Fresh off a three-game sweep and right on the faltering heels of the Minnesota Twins, suddenly the baseball world is waking up to what the Detroit Tigers are doing. It may feel lucky, it certainly feels surprising after stumbling at midseason badly enough to sell at the trade deadline, but the fact is the Tigers are outplaying just about everyone over the last two months. Their standard May/June swoon may ultimately be too much to overcome, but right now, no one wants to deal with the Tigers.
A combination of young talent, a versatile roster with a strong mix of speed, defensive ability, and power, along with outstanding pitching and brilliant managing has the Tigers looking much more like a legitimate contender in October than you might imagine the cold hard statistics would allow.
The two elements of the game that maybe get overlooked most in trying to unpack the Tigers run are speed and defense. Along with creative bullpen usage and great game planning against opposing hitters, baserunning and defense have been the secret sauce helping the Tigers overcome what is still an erratic offense and, for most of the past two months, a very inexperienced pitching staff.
One of the elemental parts of Scott Harris’ philosophy is the emphasis on youth and experience. Now, most of the credit for the current situation goes to A.J. Hinch and his staff for developing the young talent left by Al Avila, but the circumstances are playing into Harris’ consistent comments about having a young, athletic, and versatile roster.
Despite the huge presence of players like Miguel Cabrera, Victor Martinez, and J.D. Martinez a decade ago, those clubs rarely played good defense and they couldn’t run much. It was a station to station offense and the only emphasis on defense was up the middle where players like Austin Jackson, Jhonny Peralta, and Alex Avila held things down. The 2011-2014 Tigers could only score consistently by stringing together hits and trying to get on base in advance of one of their stars hitting a home run. They managed to so a lot of that anyway, because they had some elite hitters in that lineup, but the term feast or famine, at least in baseball, was made for those squads.
Pitching and hitting get all the love, and we’ll get to those two crucial sides to the game in a moment. First though, I just want to take a moment to emphasize the Tigers’ defense and baserunning, two elements of the game that often get overlooked because they’re more difficult to keep track of and quantify. The Tigers don’t play small ball much, but they are versatile, pesky, and well staffed to take advantage of every opportunity. We’ll touch on the hitting and pitching since the All-Star break toward the end of this piece.
Spoiler alert: This run feels miraculous, but it isn’t a fluke.
Defense
The 2024 Detroit Tigers have made 75 errors, eighth least in the major leagues this season. That’s a pretty crude measure, heavily dependent on the whims of official scorers. Still, it points the way.
More useful stats are defensive runs saved (DRS) at FanGraphs, and outs above average (OAA) from Statcast. By DRS, the Tigers have had the ninth best outfield unit in baseball this year, and that’s despite losing Parker Meadows in center field for about two months. As Hinch keeps pointing out, he’s got four centerfielders he can deploy, from Meadows, to Riley Greene and Matt Vierling, and with Wenceel Pérez still learning the outfield but certainly possessing the speed to handle center field in spots.
By DRS, Riley Greene is the fifth best outfielder in baseball this year, amassing 12 defensive runs saved. Matt Vierling is a plus 4, while Meadows is a plus 2 on the year. Even Kerry Carpenter has posted a plus 1 DRS on the year. Pérez is at minus 2, but again he’s just converted to a full-time outfielder this year and some of those numbers are attributable as much to communication as to skills. As Hinch and Harris have both emphasized, in an era with higher strikeouts than ever, preventing extra base hits is the most important part of team defense outside of the catcher position. That is what a good outfield does for you, and it’s working for the Tigers.
The infield certainly has been the weaker side of things.
Colt Keith is probably somewhere around average, with a -6 DRS and a +4 OAA. Again, these sites go about measuring defense and assigning credit or blame a little differently. We’re probably never going to have a perfect system for weighing defense. Suffice it to say that Keith has checked in maybe a touch below average, but within the margin of error.
At shortstop, Javier Báez was a -1 OAA and a -4 DRS. Between aging and injuries, even Javy’s defense has finally fallen off, adding even more impetus to the need to move on. Meanwhile, after a rough start, Zach McKinstry has been a +3 by DRS and +4 OAA at the shortstop position, while the acquisition of Trey Sweeney for Jack Flaherty has also been a big help, as the rookie has put up a +4 DRS mark and a +2 OAA in his 213 innings at shortstop. That he’s done that while outproducing Baez and even McKinstry at the plate has been a godsend. If you have a huge deficiency at a position, it doesn’t take a really good player to make a significant improvement in a team’s fortunes.
On the downside is the fact that the Tigers have used a real mish-mash of players at third base without a dedicated regular there, and the defense has been pretty bad. The Tigers are -13 in DRS at the third base position this season. Matt Vierling is a -4 DRS on the year playing out of his usual outfield role. Zach McKinstry is at -3 though in just 162 2⁄3 innings at the hot corner. Jace Jung has 171 innings at third base for the Tigers and holds a pretty brutal -5 DRS over the past month and change. Of course, he’s really a second baseman playing out of position.
At first base, both Spencer Torkelson and Bligh Madris have graded out about average, and while Torkelson continues to make weird errors and struggles to go back on pop-ups, his more routine fielding on ground balls does look to have improved during his time in Toledo.
Finally, there’s the catcher position, where we’ll keep it simple. Jake Rogers is one of the best all-around catchers in baseball, and Carson Kelly was very good as well. Dillon Dingler, while struggling mightily at the plate, continues to grade out reasonably well in all aspects of the catcherly arts. The Tigers could certainly use more offense at the position, but they’re in great shape defensively for the next few years.
Baserunning
Breaking down baserunning is also complicated. The easiest team measurement comes from FanGraphs, where the Tigers are 10th best in baserunning on the season. They’re 25th in total stolen bases, but their success rate is good. Where you really see the positives is in Statcast’s team baserunning metric, which has the Tigers as the second best team in baseball to the Diamondbacks in runs above average produced by advancing and taking the extra base better than just about anyone. Per attempts to advance an extra base by their metrics, the Tigers have a 98 percent success rate.
In terms of simple sprint speed, just about the whole team is fast. Only Parker Meadows is really a burner by that metric, but more to the point, only Spencer Torkelson, Jake Rogers, Justyn-Henry Malloy, and Jace Jung on the current roster aren’t at least average or better in the speed department. And for a catcher, Rogers still grades out reasonably well. Jung is far and away the laggard, but the Tigers don’t have anyone in the bottom 100 of players for sprint speed.
Simply put, there’s no one who really clogs up the bases, and the majority of their players are fast, if not up in the elite tiers of speed. When the Tigers try to steal, they have a good success rate, and they take the extra base better than just about any team in the game. Not only do they take the extra base, but the knowledge that they’re so good at it adds another layer of pressure to opposing pitchers and fielders.
Offense
Prior to Wednesday’s sweep, the Tigers held a 79-73 record. But based on their run scoring and run prevention, FanGraphs already had them pegged as an 84 win team. Make that 85 wins and rising as the club continues to surge. The Tigers have scored 40 more runs (649) than they’ve allowed (609), so that all checks out. Of course that would still mean the Tigers are the type of club to finish a few games above .500. Since the All-Star break, things look rather different.
Both wRC+ and OPS+ are total measures of a player’s offensive production, with average production adjusted for the year to year run scoring environment so that 100 always represents average production. As a result it’s a very handy overall metric.
In the first half of the season up to the All-Star break, the club had a 95 wRC+ which ranked them 23rd best. They scored 413 runs in the first half, which was the 18th best mark. So they were arguably a little fortunate in the run scoring department.
The Tigers have scored 232 runs since the All-Star break, a mark that ranks them 20th in baseball. Their team wRC+ of 94 in that span ranks them 21st.
Clearly it’s not really the offense that has heated up that much, though since the trade deadline they have a 100 wRC+ and have moved up the ranks in run scoring by a bit to 17th best. And as you’d expect, the numbers reflect that they’ve continued to heat up.
In the last 30 days, they’re 6th best in run scoring, and 7th best by wRC+ with a 108 mark. Parker Meadows returned and caught fire. Riley Greene missed three weeks and has been going strong since his return. And finally Kerry Carpenter returned from injury with a bang as well, though he’s actually cooled a bit recently.
The Tigers still need a big right-handed bat in this lineup, preferably playing in the infield. The offense has done just enough, and the return of Parker Meadows and Kerry Carpenter has boosted them down the stretch, but this still isn’t a particularly good run scoring unit. Over the last 30 days they’re running the second hottest batting average on balls in play in the game, and that isn’t going to last. However, it’s hard to judge them on what’s past when many of their key players are still under 25 years of age and not into their prime years yet. They’re supposed to be getting better and they are, but overall they probably are bound to cool off at some point. That may not be until next year, but it’s worth keeping in mind that they still need significant help this offseason to be a consistent force in 2025.
Pitching
As you might expect, it’s really the pitching staff that is making this happen.
In the first half, the Tigers posted a 3.97 ERA, 14th best in baseball. On the other hand, their fielding independent pitching mark (FIP), was 3.73, predicting that their results, represented by ERA, should have been better.
In the second half, the Tigers hold a 3.08 ERA, best in baseball. Their 3.63 FIP signals room for regression despite the good defense, but that’s still fourth best in the league since the All-Star break.
The offense is going to need work heading toward 2025, and it’s high time the Tigers front office and ownership made some significant investments on that front. Still, they’ve been a solid offense even if the actual hitting is still average at best. Add in the baserunning, and they’re making it work just enough to take advantage of one of the most dominant pitching staffs Tigers fans have ever seen from top to bottom.
As I wrote last weekend, the ability of A.J. Hinch and pitching coach Chris Fetter and his staff to get this much out of Tarik Skubal, Tyler Holton, Jason Foley, and a crew of completely unheralded names, many of them rookies with pretty ugly statlines at the Triple-A level this season, has been absolutely remarkable. The team defense and catchers certainly deserve some credit as well for making this all work, but as an overall run prevention unit, the Tigers have been incredible in the second half, and it’s made this run possible. It also looks more sustainable that the recent boom in run scoring.
With nine games left, with all teams involved under a ton of pressure, we’re into small sample size territory where anything could happen. Numbers, odds, percentages; none of this is reliable anymore with so few games remaining. We can’t predict what will happen, but the Tigers have improved in all aspects, and while the bullpen probably can’t go on pitching quite this well forever, we don’t need forever. Just a few more weeks, please.
The Tigers are on a rampage, and while they’re probably not ready to make a big October run yet, who’s going to tell them that? It’s going to be tough, but in all phases of the game, they’re getting it done and the lack of weaknesses has compounded into a truly stupendous run. Nine more games to glory.