Pumping the gas in the Motor City
Tarik Skubal gives the amazing Tigers a chance for a significant run.
These conditions actually exist, in 2024: The Detroit Tigers can make the baseball playoffs, and the Atlanta Braves might not.
The Tigers had the fifth-lowest payroll in MLB when the season started. Then they shipped out their richest players and got better. That happens sometimes. Young legs work better late in a baseball season, and hungry hearts do too. The postseason is a bigger tent as well, with six teams per league, and that lengthens the forgiveness of the season, as well as the list of teams with tangible hopes. April and May really are like extended spring training.
On August 10, the Tigers lost at San Francisco, 3-1, and fell to 56-63, eleven games behind Minnesota, the third A.L. wild-card team at the time. On Tuesday, Tarik Skubal baffled Tampa Bay in a 2-1 win, and the Tigers improved to 83-70. That’s a little 27-out-of-34 run, and it solidified Detroit’s position as the No. 2 wild card, tied with the Royals, two games ahead of the Twins.
This reminded Patrick Reusse, the Minnesota Star Tribune columnist, of 1984, when the Twins were on the verge of winning the old American League West, when only the first-place team got to advance. But they disintegrated down the stretch, and the clinching loss was a 11-10 number at Cleveland when they had led 10-0. Gary Gaetti made a bad throw that helped ice that one. Said the G-Man: “It’s hard to throw when you’ve got both hands around your neck.”
The Tigers don’t have that problem. Their hands are free and working fine. So are the hands of fate. No one really thought the final week of the Tigers’ schedule would be worth analyzing, but after they play two more with the Rays, they finish up with the White Sox, the record-holder for most losses in an MLB season. You think Shohei Ohtani is the only source of history? The Bleak Sox have been on a season-long campaign to knock the 1962 Mets into the dustbin, even without many witnesses.
Meanwhile, the Tigers could say they’re ahead of schedule, except they really didn’t have one. They have been re-trenching ever since their last winning season, which was 2016. They’ve already run through one cycle of prospects, a term that used to make ex-manager Jim Leyland choke on his Marlboro smoke. “They’re not prospects,” he would say. “They’re effing minor league players.”
Now the Tigers have some kids who have crossed that bridge. For some, it has taken a while. Riley Greene, 24, is their best hitter, with 24 homers and 72 RBI, and he was a fifth-overall pick who lived up to his slot. But Spencer Torkelson was first-overall, in 2020, and the Tigers demoted him to Toledo for a while even this season. He’s back now, hitting .218 with two home runs and seven RBI this month.
Colt Keith, 22, sounds like he should be a rodeo cowboy but instead is an everyday second baseman, and the Tigers signed him through 2029. Parker Meadows, 24, came up in mid-season and has committed two robberies at the center-field fence, bringing back home runs, and he dives into warning tracks, and he put up a .911 OPS in August, and on Sept. 5 hit a ninth-inning grand slam off the Padres’ Robert Suarez that turned an 0-3 deficit into a 4-3 win. Meadows, like Torkelson, was shipped south on I-75 for a while but was transformed in Toledo. Those Tony Packo’s hot dogs have always been restorative.
Kerry Carpenter was such a late comer in high school that he wound up at St. John’s River State JC in Florida. Virginia Tech saw him there and signed him, and the Tigers drafted him in the 19th round five years ago, and now he’s slugging .601 with 71 RBIs in 82 games.
The pitching story is also sprinkled with improbability. The Tigers drafted Casey Mize first-overall from Auburn, but he has only pitched 50 games in four seasons. First-round picks Alex Lange and Alex Faedo has failed to find traction. But Jason Foley, undrafted from Sacred Heart, has 26 saves in 30 tries. Tyler Holton was waived by Arizona, after nine innings of relief appearances, and has given up 57 hits in 92 innings. Overall, the Tigers are second in the A.L. in ERA and WHIP, and it helps that they’re also third in fielding percentage.
But Skubal separates the Tigers from what they are now and what they used to be, and he might separate them from everybody next month. “He’s the best pitcher in the league,” Aaron Judge said a few weeks ago, before he could be accused of belaboring the obvious.
Skubal came back from flexor tendon surgery on July 4 of last season. From then on, as the Tigers quietly put together a 78-win season, he was 7-3. His victory on Tuesday made him 18-4 this season, or 25-7 over the past season and a half, and he hasn’t lost since Aug. 2.
Skubal leads the league in ERA, wins and strikeouts and is second in WHIP. He should trot away with the Cy Young Award, ahead of Cleveland closer Emmanuel Clase. The Tigers are 20-10 when he starts. For the fans who remembers the shabby chic of Tiger Stadium, Skubal is the modern-day Mickey Lolich, an ample lefty (6–foot-3, 240) who doesn’t ride motorcycles as Lolich did but who zaps the strike zone with all his pitches, and he has four good ones. Lately the four-seamer and the changeup have been Skubal’s weapons of choice, but the slider is there, too, and nearly half of his outs are grounders. Those who want walks are successful only 4.7 percent of the time.
Skubal is from Kingman, Ariz., gateway to the Grand Canyon but not necessarily a cradle of pitchers. Seattle University, which had just resurrected their program, gave Skubal his only Division I offer, and then Skubal had UCL surgery. But he came back with enough promise to become the Tigers’ ninth-round pick, and he was in Detroit two years later.
Detroit head-faked the league by parting ways with Javier Baez, Jack Flaherty, Kenta Maeda and Gio Urshela at mid-season. Everyone thought they were retreating, and maybe they were. Baez and Maeda made $39 million between them; Keith is their highest-paid man at the moment, at $2.8 million. He, Skubal and catcher Jesse Rogers (who was part of the Justin Verlander deal with Houston) are the only Tigers who make over a million.
You had to spend many hours at Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland, spring training home of the Tigers since the eve of forever, or at various chilly nights at the Tigers’ home ballpark, to see how this was coming together, to realize this was not as sudden as it seems. But if the instruction is there and the patience is expressed, players can turn losses into lessons.
The Tigers were supposed to play the Rays Tuesday night, but unanimous predictions of rain prompted them to move the game to 1:10 p.m. Teachers and kids in the area responded by coming out. Afterward, Skubal noted that Thursday’s game is also a matinee.
“This is a great way to miss school,” he said. “So, go to school tomorrow and come back Thursday.”
Sounds like advanced history.