DETROIT — I’m calling it. The Tigers are toast.
It’s been another rollercoaster of a season for Detroit’s baseball team, which two years ago bucked 0.2% odds, and last year blew a 16.5-game lead in the division. Both seasons, the Tigers ended up in the playoffs and actually won a playoff series. Not this year. This year, the rollercoaster has crashed, burned and there’s no coming back from that.
The Tigers entered last weekend’s home series against the Chicago White Sox with a chance to take over first place in the American League Central with a sweep. They got swept, and that was the beginning of the end.
Since the start of that series, the Tigers have lost seven of eight games, including the first two games of this weekend’s series against the Royals in Kansas City. They now are 61-68, seven games under .500 for the first time since mid-July. They are six games back of the White Sox.
And, the worst, they are 2.5 games back of the final wild-card spot, which doesn’t seem all that daunting, until you consider this: There are seven teams in the hunt for that final playoff spot, and the Tigers sit seventh in that race. Jumping one, two or even three teams is doable, still with 33 games to go. Jumping six? Yeah, they’re toast.
The Tigers not only need to get hot, but they need six other teams — the Texas Rangers, Cleveland Guardians, Toronto Blue Jays, Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles and Seattle Mariners — to not get hot.
Good luck with that.
Just not good enough
I’ll give the Tigers some credit for even getting to this point, on the cusp of contention. Heck, a little over a week ago, they were within a game of reaching the .500 mark.
That seemed impossible when I left Chicago at the end of May, having covered their final series of that month, a three-game sweep by the White Sox at Rate Field when the Tigers were putrid. That series sent them to a 22-38 record. They were 6-22 in May. I had run out of ways to ask manager AJ Hinch what the hell was happening. I spent the drive home on I-94 thinking about what else I was going to write about all summer.
Shockingly, the Tigers turned things around enough to make things interesting almost till the end of August. Good on them. They’re professionals. They showed some grit and some pride. But now, the intrigue is gone. It died over the weekend. At least they were nice enough to step aside with football season starting.
What we’ve seen lately is what Tigers president Scott Harris saw when he decided late last month that he had to trade Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize. Yes, the team had a shot at the playoffs, but the odds were too great to risk hanging on to uber-valuable trade chips (and free agents-to-be) for a sliver of a shot at October baseball.
The Tigers, despite a franchise-record payroll of over $200 million, still have too many holes — starting with a bullpen that, despite an ERA (3.78) that suggests they aren’t that bad, is not good. Closer Kenley Jansen (6.35 ERA this month) and Kyle Finnegan (6.92 ERA since July 1) are two big reasons why. ERA can be a deceiving stat, but eyes, blown saves and all those coughed-up leads in the seventh inning or later, they don’t lie. Some decade, the Tigers are going to figure this whole bullpen thing out.
Meanwhile, the offense is just too inconsistent. A team that had 18 home runs and a .597 OPS in May and then 49 homers and a .797 OPS in June has again been on one of its patented maddeningly frustrating downturns, done in by a very ill-timed hamstring injury to Riley Greene. Even Kevin McGonigle, still the heavy favorite to be AL rookie of the year, and Dillon Dingler, who was emerging as a legit MVP candidate just a couple weeks ago, have hit a wall.
Tigers president Scott Harris has got to get serious about addressing both shortcomings this winter and build around the strength of the team, which remains the rotation, despite trading Skubal and Mize for a handful of prospects.
Any plan for 2027 (or whenever we have baseball again) can’t simply revolve around keeping the faces the same faces and hoping for a different result. This could and should require some tough decisions, including the future of players like Spencer Torkelson, Kerry Carpenter and Parker Meadows.
Simply running it back, and chalking this all up the 2026 regression to bad luck and injuries, isn’t good enough.
They’re not a good baseball team with a bad record, as Hinch likes to say. They’re a flawed team that needs fixing.
The math isn’t adding up
Hey, if you want to hold out hope for the 2026 Tigers, be my guest. There still are 33 games left, including a whole bunch against AL Central teams and other teams they are chasing in the wild-card race and teams with losing records.
Problem is, the Tigers haven’t fared well against any of those parties this year. The Tigers are 13-24 against AL Central teams, they are 23-33 against AL teams with a losing record, and they are 5-14 against AL wild-card contenders that remain on their remaining schedule.
There’s just not enough evidence to suggest another 2024-like surge is coming, and again, even if the Cardiac Cats do have one more life left in them, there are so many teams standing in their way. That’s the biggest difference between 2024 and 2025 to simply say, Hey, they’ve done it before.
That’s why the Tigers woke up Sunday morning with a 7% chance of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs. That’s their low-water mark of the season — even lower than the 9.8% shot they had at the end of May, by which point they had dug themselves such a damningly deep hole, that the margin for error has been razor thin. Every loss since has felt devastating, but none more than the last seven over the past eight games.
The margin for error has finally and mercifully disappeared, wasted away against the White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates and Royals — for their first three-series losing skid since that miserable May, when I was almost ready to call it but didn’t, only because the Tigers have made a recent habit of burning us before.
But I’m plenty ready to say it now. The Tigers are toast.
tpaul@detroitnews.com
@tonypaul1984
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Hope if you must, but eyes, math tell the cold truth: Tigers are toast
Reporting by Tony Paul, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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By Tony Paul, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
