The Tigers molded Tarik Skubal and an unlikely group of pitchers into a first class pitching unit.
If you’re still wondering how the Detroit Tigers made an incredible, improbable run to the playoffs in 2024, the answer can be summarized for the most part in one word: Pitching.
The Tigers’ pitching, both from the rotation and the bullpen, was among the major league leaders in just about every important metric that you can think of. As the purpose of this exercise is to break down the performance of the team in certain areas, there just aren’t a lot of weaknesses to be found in Detroit’s pitching staff.
Certainly it was still a tale of two half seasons. Several key arms from the first half of the season were traded at the deadline in Jack Flaherty and Andrew Chafin. The Tigers improbable run in August and September featured a largely rebuilt bullpen, as well as several rookie starters contributing as long relievers like Brant Hurter and Ty Madden. But before we go overemphasizing what we saw down the stretch, let’s consider the whole season as a whole first.
Here are the rankings for the Tigers’ pitching staff overall among MLB’s 30 teams for the 2024 season.
This table shows a pitching staff that dominated on the mound across the board in every area, with the exception of strikeouts. The team ranked among the top five MLB teams in ERA, FIP, WHIP, Walks, Home Runs, and opponents’ batting average and they led the majors in barrel percentage (hard hit balls allowed). They were top ten in ground ball percentage and wins above replacement.
We previously broke down the Tigers lineup rankings, and found an offense that was below average across the board. Suffice it to say that the Tigers’ pitching carried them to the post season.
Now let’s isolate the Tigers’ starting pitching.
Captain obvious tells us that the staff was led by their all world Cy Young candidate, Tarik Skubal, plus four months from Jack Flaherty, who was traded in July and is now a leader in the LA Dodgers ’ rotation.
But it wasn’t just Skubal and Flaherty. Just after the trade deadline, when the Tigers took off like a rocket and posted the best record in the major leagues, they featured a rotation of Skubal, Keider Montero, TBD, TBD and TBD. When they got Reese Olson back off the IL, that gave them three regular starters, but neither Montero nor Olson pitched as full-time traditional starters over the final weeks of the season either. It was only in the postseason that Olson returned to something like regular starting duty.
The club got 20 starts from Casey Mize, 17 from Kenta Maeda before he was sent to the low leverage closet in the bullpen, and 16 from rookie Keider Montero. But for two solid months, Tigers’ starters morphed into openers, closers became starters, and more than half their games were “bullpen” games.
This is evident in the fact that just 40 of the teams 86 wins were credited to the starting pitcher. The team was dead last in innings per start.
Enough about creative methods. The numbers show that whatever pitchers the Tigers called upon to pitch the first inning and an undetermined number of innings beyond that, they were among the best in the game.
Detroit starters were top five in the majors in ERA, FIP, WHIP, Walks, Home Runs, Ground Ball percentage, and barrel pct. The rotation was 8th in strikeout ratio which shows that the starters weren’t the issue in this department. The lone weakness on the staff was the relative lack of strikeouts out of the bullpen.
The Tigers featured a quantity of good pitchers throughout the 2024 season, but never were able to assemble a full rotation of healthy quality starting pitchers at the same time. Going forward, they’ll need to add a starting pitcher or two. While the usage of the pitching staff as a whole by manager AJ Hinch was masterful, we wouldn’t want to see them try that for 162 games. Hinch and Scott Harris both agree the opener/longman strategy was born out of necessity and not really viable for a full season.
Now let’s look at how the Tigers’ bullpen ranked among their MLB peers.
What we can see from this table is that the Tigers’ relief corps performed admirably, ranking among the top five MLB teams in several important categories- ERA, FIP, WHIP, Opponents’ average, and they led the league in walks per 9 innings and barrel percentage.
What sticks out as the biggest weakness on the Tigers pitching staff is the lack of strikeouts. Certainly Tarik Skubal had no issues in that regard, and he and Jack Flaherty were among the league leading starters by that metric, as well as most other numbers. The rest of the Tigers starting options throughout the year were pretty light in the strikeout department.
The two leaders in K ratio in the bullpen were Andrew Chafin, who was traded, and Joey Wentz who was released. The only other reliever who struck out a batter per inning was Beau Brieske, who made a dozen starts during the season and whiffed exactly 9.00 K/9 as a reliever. Brieske, like Vest, pitched brilliantly down the stretch as the duo seized much of the team’s high leverage and closing duties.
The Tigers relief corps surrendered their share of leads, with 26 blown saves, but they also ranked third in wins, recording 46 of the team’s 86 victories. Some of those were tallied because a starting pitcher didn’t go the required five innings. In the final analysis, you can’t really break the Tigers staff down along traditional starter-reliever lines as easily as you can in most seasons, but the bullpen clearly went from a minor weakness to a huge strength in the second half.
The Tigers bullpen featured several unlikely success stories that helped propel them in the second half.
- Brant Hurter, regarded as a quality starting pitching prospect, started the year a 5.80 ERA in Toledo, yet turned into a valuable long reliever with a 2.58 ERA in Detroit.
- Brenan Hanifee turned a 5.17 ERA in Toledo into 1.84 in Detroit.
- Sean Guenther was a rehabilitation project who developed his splitter in Triple-A Toledo, got called up from the minors down the stretch, and posted an ERA of 0.86.
- Will Vest was left unprotected by Detroit in the Rule 5 draft, selected by Seattle, and returned to the Tigers to post a 2.82 ERA in 70 1/3 innings of work, finishing the season in late inning duty.
- Jason Foley struck out fewer than seven hitters per nine innings, yet worked 60 innings, with a BB ratio under 2.00 per 9 IP and a miniscule 0.26 HR/9 ratio. He led the Tigers with 28 saves, typical of a Tigers’ relief pitcher. Nothing flashy, just efficient. Foley had a few rough spots over the course of the season where his velocity dipped, but every time he bounced back strong.
- Tyler Holton has the lowest ERA (2.15) among all pitchers, both starters and relievers, over the 2023- 2024 seasons, with a minimum of 162 innings pitched. During that span, he has made 10 starts, has nine saves, and 125 appearances.
In the final analysis, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of the work by manager AJ Hinch and head pitching coach Chris Fetter. By creative pitching management, they turned a weakness into a strength, forcing opponents’ best hitters to deal with a different pitcher just about every time they came to the plate. The only exception to the mix of openers, long relievers, and late innings matchups was Tarik Skubal’s dominance every fifth day. The Tigers leadership managed to take a rag tag group of pitchers, many of whom struggled in Triple-A ball, and mold them into one of the best pitching staffs in the major leagues.