There’s a lot of baseball to play, but the Detroit Tigers have dug themselves quite a hole this month.
As the Tigers know better than anyone, a lot can happen over the course of an MLB season. They were virtually a lock to win the American League Central for most of the 2025 season before a collapse in the final month that allowed the Cleveland Guardians to overtake them and win the division.
But if you put stock in projections and simulations, the Tigers are not in a good spot.
According to FanGraphs’ MLB playoff odds, the Tigers had just a 28% chance of making the 2026 postseason entering Thursday’s game against the Guardians.
That’s one of the lowest in the American League, as only six clubs have worse odds: the Minnesota Twins (24.4%), Baltimore Orioles (17%), Kansas City Royals (14.8%), Chicago White Sox (12%), Houston Astros (7.3%) and Los Angeles Angels (0.8%).
The good news? Three of those teams are in the Tigers’ division, meaning they’ll have a lot of opportunities to clean up against some of the league’s worst teams.
That won’t mean much, however, if the Tigers can’t start playing better baseball, as they started May with just a 4-14 record.
The Tigers have been ravaged by injuries, especially in the starting rotation, where Tarik Skubal, Justin Verlander, Troy Melton, Jackson Jobe and Reese Olson are all injured. And it hasn’t just been the starting pitchers.
Outfielders Kerry Carpenter and Parker Meadows are injured, as are infielders Javier Báez and Gleyber Torres, leaving the shorthanded Tigers stumbling through the schedule, including 13 losses in the last 15 games entering Thursday.
“I think our guys are pretty beat up right now, but the schedule doesn’t stop, and the 112 games we have left are going to be presented as opportunities,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said after a frustrating loss to the Guardians on Wednesday.
“But it’s pretty [expletive],” he said to finish off his postgame news conference.
On the other side of the spectrum, a couple of teams have already started to separate themselves from the pack.
FanGraphs gives the New York Yankees a 97.3% chance of making the playoffs, with their AL East rivals, the Tampa Bay Rays, not far behind at 92%. The Guardians are the only other team over 70%.
For now, it seems the best option for the Tigers is to embrace their inner Jim Mora, not think about the playoffs (???) and just try to win a game.
Andrew Birkle is an assistant sports editor at the Free Press. Contact him via email at abirkle@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Only 6 AL teams have worse odds to make playoffs than Detroit Tigers
Reporting by Andrew Birkle, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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