It might be hard to believe, but the 2024 Major League Baseball season is nearly one-quarter complete now that many teams have reached the 40-game mark. Once upon a time, a silver-haired manager led his squad to a record-best 35-5 start to the season, resulting in the last World Series title that the franchise earned.
That manager was Sparky Anderson, that team was the Detroit Tigers and the year was 1984.
Since then, it has become something of an adage that one cannot really judge a team until it has reached the 40-game mark. While there is zero statistical evidence to support this notion, it has remained an anecdotal benchmark for the early part of the season — especially for Tigers fans.
On Sunday following the completion of Game 40, I asked the Bless You Boys staff to provide their thoughts on the 2024 campaign. Here is what we have to offer.
Frisbee Pilot: I feel like the Tigers are the definition of an incomplete team: their pitching is great sometimes, and lousy at other times. Sometimes the hitters will put up seven in an inning, sometimes they couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat. But, I’m not convinced that the roster is incomplete — I feel like there’s a lot of talent and potential here — but that the culture is incomplete.
Let’s say the Tigers get on a six-game winning streak where the pitching, hitting and defense are all clicking: that’s the kind of streak that can show a team what it’s capable of. So much of this game is psychological, and good performances are contagious. I really do think that’s what’ll kick this team in the pants enough to put the train back on the tracks, if I can just rattle off some metaphors there.
Brandon Day: I can’t say that things are specifically going exactly as planned, but in general I feel like they are. Didn’t expect Tork to hit his first homer on May 12, for example, nor Keith to struggle this much early on. I figured this to be a .500 team with upside, and that’s how things have shaken out after 40 games.
All three of AJ’s teams have played over .500 from June on, so my hope in the preseason and still today is that some of the younger players, Colt Keith being the main one, settles in and the offense and team overall looks better in the summer than it has so far this spring. Still confident they’ll get there, and they do have more talent developing on the farm to contribute this summer. Hopefully, that will include Jackson Jobe and Jace Jung. But obviously what they need is an infielder who can both hit and field both. Keith should be one, but this front office has a lot of work to do. Would hate to keep wasting this rotation all season long. And while the bullpen has been poor the last two weeks, they were great the first four, and it’s pretty easy to trust Fetter and his staff to keep them in good, though unlikely to be great, form.
So, the pitching carried them early on, they avoided the early season collapse, and hopefully, the bats warm up and the best is yet to come. Based on my preseason expectations, things have gone pretty well, but they obviously have to hit better the rest of the way. Just don’t have a lot of faith that the FO is going to be aggressive and solve any of these issues in the infield in time to make a difference this season. Probably will remain a frustrating team with good pitching squandered more than it should, but this will be a more well-rounded offense as they get it going. And that will give them a shot at finishing strong if they can get some help from the younger players they’re trying to build around.
Frisbee: Speaking of the infield, Brandon… if you were a betting man, what would you say the odds are of Javier Báez still being on this team by the All-Star Break?
Brandon: Pretty high but I expect he’ll be playing 2-3 times a week all year and that will probably be it, unless some legit contender emerges. Please Gage Workman, save us.
Mr. Sunshine: This is a better team than the last few years, but still frustrating. You can see the potential. Guys will have monster offensive games, then vanish for a week. Starting pitching has been mostly good to great, and the bullpen certainly started off dominant. Defense was good…til it wasn’t, and now it’s mostly back to normal. Very inconsistent.
Riley Greene, Mark Canha, Kerry Carpenter, and the shocking rise of Wenceel Perez have buoyed this team so far. Three of those are homegrown hitters, and they’re all worth at least 0.6 fWAR. On the flip side, Tork, Keith, and Baez have been brutal so far — worth between -0.5 and -0.9 fWAR so far this season. The bad is canceling out the good. If the team got even replacement-level play from that trio, they’d have a winning record instead of sitting at .500.
Many folks have been upset that the Tigers didn’t go out and sign big-name free agents or find a bat to go after. The main position players added were Canha and Urshela, and both have been quite reasonable in production – when they’re playing. The pitching has been more of a mix – Flaherty’s been good and Maeda’s been…less so, and the bullpen guys like Shelby Miller have come back to earth with a few rough outings. So…still inconsistent.
I’d like to look real quick at a team the Tigers have been compared to due to their offseason signings, the Royals. Same division, same poor play the last few years, and they too went and got some new blood for the team that made many folks excited and yell at the Tigers for not doing more. Let’s look at that. The big names they signed: Tyler Duffy, Michael Wacha, Seth Lugo, Chris Stratton, Will Smith, Adam Frazier, and Hunter Renfroe.
For the hitting side of that group, Hunter Renfroe has a .466 OPS and is worth -0.8 fWAR, while Frazier comes in with a .559 OPS and worth 0.8 fWAR (all on defense). Pitching, Duffy is at 0.0, Wacha at -0.5, Stratton at -0.3, and Will Smith at -0.7 fWAR this season. Only Seth Lugo has been a positive, posting great numbers en route to 1.8 fWAR so far. Hardly the dominant free-agent class.
One final note on hitting. Matt Chapman was a name mentioned over and over that would spark the offense. As of Sunday, he has a .615 OPS for the Giants on an $18M salary, signed for a few more years. Gio Urshela is sporting .644 for the Tigers on a $1.5M, one-year salary.
So what I’m saying with all of that is… the team is inconsistent, but keep in mind other players or teams praised this offseason aren’t exactly lighting the world on fire. I wish we had done more trades — the Canha one is working great so far, but there wasn’t exactly a reasonable franchise fix this offseason either.
Patrick O’Kennedy: The Tigers finish the first quarter of the ’24 season at .500, the very definition of average. That would be an improvement on recent seasons, but not good enough to challenge for a division title that is there for the taking.
The pitching staff is holding up their end of the bargain, ranking sixth in MLB with a 3.32 ERA and in fielding independent pitching FIP. The rotation ranks 10th in ERA, but fourth in FIP, while the bullpen flips the script, ranking 4th in FIP but 13th in ERA. Overall, the team is 10th in runs allowed per game. Of concern is the fact that so many leads have been blown in recent weeks by a bullpen that looks to be tired already.
The lineup which ranked 28th in MLB in runs scored in 2023, is up to 20th through 40 games this season. While that is an improvement, the holes in the lineup are glaring. Colt Keith and Spencer Torkelson are two young prospects who, along with Riley Greene and Parker Meadows, were supposed to be part of the core of the lineup for the future, but both have been horrible at the plate. Only Greene has lived up to expectations. Javier Baez continues to be one of the worst batters in the major leagues, leaving three gaping holes even after Meadows was sent back to the minor leagues.
If we’re to hand out grades, the Tigers get an A in the corner infield spots, B at third base, D at catcher (offensively) and F at first base, second base, shortstop and center field.
More to the point, the front office would not get a passing grade for the lineup that they have assembled. Still, the Tigers lot has been cast for the season, and they need to see improvement from the promising young prospects that they’ve pinned their hopes on for the future.
Brady McAtamney: I think the highs and lows that we’ve seen out of this team are… well, probably the two extreme outcomes this season could have. On one hand, you have games where pitching dominates, the offense gets 5+ runs and win it. Or, hell, they’ve even shut a few teams out or held them to 1-2 runs. That’s a winning recipe.
But there are games where the pitching just doesn’t have. The bullpen is already exhausted from all these close games. We need to start scoring more — novel concept, I know — to be able to keep the bullpen at its best.
I think the team’s ceiling is probably in the high 80s, maybe even 90 wins. The floor is closer to 70.
And that’s my long-winded way of saying that this team is a dead-on-average ball club. We have legitimate all-stars: Skubal is Cy Young if he stays healthy, and Riley is a top-10 corner outfielder. Heck, if Jason Foley can rediscover his velocity, he’s there too.
The biggest weakness is obviously in the lineup, particularly the bottom. Canha-Greene-Carpenter is a fine core if the rest can help. Unfortunately, we’ve been trotting out black holes at first, second, shortstop and catcher daily. Depth is probably the foremost concern I have, which leads into the other biggest one: a big bat. Aka go get Pete Alonso or Kyle Tucker or someone like that, and I think we’ve got a stew cookin’.
Bonus team need: swag. There’s Javy, but he’s public baseball enemy No. 1 around these parts. Everyone else on the roster is vanilla. Go get Jazz Chisolm. No, I’m serious!
Peter Kwasniak: Overall I think the Tigers have been slightly underperformed as a whole, but the various facets have been ahead of expectations while others have been below expectations.
The positives are pretty much most of the pitching and Riley Greene. The bullpen has been overall good but lately some chinks in the armor have brought the numbers down from best in the league to simply above average.
The incumbent members of the rotation has been very good while the imported members have been up and down. Skubal looks like a legit Cy Young candidate and Olson is having himself a breakout year. Mize and Manning have been solid while Flaherty has been another Fetter success story (though wish they had an option on that deal).
On offense, unfortunately, the only real big positive is Riley Greene and his big breakout season. He looks like the next face of the franchise if he keeps this level of success up.
Carpenter, Canha, Ibanez have generally been about as expected. Perez has been an unexpected source of offense but there’s little in his profile thus far that says he’ll be more than an average player.
But that’s sadly where the positives end. Maeda has been a struggle and while he’s generally been a slow starter, he’s trending below his usual numbers. Foley started off great but the dip in velocity is concerning, and Miller has struggled in key spots. Overall it feels like they’re missing identifying who they key big arms will be late.
And then there’s the rest of the offense. Torkelson, Meadows, Baez, Keith, Rogers. All key incumbent members at key positions and all struggling. To me this is the biggest disappointment and a big problem with the argument that the Tigers should have spent on another big bat. Who among these would you have displaced given last year’s numbers? Short of just cutting Baez, I don’t know if there was a realistic opening among those positions that are struggling now.
Three of that group of five will need to turn it around for this offense to be even average. And I have no faith in Baez doing it so it’s really three of four that need to step up. Right now this is a team headed for a .500 season with the pitching keeping them in tight low-scoring games but the offense coming up short a frustrating amount of times. The good news is the potential to make this team better is on the roster, it just needs to perform as it was expected to.
Cam Kaiser: The Tigers are right where I expected them to be at the end of the season: a .500 baseball team. They’re far from the best Detroit baseball team I’ve watched, but a helluva lot better than most of the teams they’ve run out the last ten years. The frustrating part is that the problems they’re having were so predictable. The starting pitching is very good, as expected. The bullpen is inconsistent, as are most major league bullpens. The offense is very bad, sadly, as expected.
While they’re better than they’ve been in years, it’s frustrating to watch because a few tweaks could make this a legitimately good baseball team. Scott Harris simply needs to be better at building a roster. Everyone who follows the team knew there wasn’t enough offense, but he spoke to the media early in the year and said there wasn’t any room for more bats.
My guy, maybe instead of handing everyday jobs to players like Parker Meadows and Colt Keith (who I still think highly of), let’s bring in some guys who have proven something at the major league level.
I understand that the free agent market wasn’t robust this offseason, but that’s not the only avenue to acquiring players. Harris made a trade for Mark Canha, and he’s arguably been the Tigers’ second-best position player this season.
David Rosenberg: It’s been a weird first quarter of the season for the Detroit Tigers. It looked like this team had what it takes to compete with the rest of the division, but the last two weeks have brought us back to the zero point that is .500 baseball. As always, there’s some good to celebrate and some bad to bemoan — maybe a lot to bemoan if you’re getting fed up with mediocrity.
Let’s start with the good. Riley Greene is either a top-three or top-five outfielder in baseball right now, based on bWAR (2.0) and fWAR (1.7) respectively. He’s already hit nine homers in 40 games after ending the 2023 season (99 games played) with just 11, and his walk rate has almost doubled — 8.8% to 15.5%. He’s on pace to make the All-Star team, which would end a seven-year run of pitchers representing the Tigers at the Midsummer Classic. This kind of performance screams contract extension, but Greene still has to stay healthy with 122 games left in the season.
There’s also Tarik Skubal at the top of Detroit’s rotation. The 27-year-old southpaw is on of the top arms in baseball this year and is the first true ace for the Tigers since Justin Verlander left. Only Matthew Boyd has a higher cumulative WAR among Detroit pitchers since 2017, and Skubal is only just now starting to peak after dealing with injuries.
Then there is the bullpen, which features some of the best stuff in baseball but also tends to blow it more often than any other team. This one’s a bit weird. Detroit’s bullpen has one of the lowest inherited score percentages in baseball at 27%, but the Tigers also lead MLB with 10 blown saves. What’s even weirder about it is that Detroit isn’t relying on the bullpen too much or overworking them. The 136-plus innings thrown by Detroit relievers ranks 24th out of 30 MLB teams and a bullpen ERA of 3.23 isn’t suspect in any way. Yet relievers have earned a decision in 23 of Detroit’s 40 games this year. It’s hard to say what’s going wrong or right with this group right now, but the talent is obvious.
Now it’s time for the bad. Spencer Torkelson is having a rough go and there’s really nothing Detroit can do but wait it out. He finally connected with a ball for a home run on Sunday, but that means he’s on pace for single-digit homers this season. A former first-overall pick with a reputation for power can’t put up those numbers without receiving some backlash from the fans. Don’t even get me started on Baez.
Most of the lineup isn’t hitting, save for Mark Canha and Kerry Carpenter and Greene. A lack of movement during the offseason has Detroit in limbo for another year. The Tigers could use a bit more firepower, and Canha’s bat simply isn’t enough to award Scott Harris any kudos. Jack Flaherty has been a nice addition to the rotation, but Kenta Maeda hasn’t found the consistency he’s looking for.
It feels like we’re in a familiar position 40 games in, but the truth is that Detroit’s in a better place than it has been in years. The bullpen will sort itself out one way or the other and the front office can adjust from there, but the bigger question is will the Tigers make a trade ahead of the deadline? It’s still a few months away, but the Tigers could use the help now. Perhaps dangling one of those arms on the market for a bat will help give Detroit the right kind of balance.
Zane Harding: There is a ton to read through for the BYB faithful already, so I’ll just point out key things through 40 games that catch my “Sparky Anderson” 40-game sample size eye:
- Tarik Skubal, at 1.8 fWAR, has struck out over 30% of batters, walked under 5% of batters, and his 2.02 ERA just about equals his 2.03 FIP. These aren’t just Cy Young numbers; Skubal, at this pace, could be receiving MVP votes! He is definitely stuck behind Bobby Witt Jr, Gunnar Henderson, and Kyle Tucker, but he is a true superstar.
- Jack Flaherty has been an amazing surprise; he looked lost in a Baltimore uniform post-deadline last year, and yet he sits T-21 in fWAR, he has an xFIP of 2.15 compared to his 3.88 ERA, and he’s walking batters at the fourth-lowest rate in the game, behind only Zach Eflin,and Shota
- This man would be an ace on some teams!
- Reese Olson has been a low-SP2/high-SP3 himself. 2.52 ERA, 2.73 FIP, and no home runs allowed in 39.1 innings. Casey Mize hasn’t found his strikeouts, but has a 3.58 ERA and 3.59 FIP. That’s an easy #3 starter. Matt Manning is the only one with not-so-friendly peripherals, but he has a sub-1.20 WHIP in our SP5 slot as of today. I’m LOVING this rotation, and I’m thrilled to see what it grows into this decade as Jackson Jobe, Keider Montero, and Jaden Hamm come through the ranks.
- Despite our offensive woes, the Detroit Tigers have five hitters above a 130 wRC+. Mark Canha has a 132 wRC+; Andy Ibáñez sits at 136 wRC+, and Kerry Carpenter is back up to a 137 wRC+; meanwhile, breakout stud Wenceel Perez has a 144 wRC+ to nearly match Riley Greene’s all-star caliber 145 wRC+.
- The bad news? After Matt Vierling’s 99 wRC+ mark, Detroit’s remaining hitters all sit below an 85 wRC+, weighing the average down to a team 92 wRC+ mark. Torkelson, at 82 wRC+, can hopefully be chalked up to another slow start, as he is knocking doubles like there is no tomorrow and finally got the home run monkey off of his back. Jake Rogers, at a 75 wRC+, is rosterable given his position and defense, as well. But Zach McKinstry, Carson Kelly (especially after his hot first week), Colt Keith, and Javy Báez have been abysmal!!! The rest of the hitters have done enough to maybe keep Tork and Colt afloat, but something needs to be done about the black holes at the end of the lineup.
- If there’s one thing I have no idea how to project from here, it’s the bullpen. Best in the game in April, and absolutely terrible most of May. No reliever has a 30+ K% rate — only Joey Wentz sits above 25%, so that’s scary — and the walk rates aren’t encouraging either. Brace yourselves!
Something’s gotta give on the hitting and relief side, or we’re going to be a cranky bunch by season’s end. Especially if the rotation doesn’t continue this improbably good stretch!
Adam Dubbin: My colleagues have covered most of the points well in their above comments. Given that I predicted a .500 finish in our preseason prognostications, the results so far are very consistent with what I expected — a few stretches of solid play mixed in with some disappointing results as well.
The pitching started off red hot but even with the small sample sizes a lot of the advanced metrics were pointing to the regression we’ve seen in recent weeks. The offense was always a concern, and while I did not expect Torkelson to struggle as much as he has, I was under no impression that this team would carry some heavy lumber. And the defense? Well… it seems to be a deal-breaker oftentimes — usually the most inopportune times.
The long story short here is that I am neither impressed nor disappointed with what we have seen so far. In fact, this team ostensibly had a winning record until Game 40, so there have been a few fun moments and I expect more this summer.
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