DETROIT – It’s late September, and the Detroit Tigers still haven’t been eliminated from the playoff race. All they have to do is win their last nine games and they’ve got a chance.
Oh yeah, and the Minnesota Twins also have to finish 0-9. Against the Angels, Athletics, and Rockies. Three of the worst teams in baseball.
Anything is possible... right?
OK, you’ve got me. The Tigers aren’t going to make the playoffs, even in a terrible AL Central. Even though they won the season series against all four of their division rivals.
But I’m not actually here to say the Tigers have a chance at the postseason -- I’m here to highlight the fact that, very quietly, they’ve played solid baseball for almost the entire year.
Right now, with nine games remaining, the Tigers are 72-81. That’s not good enough, but if you look at it from a slightly different angle, it offers hope for next season.
First, let’s talk about the AL East. The Tigers were horrendous against that division -- I mean outlier bad. As good as the East is, you could replay this season 10 times and the Tigers wouldn’t go 7-25 again. It’s a fluke.
Take out those games and the Tigers’ record on the season is 65-56, which is a better winning percentage than the division-leading Twins have right now.
Another positive spin: What if half the roster hadn’t gotten injured in early June?
On June 2, the Tigers were 26-28 and 2.5 games behind the Twins in the Central when they lost Riley Greene, Matt Vierling, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Kerry Carpenter all at once.
One nine-game losing streak later, the Tigers were toast. They never got close to the Twins again.
But other than that losing streak, the Tigers have played .500 baseball this season -- it might not seem like much, but it’s not nothing.
This season, Greene, Carpenter, and Spencer Torkelson have blossomed into an offensive core the Tigers can build around. On the mound, they’ve gotten unexpected contributions from Reese Olson and Sawyer Gipson-Long.
Maybe, just maybe, the pieces for a competitive baseball team are falling into place.
The Twins will win at least once this weekend and officially eliminate the Tigers from playoff contention, but it looked like this was going to be another miserable season, and it ended up feeling a lot more like the pleasantly surprising 2021.
Detroit is still a few players away from really having a chance to make a playoff push, and it’s up to Scott Harris and his new general manager, Jeff Greenberg, to identify those pieces. But the organization seems to be back on track after a horrid 2022, and this season was a step in the right direction.
