DETROIT — A.J. Hinch walked to the mound mid-inning. The manager, usually measured in his reactions, did not waste time or words.
He delivered a short but stern message to Tigers relief pitcher Alex Lange, who had just surrendered a double to Bobby Witt Jr. as another inning imploded. Lange had slung a ball out of play toward the Tigers’ dugout and spiked the rosin bag in frustration.
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After that Wednesday afternoon game, Hinch said the message would stay between him and his pitcher. The manager may have provided a challenging exercise for lip readers everywhere, but whatever he said was not enough to rescue the Tigers from the depths of an 8-3 loss and a series sweep at the hands of the surging Kansas City Royals.
I still haven’t seen any footage of Alex Lange firing the ball into the netting, but the KC TV broadcast discussed it right away…and for the lip readers, there’s a pretty good look at what Hinch said to Lange. pic.twitter.com/nU4ssl2548
— Chris Brown (@ChrisBrown0914) May 23, 2024
The next day, the Tigers were back in Detroit, and Hinch began the afternoon by announcing the Tigers had demoted Lange to Triple A and recalled reliever Mason Englert in his place.
“I’ll answer the obvious question: After all the emotion yesterday, is this a reaction to something?” Hinch said. “The answer is no. We’ve talked about Alex in recent weeks, or actually for the entirety of his major-league career, about strike-throwing and execution. … It continued yesterday and he started falling further and further behind in the role category, and then we decided the best place for him to go work on that is in Toledo.”
Lange’s struggles were hardly the chief cause of the Tigers’ recent struggles. A team that began the season 6-1 is so far 6-14 in May. Lange was merely the most recent example of how far off track things have gotten, of emotion beginning to set in as fans fear watching another summer slip away.
All that was before the Tigers stepped on the field against the Toronto Blue Jays on Thursday evening. A power outage zapped both teams’ TV broadcasts for most of the night. The Tigers did not muster a hit until the sixth inning. They made their sixth out at the plate this season when Carson Kelly got hosed from center field. Jack Flaherty pitched well again but again took the loss. He gave up two home run balls, and the Tigers could muster only one run. The bullpen again blew up. Detroit lost its fifth in a row.
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“This is a very small sample size of what this team is capable of,” first baseman Spencer Torkelson said after losing 9-1. “We’re not putting too much stock into this little stretch. I still believe in every single one of the guys on this team. We’re not worried.”
But here we are, the young Tigers 10 games behind the Guardians for first place in the AL Central and watching those Royals eclipse them as the division’s underdog sweethearts. The most online sect of the fanbase is turning its anger toward Hinch and president of baseball operations Scott Harris. The Tigers are 23-27. Through 50 games last year, the team was 24-26.
Detroit’s May flop is disappointing, even more so considering how often the Tigers seem to be out of games in the early innings. After that final game in Kansas City, Hinch took exception to the idea his team was not competitive. The effort, he said, was there.
“The win-loss part, if that’s what competitive means to somebody, then just grade it by the end-of-game score,” Hinch said Thursday, “and that hasn’t been competitive in terms of the score the last week, the last two weeks, even the last month.”
Despite this abysmal 20-game stretch, the Tigers are mostly playing in line with their projections, mediocre as they may be. FanGraphs projected the Tigers to win a median of 77 games entering the year. PECOTA had them at 75 wins. This team’s issues and its complexities, though, are numerous. A few scattered stats to consider:
• At the conclusion of April, the Tigers had among baseball’s best bullpens. Talented as some of the team’s relievers are, it always felt a bit like a house of cards. Detroit relievers had a league-low .232 BABIP, which suggested more hits were bound to start falling. A team that was winning games in nail-biting fashion and consistently relying on its pitching to save the day needed its bats to come around.
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• In May, the Tigers’ bullpen ERA has jumped to 4.79, actually worse than its 3.58 FIP. This is the game correcting itself. Starting pitchers, meanwhile, entered Thursday with a 4.09 ERA in May, well above the rotation’s FIP of 3.29. This hints at the defensive woes that have come to haunt the Tigers, who have fallen to minus-4 defensive runs saved as a team. Their 30 errors are the ninth most in MLB.
• As for the offense? Believe it or not, the Tigers entered Thursday’s game ranked 16th in runs over the past 30 days. The team’s 97 wRC+ sat just below the league average of 100. The more recent numbers are aided by the team’s offensive breakout in Arizona, when the Tigers racked up 25 runs over three games. The batted-ball data shows some added reason for hope. The Tigers rank 11th in hard-hit rate and 13th in barrel rate.
• But the individual cases are as concerning as ever. Javier Báez has a 42 wRC+, making him the second-worst qualifying hitter in the major leagues. Riley Greene, the closest thing the Tigers have to a premier hitter, is still battling exaggerated bouts of inconsistency. After appearing to hit his stride, he entered Thursday batting only .196 over the past 14 days. Colt Keith, though he has shown encouraging signs, does not have a home run through 141 at-bats (though in one of those great baseball oddities, he would have six homers if he played every game at Dodger Stadium). Spencer Torkelson is hitting only .191 against fastballs. Despite small glimmers of progress earlier in the month, he continues to get beat with the same pitches and struggles with the same timing issues.
• How is dominating the strike zone going? Not all that well. The Tigers this season rank 20th in walk rate. They have the league’s eighth-highest strikeout rate. These totals are a distinct improvement from 2022, when the Tigers walked less than all but one other team and struck out more often than all but three. But it hasn’t been enough to transform the offense.
All this leads to a natural relitigation of the team’s offseason, when the Tigers added Mark Cahna and Gio Urshela but largely shied from adding more pronounced thump to the lineup. That was all part of the strategy. Letting the kids play. Providing openings for more prospects such as Jace Jung to eventually get up to the big leagues. The strategy had its merit, but its consequences are more dire when young hitters such as Torkelson, Keith and Parker Meadows have not produced to standard. If the Tigers had real aims at the playoffs, they did not add enough hitting. There’s not much disputing that now.
But there is no doing it over. The Tigers are what they are. Right now that is an average-at-best MLB club. A team praying its pitching will not come unglued. A team begging for runs to start coming more often. A team at risk of watching its summer dwindle into irrelevance once again.
(Photo of Colt Keith: Peter Aiken / USA Today)
Cody Stavenhagen is a staff writer covering the Detroit Tigers and Major League Baseball for The Athletic. Previously, he covered Michigan football at The Athletic and Oklahoma football and basketball for the Tulsa World, where he was named APSE Beat Writer of the Year for his circulation group in 2016. He is a native of Amarillo, Texas. Follow Cody on Twitter @CodyStavenhagen
