Will the Tigers break loose even further, or will the next four series see them reeled back?
The Detroit Tigers are now 50 games into the season and they continue to hold the best record in the major leagues. They’re well beyond “hot streak” territory. Only the New York Yankees have a better run differential at 93 runs versus the Tigers 85 run mark this season. The Tigers are on their way to establishing themselves among the best teams in baseball.
If we go back through their last 110 games, taking us back to the beginning of August and including the postseason, the Tigers have a 71-39 record. They’re coming up on three-quarters of a season’s worth of games where they stand atop the major leagues. That’s a wonderful place to be, particularly as the Tigers also have one of the top farm systems in baseball. Their payroll commitments beyond 2025 remain quite low by league standards. Around the league the reputation of the Tigers organization in all departments is soaring. A new era of good Detroit Tigers baseball is well underway and it looks very sustainable.
Now, after a successful 4-2 road trip through Toronto and St. Louis, the club comes home for a seven game homestand before heading back out on the road to Kansas City on May 30. Currently holding a 5.5 game lead over both the Minnesota Twins and the Kansas City Royals , and a six game lead over the Cleveland Guardians , the Tigers next three series will provide an opportunity to put two of those three teams further back in their place.
First up is a four-game set against Cleveland at Comerica Park. They’ll then host the Giants for three before heading out on the road to face the Royals and then the scuffling Chicago White Sox . No doubt A.J. Hinch and the Tigers have Cleveland on the brain after their ALDS loss to the Guardians last October. They should have no trouble coming home from the trip with plenty of motivation to exact a little vengeance and push through a stretch that could get to a point that will be really hard for the rest of the Central to catch.
The flipside to this, of course, is that there is also an opportunity for these teams to reel the raging Tigers back in and get the divisional race back into close order as the calendar turns to June. No doubt the Guardians and Royals will be primed for these series as well. The Tigers remain the hunters, but now everyone else is hunting them as well.
Of course, it’s different as a fan. After so much success, it’s hard for many to avoid focusing on everyone that could go wrong, and in baseball, a whole lot can go wrong even for a talented, deep ballclub excelling in all phases of the game.
The Tigers are tied for seventh in the league in home runs with 62, and they haven’t even gotten to play warm weather games in Comerica Park yet. The Tigers are seventh best in on-base percentage and isolated power. Per FanGraphs they’re the eighth most valuable team in terms of baserunning, seventh best in defensive runs saved.
The pitching staff has the sixth best ERA at 3.37, and they’ve arguably underperformed. The staff’s 3.86 FIP shows room for improvement and certainly they’ve had more shaky bullpen outings in the recent weeks than we saw through the first 40 games. Still, Chris Fetter and his coaches’ record of getting guys on track over the course of a season is really good and they expect lot of potentially useful arms to return in the summer months. As long as their top arms in the rotation and the pen stay healthy, they’re going to be in fine shape all year, and there’s not that much to be done if they don’t.
The pitching depth should get better as the year goes along. It’s hard to know what, if anything, to expect from Alex Cobb. But between Sawyer Gipson-Long, Alex Lange, Ty Madden, Tyler Mattison, and perhaps eventually Jose Urquidy, the Tigers have some quality arms on the mend. They have some quality relief prospects brewing as well.
Jackson Jobe is just settling into his first rookie season but is showing signs of his strikeout touch developing under the Tigers’ coaching staff. Casey Mize and Reese Olson are both on the injured list, but with very mild maladies that should provide them with a break in the long season rather than impacting their performance. Olson will be out until at least the Royals series, but should only miss one more turn in the starting rotation before he’s eligible to return from ring finger inflammation.
All in all, things continue to look very good for the Detroit Tigers.
They may not be quite the juggernaut they’ve looked like so far, but there’s a good chance that their true talent level will be able to handle the adversity that is sure to come over the course of the season. Parker Meadows and Matt Vierling are playing rehabilitation games, with Vierling looking due to return in the next week or so. Jake Rogers has already returned, which will be good for the pitching staff. Mize should be back this weekend. They’ve even gotten their two long west coast road trips out of the way already.
The next four series provides a real challenge all around, and the Guardians, Giants, and Royals tend to play a pretty pesky, fundamentally sound style of baseball. However, the Tigers opponents have more problems on their plate than they do. The Guardians pitching staff has been uncharacteristically mediocre, while the Royals just lost Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo for a few weeks at least. The Royals offense is pretty poor, with teams doing their best to neutralize Bobby Witt Jr.’s damage and otherwise having an easy time of it. The Guardians offense hasn’t been much better, with both teams seriously outperforming their run differentials. The Giants pitching staff has been good, but they’re certainly not scaring anyone either.
And of course, the streaking Minnesota Twins will have their own thoughts on the situation. The Tigers won’t see them until a series at Comerica Park at the end of June.
Certainly the Tigers have a few issues of their own. The relief corps continues to outperform their peripherals by a pretty good margin, and they aren’t exactly dominating up and down the pen right now. With a 4.02 ERA/4.09 FIP in May, there are a few pitchers who need to turn things around. Beau Brieske, Tyler Holton, and John Brebbia in particular. They’ll also have to piece together one more outing without Reese Olson in the rotation. That’s still not a lot in the problem department, but so far the pitching staff and the offense have been pretty complimentary. If the bats cool, the bullpen issues may become more pressing. At the moment though, it feels like grasping at straws looking for trouble while the Tigers just keep piling up wins. Long experience of watching baseball will do that to you.
Winning brings more meaning to every game. When your team is good, everything is magnified, including the pressure to keep it going. It’s easy to get too far ahead of ourselves even in late May, but the next four series have been circled in my mental calendar for a few weeks as the point where the Tigers might really start to pull away from much of the division, or where the inevitable cooling off of certain players might take its toll and see the Tigers slip back into nail-biting territory in June.
Hinch will no doubt have his players viewing this next homestand and road trip as an opportunity. If they can seize it, acceptance of the idea that the Tigers are now one of the top teams to be reckoned with in baseball will really start to take hold. If not, maybe things will finally become less comfortable and a lot more hair raising heading into the summer months.