Detroit Tigers’ slugger Kerry Carpenter had a good, but certainly also a very mixed season in 2024. His performance in the club’s first postseason run in a decade was a perfect microcosm as enormous success was undercut by injuries.
When last seen on the field, the 27-year-old outfielder was busy establishing himself as a postseason terror. His ninth inning, three-run home run off ace closer Emmanuel Clase in Game 2 will be remembered as one of the great postseason home runs in franchise history. Even in their Game 5 loss to the Cleveland Guardians, Carpenter came up with a huge RBI knock while limping around with a hamstring injury suffered in the series. But that injury held him back and likely would’ve proven a real problem to overcome even if the team had defeated the Guardians to advance.
Carpenter’s big leap in 2024, with numbers that should’ve established him as one of the game’s more dangerous hitters, ultimately went overlooked because he couldn’t stay on the field. Now well into his prime years, Carpenter needs to figure out how to stay on the field consistently, both for the Tigers sake, and to ever have a chance at a big contract. However, there isn’t that much in the game bigger than this kind of at-bat and coming through for your team in the postseason.
The numbers
One of the difficulties in evaluating Kerry Carpenter is that after two full seasons and change since his August 2022 debut, he still only has 236 games played. So while he did turn 27 in September, he’s still not that far beyond rookie status in terms of total body of work. He played 87 games and had 296 plate appearances in 2024, just over half the season, and while it’s tempting to simply assume he would’ve roughly doubled his counting stats if not for the lumbar spine stress fracture suffered in late May, there’s just no way to know for sure.
The eye test would certainly argue that he reached a new and sustainable level of performance. We’ll just have to hope he can find something in his conditioning work to help him avoid injury and prove it in 2025.
What we do know is that he launched 18 home runs, hit 16 doubles and five triples. slashed .284/.345/.587 and posted a monstrous isolated power mark of .303. He played six games more than half the season. Only Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani put up a better ISO among qualified hitters. He entered the season with a career wRC+ mark of 124, but in 2024 he posted a 160 mark. Only seven qualified hitters in the game posted a better wRC+ than Kerry Carpenter this season.
Despite some overcooked angst from fans when he sits against a left-handed starting pitcher, Carpenter would have ranked in the elite tier of hitters if he hadn’t suffered the back injury and sustained his averages for the full season. There’s no question he’s one of the game’s better power hitters. Solidifying himself into that top tier slugger category will just take a little more time to prove out.
There are also no questions about what to do with Kerry Carpenter. He won’t be a free agent until 2029, when he’ll be 31 for the majority of that season. So there’s no real need to reach an extension with him. Because his first full season didn’t come until he was 25 years old, the Tigers already have the likely prime years of his career locked up under team control. Perhaps they want more than that, but until Carpenter can avoid the injuries for a full season, there’s just no reason to commit more dollars to try and lock up his age 32-34 seasons unless it comes pretty cheaply.
The breakdown
We already know Carpenter is good. The remaining question is whether the leap in performance this season is sustainable. So to find out, we’ll look at his swing decisions, contact rates, run expectancy at the plate, and we’ll hunt for signs that his batted ball luck is sustainable or not.
By the most basic measure, Carpenter’s swing decisions looked no different than in 2023 when he posted a 123 wRC+ and 18 bombs over 118 games played. His walk and strikeout rates were basically unchanged from 2023. He struck out 25.3 percent of the time as compared to 25.1 percent in 2023. He walked 7.4 percent this season after a 7.0 percent walk rate in 2023. League average was 22.6 percent and 8.2 percent, respectively.
So Carpenter put the same rate of balls in play as he did in 2023. What he did better was crush the baseball more often when he did make contact. League hard hit rate was 38.7 percent with a 7.8 percent barrel percentage. Carpenter’s 45.1 percent hard hit rate was outstanding, as was his 16.9 percent barrel percentage. He posted a 43.1 percent hard hit rate in 2023, with a 10.2 percent barrel rate, so while he’s always hit a lot of balls hard, he barreled a lot more of them up with home run trajectory in 2024.
The final obvious note on his contact was that his fly ball rate went up from 35.5 percent in 2023 to 44.8 percent fly balls in 2024, without much increase in pop ups. That’s a good sign that he’s improved at finding pitches he can drive, and squaring them up more often when he does.
Even better, he did this against a wide class of pitches. In contrast to his first two seasons, in which he hit fastballs a little better than league average but struggled with sliders, in 2024, Carpenter crushed fastballs, but he was also in the plus column against every pitch type except curveballs. His recognition improved, but he’s also learning to use the threat of his power against pitchers by taking more balls.
You can see the better swing decisions show up in his chase rate, where he dropped his swing percentage on pitches outside of the zone from 36.0 percent down to 31.3 percent in 2024. He swung at just about the same amount of pitches in the zone, going from 69.7 percent Z-swing to 70.1 percent in 2024. It’s not that he necessarily cut down the swing and miss in his game. In fact, he whiffed at a 1.6 percent higher rate in 2024. But he recognized pitches and put his best swing on them more often, while cutting down his swings out of the zone. As you’d expect that’s a receipt for success.
The real capper on his season was teeing off on Emmanuel Clase twice in the ALDS, the second time while playing on a bad hamstring. If you wanted final proof that Carpenter really did level up in 2024 and finally put it all together, winning those big at-bats down the stretch, and the fear Carpenter struck into opposing managers for the Astros and Guardians in the postseason, offered plenty of proof that he’s now a red alert level at-bat for opposing teams when the game is on the line.
2025 Outlook
The one thing that didn’t happen for Kerry Carpenter was in terms of putting his above average speed to work defensively and on the basepaths. He was already DH-ing a good amount early in the season. After returning from the back injury and a long layoff, he really didn’t see too much time in the outfield.
When he did play right field, he was a plus 1 in defensive runs saved (DRS), and exactly average according to Statcast’s outs above average (OAA) and fielding runs saved (FRS) metrics. We didn’t get much of a look at his throwing arm this season, which has been a plus for him in 2022-2023, but we’ll assume he’s still throwing a little better than average as suggested by FanGraphs advanced fielding metrics.
So overall the Tigers have a solid right fielder here, but the need to keep him healthy and in the lineup everyday, along with the quality of their other options in right field, like Matt Vierling and Wenceel Pérez, will probably combine to keep Carpenter in the DH role much of the time in 2025. That limits their options a bit in terms of bringing in another big bat in free agency or trade, but it’s worth remembering that Carpenter is perfectly fine in right field.
On the bases, Carpenter graded out a bit below average as a baserunner, but his sprint speed average remains modestly above average. He just doesn’t present much of a base-stealing threat, and that’s unlikely to change at this point in his career. It’s also partly a function of the that fact that over half his hits were of the extra base variety. He had 36 singles and 22 walks, plus one intentional walk, but he had 39 extra base hits. Hard to steal too many when you’re often on second or third base, or trotting around to touch them all.
And of course, I’m just being thorough. No one cares if Kerry Carpenter steals bases. He’s here to mash, and in 2024 he did so at a whole new level. The improved hard contact rate and much higher fly ball rate, combined with chasing less balls out of the zone, all provide evidence of stable improvement which should continue in 2025. He probably won’t double his 2024 counting stats next season, but Kerry Carpenter is now a big, big problem for opposing managers.
The Tigers need offensive help this offseason in a big way, and if they can add some right-handed power, get some gains from Colt Keith in year two, and keep Carpenter healthy for most of the 2025 season, the Tigers offense should be much improved.