The strengths and weaknesses of this team were on full display.
After a bit of a shellacking by the beast known as the Los Angeles Dodgers , though the Tigers were in all three games until the end, the Detroit Tigers just needed to come into Seattle and right the ship a little bit. They took the first two games of the set to complete job one, but let a winnable game slip through their fingers on Wednesday with Tarik Skubal on the mound to finish their first road trip of the year with a 2-4 record.
Several players were just in neutral in this series. Kerry Carpenter has had a few RBI knocks but hasn’t really swung the bat well so far. Zach McKinstry is getting pressed into leadoff duty and playing all around the field as usual. He’s really held things together for a roster with a few big holes due to injury, but can’t really be expected to be a key contributor. Spencer Torkelson continues to look improved, but was a little quieter than he was in LA. Justyn-Henry Malloy gives you a much needed threat off the bench, but after dropping everything to fly to Seattle after Torres’ injury, Malloy was quiet in the series.
Andy Ibáñez is not in lefty masher form so far this spring, and that’s another minor problem, particularly if A.J. Hinch continues to pinch-hit him in place of Kerry Carpenter rather than further down the lineup. In a big RBI spot, sure we get it against lefties, and Andy needs some ABs to try and get it going. However, he was a non-factor in this series.
Overall, the Tigers are still giving off fairly gritty vibes. Even in their four losses they kept putting together threats late in the game. They just don’t have the depth in their lineup to consistently beat up on major league pitching and the need to move players all over the field hasn’t been great for their defense either. Five of the six starting pitchers the Tigers have faced have been good to excellent to start the season, so if we’re taking very small samples, it’s nice to see them battle it out with Logan Gilbert, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Luis Castillo right out of the game. Roki Sasaski and Emerson Hancock struggled and the Tigers’ discipline served them in good stead against both.
Fortunately, the pitching looks very good in the early going and is capable of carrying them a good way this season. Getting healthy will help, so the mission in the meantime is to just hang tough in April.
Riley Greene
One the big pluses in the Mariners’ series was the continued strong start of Riley Greene. The Tigers star left fielder went 5-for-13 with a pair of homers and a pair of doubles in the series. With the bottom of the order bereft of any real production other than some good swings from Dillon Dingler, the Tigers need their better bats to produce until they start getting some help back off the injured list. Greene has led the way in the early going, as one would expect.
Casey Mize
Probably the standout pitching performance of the series was Casey Mize’s work on Tuesday night. Racking up 15 whiffs is huge for Mize, as both his splitter and two slider types were drawing bad swings from the Mariners all game long. The right-hander’s fastball was much more crisp last season as he returned from Tommy John surgery, but the secondary pitches were nowhere in evidence most of the season.
Mize put a ton of work in over the offseason with both the Tigers’ coaches and at Driveline Baseball, and it’s paying dividends already. This outing was the best, most promising start of his career, and while he ran out of gas late in the outing, it’s early in the season and there were a ton of positives to build on for the former first overall pick. We’re pretty excited to see what a fully operational Casey Mize can do this year.
Tarik Skubal
Tarik Skubal’s second start of the season on Wednesday was a more Skubal-like affair than his Opening Day work. If not for a blunder by Colt Keith on a two-out grounder from J.P. Crawford in the second inning, Skubal’s line would look a lot better. It was a bit of an awkward play with Keith shaded way over toward first base, so he was moving toward second as he collected the ball, with the speedy Crawford running toward first, but he had time to set his feet and make a sharp throw to first and instead tried to spin and get the short throw to second, realizing too late that Dylan Moore was already going to reach second before the throw got there. Instead, everyone was safe, and a Victor Robles double scored two runs and borked Skubal’s outing in the process.
Still, the command for Skubal was a little better than against the Dodgers. He started off feeling for his release point, but by the end of the third was really locked in. The stuff remains outrageous. Fears of regression after winning the AL Cy Young award have no particular basis in fact at this point. After an eight strikeout performance against the Mariners, he’ll tackle the hard-hitting Yankees next Tuesday at home for his third start of the season.
Kahnle and Brebbia
This pair of veteran relievers has looked good in the early going, offering some different looks out of the Tigers’ bullpen to go with a lot of experience pitching late in games.
Kahnle picked up his first save as a Tiger on Tuesday evening, and looks to be line for his share of chances going forward. A changeup heavy reliever may bring back memories of late period Francisco Rodriguez, but Kahnle’s changeup is much more of a swing and miss pitch even in the zone, and he can back hitters off with 94-95 mph as well. That dimension was sorely lacking from K-Rod during his brief Tigers’ tenure.
As for Brebbia, hitters just can’t square up his fourseamer. Despite sitting around 93-94 mph, the weird angle and outstanding life on the heater leaves hitters getting very big-eyed when it comes out of his hand and taking big swings, only to find nothing but air in front of their bats. Brebbia doesn’t even get crazy ride on the fourseamer but it has plenty of run as well and just seems to tie right-handed hitters in knots. His weakness is giving up homers to left-handers, so we’ll continue to see A.J. Hinch try to use him against right-handed stacks in opposing lineups.
Brenan Hanifee and Will Vest have also gotten off to good starts, while Tyler Holton and Brant Hurter have been a bit more hit or miss so far. Still, the bullpen looks good and pretty deep, though Beau Brieske hasn’t had a very good start to the season, and Kenta Maeda is pretty hard to have much confidence in beyond middle relief work.
Colt Keith
We’ll use Keith as the transition from the good to the bad, as he was both in this series. After a tough opening series in LA, Keith clearly told himself to chill out at the plate heading into Seattle. He was much more patient, and as a result he was 3-for-7 in the series with six walks, and had a few key hits in the victories on Monday and Tuesday.
Yes, we’d like to see him start driving the ball more consistently, but he’s just feeling his way into the season and not that dialed in with his timing so far. That’s been clear, but taking those walks and settling in at the plate is the path to doing more damage.
The real flaw for Keith in this series was the aforementioned defensive blunder on Wednesday. He knew there were two outs, but it was a bit of a bang-bang play with a slow grounder and two speedy runners, and Keith made the wrong call as to where the easier out was, spinning to go to second base and then having to recalibrate and throw too late to first. The kind of error that gets forgotten quickly unless, as it happened, the next hitter doubles in both runners when you should have been out of the inning. A baserunning blunder later in the game that plausibly cost the Tigers a run only added to a rough day out there despite getting on base three times.
Skubal wasn’t his best on Wednesday, but he was more than good enough to win with a clean game behind him.
Jackson Jobe
The Tigers beat up on rookie Emerson Hancock in Game 1 of the series. That obscured a fairly erratic outing from Tigers’ top pitching prospect Jackson Jobe. The stuff is electric, and the 22-year-old has the confidence to shake off some early mistakes. Still, he remains a work in progress who is too good to learn what he needs to learn in the minor leagues, but still a little too raw to navigate major league lineups the way his stuff suggests he should.
Overall, I really think starting with the major league club was the right move, and they’re going to give him plenty of time to work with Chris Fetter and his staff. The talent level is high and a final hurdle of spotting his fastball to both sides of the plate more effectively is pretty straightforward. If he’s still nibbling and wasting too many pitches a month from now perhaps the Tigers will reconsider, but you might as well settle in and enjoy what will probably be a wild but entertaining ride with the rookie this spring.
No worries here though. The Mariners battled him pretty well, but Jobe continues to miss gloveside or up too much with his fourseamer. When he needed a strike, he usually got it, but often by just firing it down the middle. More artistry is required, but he’s a good bet to get there fairly soon. It was somewhat amusing watching Chris Fetter calmly deliver a lengthy speech in Jobe’s ear on the bench after he left the game.
An interesting note from the Mariners broadcast touched on whether Jobe might be tipping his pitches. The Mariners did a really good job spoiling some tough cutters and changeups along the way and ambushed him twice for home runs. I can’t say if he’s tipping anything, but we have speculated for a while that Jobe could stand to build a bit more deception into his delivery. He’s very smooth out of the glove into release and the same balance and rhythm that tells prospect forecasters that Jobe is going to be able to refine his command a lot more may also make his a little easier to time up for hitters. Perhaps a little bit of funk added to the mix would be good for him, but ultimately it’s still just about command. There are few pitches good enough to dominate major league hitters over the heart of the plate consistently.
Jake Rogers
I’ve been joking this spring about the likelihood that Dingler fever catches hold in the early going. So far that looks prescient as Jake Rogers’ offensive production has really fallen off over the past year. He’s already had some pretty ugly ABs in the young season.
Rogers is so good behind the dish that he’s in no danger of losing much playing time yet. It’s also a little early to worry too much about his bat. All he has to do is chip in a little modest production and he’s still an average or better player because of his defensive work. There’s a going to be a lot of leeway for Rogers’ offensive production or lack thereof.
Still, we’re already seeing A.J. Hinch pinch-hit Dingler in for him late in games, and with success. The youngster is good behind the plate as well, and if he continues to hit and Rogers doesn’t, Hinch is going to have to start tilting the playing time toward Dingler a little more, but the Tigers are still going to prioritize the catching over the hitting, and there really isn’t anyone better behind the plate at this point. A healthier Tigers’ offense would make this more of a moot point, but right now they are a little strained as a lineup, so we’ll see how aggressive Hinch is in pinch-hitting for his number one catcher this spring.
The bottom of the order problem
This is no surprise, but the Tigers have gotten very little from their seven through nine hitters through six games. Dingler has been a real bright spot, and Trey Sweeney did homer on Wednesday, but overall, Sweeney, Rogers, Ryan Kreidler, Andy Ibáñez, Zach McKinstry, and Manuel Margot is a very weak group to have to fill three spots in the lineup with most days. To his credit, McKinstry continues to chip in a lot of quality at-bats and is wearing a lot of hats defensively too.
Having Spencer Torkelson and Justyn-Henry Malloy both in the lineup will hopefully be a moderating factor this spring. With them trading off between first base and designated hitter, with Malloy playing some left field perhaps, there is at least a chance that the Tigers can ride some hot hands until the roster gets a little healthier. Still most nights the Tigers will have three or four weak offensive performers in the starting lineup, and they need their bigger bats to carry the load.
To really expect to be an above average offense and take full advantage of their pitching, the Tigers really need Gleyber Torres and Matt Vierling back in the fold. Instead, Torres has a somewhat ominous oblique injury, while the super utilityman Vierling is rehabbing a strained rotator cuff in his right shoulder. He’s already missed five weeks going back to late February, and there hasn’t been much of an update. Hopefully he’s closing in on a rehab assignment in the next week or two, because the Tigers really need that combo of defensive versatility and offensive production.
Wenceel Pérez might be back in early May, but Parker Meadows’ continues to be a longer term affair. That’s too bad, because it’s not hard to imagine a pretty good offense if they can get the whole group back in the dugout and healthy.
Time to crush the White Sox
The Chicago White Sox can’t be worse than they were last year. It’s nearly mathematically impossible. Still, they’re the clear bottom feeder in the AL Central, and the Tigers will welcome them in for three, including Friday’s home opener, looking to make it two straight series victories. They’ve handled some tough starting pitching pretty well to start the year. Will they suddenly struggle with a decent but pretty pieced together White Sox group?
Jack Flaherty, Reese Olson, and Jobe should be the scheduled starting pitchers for the Tigers. It figures to be damp and not particularly warm this weekend in Detroit, but you can bet the vibes will be extremely sunny as Tigers fans get their first look at the club in person since their stirring 2024 run.
The season has just begun, but the injuries in the lineup are making everyone a little jittery about a slow start. Getting right and taking at least two of three from the White Sox would help settle the nerves. Beyond them it’s the Yankees, Twins, Brewers, Royals, and Padres, so the early competition is going to be fairly tough. The Tigers will finish April at home against the Orioles and then on the road in Houston, so there are no pushovers on the dance card the rest of the month.