Out of context, this wasn’t the Detroit Tigers’ worst loss of the season. Far from it.
But it’s the loss that brings them to their lowest point of the 2026 season, and that might as well be the same thing.
The Tigers suffered a 10-6 home loss to the Los Angeles Angels on Tuesday, May 26, dropping them to 21-34 on the season. That puts them firmly in last place in the American League Central standings – 10 games behind the first-place Cleveland Guardians and seven games behind the second-place Chicago White Sox (who, if you need a reminder, finished 27 games behind the Tigers in 2025 and set an AL record with 121 losses just two seasons ago).
The loss also drops them to a tie for the worst record in the AL with the Angels – and the way things are going, it may not be long before the Tigers catch the Colorado Rockies for the worst record in baseball. The Rockies lost on Tuesday, as well, keeping the Tigers’ margin on MLB’s ultimate cellar at 1½ games – for now.
“I don’t know that anything can add to the frustration, because it’s already at a pretty high level,” said Tigers manager A.J. Hinch.
‘Frustrated with losing’
The Tigers had their chances on Tuesday, with the most notable being their three-run fifth inning. Those runs all came with no outs, as they loaded the bases for Spencer Torkelson. A would-be grand slam – a Grand Tork Bomb? –went foul, was upheld upon review and then led to a strikeout, with the Tigers eventually stranding all three runners after a Zach McKinstry strikeout and Hao-Yu Lee flyout to end the inning.
“Yeah, it went foul quick, but obviously [I was] very hopeful at first,” Torkelson said. “I think we’re just frustrated with losing. Losing sucks, winning is a hell of a lot more fun.”
Beyond Torkelson’s not-so-grand slam, the Tigers got some other bad bounces in this game. The crucial, five-run eighth inning for the Angels could’ve just been a one-run inning had Zach Neto’s two-out ground ball heading straight for Lee at second base – in an echo of a Tigers hit in the second inning – not bounced off of reliever Will Vest and allowed the Angels to continue the inning.
But as Vest said after the game, the game-breaking grand slam he allowed to first baseman Vaughn Grissom two batters later came down to execution, not luck. After all, Vest was the one who walked slugger Mike Trout and allowed the slam to Grissom, flipping a 6-5 lead to a 9-6 deficit.
“[I] just didn’t execute when I needed to and let the inning kind of unravel, which was unfortunate,” he said. “[The] ball is not really going our way right now with some of these games, but [we’re going to] try to keep going and do our job.”
Tigers looking at franchise-lows
To put this loss into perspective, the last time the Tigers were at least 13 games under .500 was on Sept. 1, 2023, when a 4-2 win over the White Sox brought them to 61-74. That team finished 78-84, nine games out of first place in Hinch’s third season at the helm.
The last time the Tigers were at least 13 games under .500 at this point in the season was in 2003, when the worst team in franchise history – and the worst team in AL history until the White Sox took them off the hook two years ago – started the season 15-40 and finished with a 43-119 record. A year earlier, they were at 21-34 at the same point of the season – matching the 2026 squad – before finishing with a 55-106 record.
If the Tigers finish 2026 with that win total, it would be a staggering failure for a team that came into the season with MLB’s 10th highest payroll and the according World Series expectations.
So on one hand, that doesn’t bode well for Detroit. But on the other hand, it may not be time to bury those postseason expectations quite yet, no matter how bleak the season has looked so far.
Detroit, somehow, still in wild card race
Detroit’s odds of winning the AL Central for the first time since 2014 are incredibly slim, with the Guardians entering Wednesday with a 10-game lead over the scuffling Tigers.
But a wild-card berth is still very much in play, especially this early in the season, thanks to a mostly mediocre AL. Just ask rehabbing ace Tarik Skubal.
“We’ve played a bad stretch of baseball here, and we’re still five games out of the wild card,” he said before Tuesday’s loss, which put the Tigers 5½ games back in the wild-card standings. “So as bad as it may seem, we’re still right there.”
He’s not wrong. On Aug. 2, 2024 – the Tigers’ lowest point in the divisional standings before a virtually unprecedented 31-13 finish for a playoff spot – they were 16 games behind the division-leading Guardians and 9½ games behind in the wild card race. Two months later, they were in the playoffs, before falling just one win shy of an ALCS berth.
There are caveats, of course. That Detroit team was in the middle of the wild-card pack at the time and only seven games below .500, while this Detroit team would have to leapfrog nearly everyone in the AL – at least nine teams, including the Angels, who hold the tiebreaker over the Tigers by virtue of Tuesday’s win.
But time is on Detroit’s side, with over 100 regular-season games to go (including two this week and three in July against the Angels). Hinch and the Tigers have already worked a bigger turnaround in a shorter timespan – who’s to say it can’t happen again?
Even with all this losing – 17 defeats in their past 20 games – Fangraphs’ playoff odds still give the Tigers a 7.8% chance of winning the Central (third in the division) and a 16.4% chance of making the playoffs overall (10th out of 15 AL teams).
“We know how to play winning baseball, and we’ll turn this thing around,” Torkelson said.
And while winning has often eluded this 2026 team, Torkelson’s confidence at least has precedence. The Tigers are the worst team in the AL and still very much in the race, no matter how bad their play has them looking.
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You can reach Christian at cromo@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Brutal loss to Angels pushes Tigers to new low, but doesn’t quash hope
Reporting by Christian Romo, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
