DETROIT – Baseball is a game of ups and downs, both on a game-by-game level and season to season.
For a young team like the Detroit Tigers, the ebbs and flows can be even more dramatic, because we aren’t exactly sure what the baseline looks like for many of these players. (We might not be so sure about all the veterans, either.)
What we do know: Some players will be better than they were last season, and others will take a step back.
Better: Javier Baez
Look, I don’t expect a ton from Baez this year, but I do think he’ll get his OPS back above .600. That feels like a pretty safe bet.
Baez bottomed out last season with a .593 OPS and only nine home runs across 135 games. The irony is it coincided with a career-low strikeout rate of 22.9%.
Strikeouts or not, we should see some positive regression for Baez in his age 31 season. He’s the type of player who thrives with higher stakes, and if the Tigers turn out to be a bit more competitive in the AL Central, that could spark Baez.
Can he hit .240 with 15 homers? That’s basically what the Tigers got from him in 2022, and it doesn’t seem unrealistic.
Worse: Tarik Skubal
I know, I know: I’ve been calling Skubal a Cy Young candidate all month -- and I haven’t changed my mind. All signs point to him being one of the best pitchers in baseball.
But will he sustain a 2.80 ERA and 0.90 WHIP across a full season? I wouldn’t project that for anybody in the game right now.
Skubal excels at everything a pitcher can control. He throws strikes, he misses bats, and he keeps the ball on the ground. But in the current environment -- with the new base running rules and shift ban -- starting pitchers are much more susceptible to an occasional disastrous outing.
A couple of those outings would take last year’s ratios out of the equation pretty quickly.
I also expect the Tigers’ infield defense to be a bit worse this season, which could also hurt Skubal a little bit. A low-3s ERA and a WHIP between 1.00 and 1.10 feels about right.
Better: Spencer Torkelson
Everybody remembers the final 45 games of last season, when Torkelson posted a .905 OPS with 14 homers and 10 doubles. Do I think he’ll maintain that pace and hit 45 homers in 150 games? Absolutely not. But he should wind up somewhere between that and his full-season numbers.
Torkelson’s final stat line was actually pretty mediocre last season, even with the 31 homers. He was a slightly above-average offensive player.
When his career comes to an end in the distant future, I expect he’ll have had quite a few seasons that qualify as well above average. And I don’t believe this will be his last 30-homer season.
Pretty much everybody agrees Torkelson will improve this season, and I’m on board.
Worse: Tyler Holton
Holton was amazing for the Tigers last season, maintaining a 2.11 ERA and 0.87 WHIP while leading the bullpen with 85.1 innings.
The underlying numbers agree Holton was excellent, but they certainly don’t suggest he’s going to do that again.
Holton’s expected ERA was more than a full point higher than his actual ERA last season, which means he was definitely lucky on batted balls. He only struck out 74 batters, and typically that much contact translates to much higher WHIP than 0.87.
I still think Holton will be very valuable for the Tigers. He throws strikes and keeps the ball on the ground. He’s completely un-hittable against left-handers (.363 OPS last season) and also solid against righties (.642 OPS).
Holton only had nine MLB innings under his belt before last season, so we don’t have much of a track record to reference. But it’s probably fair to expect his ERA to rise above 3.00 this season, and the WHIP should be much closer to 1.00.
Better: Alex Faedo
I’m going a little off the beaten path with this one, because Faedo probably won’t even make the Opening Day roster. But he’ll get his shot with the Tigers at some point this season, and I expect he’ll be better than last year.
Faedo had a bit of a disappointing sophomore campaign, largely thanks to injuries and inconsistency. If he can stay healthy, though, there are some really positive signs for the 28-year-old former first-round pick.
A pitch with a 41.3% whiff rate is a really good place to start, and that’s exactly what Faedo posted with his slider in 2023. Hitters managed just a .192 batting average against that pitch, and when they did put it in play, it was with a weak 86.6 mph average exit velocity.
Faedo doesn’t have another put-away pitch, so he’s likely to end up as a reliever for the Tigers -- a role he handled well last September, posting a 1.04 ERA with 11 strikeouts in 8.2 innings. Opposing batters had a .460 OPS against Faedo over that span.
It’s clear he can be dominant in short spurts, likely because of that slider. If the Tigers decide to move him to a relief role, Faedo could be a real weapon.
Worse: Matt Manning
It’s been three seasons since Manning made his MLB debut, and we still don’t know exactly what to expect because of injuries.
Manning came up midway through 2021 and survived through the end of the season, but the next year he dealt with three separate injuries, and then last season, he was struck by two line drives on the same foot.
Hopefully, Manning flushed out a career’s worth of bad luck last year and can stay healthy in 2024. But even if that happens, don’t expect another sub-4 ERA.
Manning’s strikeout rate plummeted to a career-low 5.8 per nine last season across 78 innings. There’s a chance he could recapture some of his minor-league strikeout magic, but we’ve got a 226.1-inning sample size that suggests he isn’t going to miss many bats at the MLB level.
As a result, his expected ERAs have been much, much higher than his actual numbers each of the past two seasons. Last year, his 5.48 xERA was almost two full points higher than his actual 3.58 ERA. That’s outrageous.
Maybe Manning is the type of player who will regularly outperform his underlying numbers. But I don’t think it’ll be by that margin. If he wins a spot in the starting rotation, I think that ERA will rise at least into the 4.50 range.
