen survives on getting weak contact and preventing home runs. That’s not how most good bullpens around the game look.
Ben Clemens at FanGraphs covered the Tigers’ bullpen at length in a great piece yesterday, so we’ll leave it at this. The Tigers really don’t have a single reliever whose baseline stats would look that appealing to opposing teams for late innings high leverage work. The same is true for the slightly motley crew of long men and part-time starters they’ve worked with as long relievers since Reese Olson and Casey Mize got hurt, and Jack Flaherty was traded. And yet the run prevention unit taken as a whole is working incredibly well.
Part of the reason this is able to work, is that the Tigers game plan hitters and defensive positioning really well. They’ve also been helped in that vein by the lack of home runs around the league this season overall. This probably wouldn’t be working so well in a year where the ball was really flying out of ballparks excessively. Holton, Foley, and Vest don’t give up too many home runs as a group, but their lack of strikeouts would be even more dangerous and likely not to last in a season in which the ball was really flying. Play good defense and keep the ball in the park and you’re going to be alright.
Holton had a few troubles with home runs early in the season, and Foley did as well as the Tigers rode him hard in late spring and early summer, but both have been exceedingly hard to do anything more than single off of for two months now. Vest has a bit of a penchant for struggling with inherited runners perhaps, but he’s allowed just two home runs in 61 2⁄3 innings of work. They aren’t likely to walk you, you aren’t likely to homer, and it tends to take stringing together three hits to score more than a run in an inning against them. The Tigers don’t have a classic flame-throwing closer with elite strikeout rates, but over the long haul of a series, they can smother teams by forcing them to string together multiple singles to do any real damage.
Obviously the defensive component is also crucial when you’re far from the league leaders in terms of strikeouts. The Tigers have emphasized building a young, athletic roster ever since they tore things down back in 2017, but it’s only now coming to pass with a deeper collection of talent. That youth is now paying dividends out on the field, as the Tigers play good defense and outrun other teams on the basepaths. The outfield overall has ranked 8th in defensive runs saved, and that’s with Parker Meadows missing the middle of the season and now red-hot and playing dominant center field in this second half run.
The infield defense grades out about average, but overall that doubles prevention outfit in the outfield most days does a lot of the heavy lifting and helps their pitchers avoid the big inning. Not only has Trey Sweeney, considered the second piece of the Jack Flaherty trade with the Dodgers at the time, outperformed either Javier Báez or Zach McKinstry so far, but It’s just not that easy to score on this team unless you’re crushing homers. And they’re doing a good job of preventing just that, while smothering on-base percentages with low walk totals and the 8th highest ground ball percentage from a pitching staff overall.
The final piece is the catching. Jake Rogers is an outstanding defensive catcher. Dillon Dingler has areas to improve, but he’s been very solid in his debut. Continuing on from the Rogers and Carson Kelly duo pre-trade deadline, the Tigers do good work behind the plate.
Reese Olson is due to return to the rotation shortly, and that will help them hold it together down the stretch. It’s hard to sustain a strategy like this without burning out your best relievers, and after months of this the Tigers are no doubt happy to be getting some of their rotation back in order. Casey Mize has been pretty mediocre this season in his return from Tommy John, but having him back to give them innings may still help out over the final 16 games of the season.
The Tigers odds of winning a wild card berth aren’t great right now, but they hold their destiny in their own hands, and they have nothing to lose. This is a young team that picked themselves off the mat after another rough stretch in May and June, and put together a rousing stretch of baseball that finally has them looking like a team on the brink of winning divisions and becoming a postseason threat in the years to come.
The outstanding pitching management from the front office analysts down to the coaching staff and to the players should give Tigers fans a lot of enthusiasm about the future. If they can do this with an absolutely battered rotation, it’s exciting to think of what’s in store for them next season as Jackson Jobe arrives and they hunt for the next Jack Flaherty style reclamation project. It also speaks to what this group may be capable in an all hands on deck postseason scenario in Octobers to come.
Right now, the Tigers are a young team playing with house money. They have nothing to lose. They’re pitching great and everyone that Chris Fetter, Robin Lund, and Juan Nieves get their hands on seems to improve significantly. If they add strength, particularly right-handed hitting strength, to the infield and shore up the pitching staff again, the Tigers are going to be a big problem for everyone next year.
For now, we’re still hoping for a run that makes them a big problem this October. The fact that this is any more than the wildest of hopes is a huge testament to the skill of A.J. Hinch and the Tigers coaching staff and analysts.