Well, that weekend stunk for the Detroit Tigers.
But we don’t have to live in the past. Or at least, not THAT past.
Come with us to a better time. A kinder, gentler, less City Connect-ed time.
A time when Miguel Cabrera was still a Tiger, and en route to another All-Star berth and, eventually, a batting title.
A time when J.D. Martinez was a All-Star Tiger, too, and crushing bombs en route to 38 homers.
A time when the rotation had two former Cy Young winners, and the one not named Justin Verlander — David Price, ahem — headed to the All-Star Game.
And, perhaps most unbelievably, a time when the shortstop position wasn’t a gaping hole in the lineup, but instead a strength, with an honest-to-God .300 hitter — Jose Iglesias — earning an All-Star berth.
Yes, by the end of this week, we might all be flashing back to 2015. Oh, not because the Tigers will be flirting with .500, or because the team’s top baseball exec is going to get fired again. But because that was the last time the Tigers landed three players in the All-Star game.
But that could change at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, when MLB announces the positional reserves and pitchers for the 94th edition of the Midsummer Classic. (The starters come out Wednesday night, but the Tigers — shocker — don’t have any finalists.)
Hello, and welcome to the Three’s Company Newsletter. (Come and knock on the All-Star Game’s door!)
Can the Tigers really send THREE players to Arlington, Texas, a little more than two weeks from now?
After all, our argument for TWO a few weeks ago was that they were a team close to .500, making them perhaps eligible for some extra representation. And now, well, .500 is much more than a hot week away.
Unfortunately, even in the modern setup, with fan voting selecting the starters, player voting (and a mysterious “commissioner’s choice”) selecting the reserves and pitchers (and, of course, every team guaranteed at least one representative), the quantity of All-Stars fielded by a team is a solid proxy for that team’s playoff chances. A bad team is guaranteed one spot, and might sneak a second. But three? Not likely.
Consider last season: 11 teams — seven in the American League and four in the National League — landed at least three players in the All-Star Game. Of those 11, eight made the playoffs. Two others — the Chicago Cubs and Seattle Mariners — finished with winning records and just one game apiece out of a wild-card playoff berth. The outlier? The L.A. Angels, who landed Mike Trout (despite an injury) and Shohei Ohtani as starters, saw Ohtani picked again as a pitcher, and then got reliever Carlos Estévez as an injury replacement.
How many All-Stars is that? Three? Four? 3½? We’re not quite sure, but we know it’s probably not a route the Tigers can count on, unless Skubal starts cranking homers between now and Sunday.
And yet, looking at their individual contributions this season (and not their win-loss record), it’s tough to argue the Tigers don’t have three solid candidates. (But only three — sorry, Reese Olson, but you should be used to being let down by now.) So with apologies as well to Messrs. Carpenter, Foley, Vest and Vierling — who at least made our list three weeks ago — let’s break down the Tigers’ real Midsummer Classic contenders:
LHP Tarik Skubal — Lock: While we’re waiting for Skubal’s Ohtani impression — he’s 0-for-2 in the majors, following an 0-for-44 run over three collegiate seasons, so, hey, maybe he’s due? — let’s review his qualifications on the mound. Heading into Tuesday’s start in Minneapolis, he’s tied for second in wins (nine), third in bWAR (3.9), third in WHIP (0.938), third in ERA (2.32), fourth in fWAR (2.8), fourth in strikeouts (112), sixth in strikeout-to-walk ratio (5.865), seventh in strikeouts per nine innings (10.392) and seventh in homers per nine innings (0.742). Yeah, that’ll do.
This was a big week for Skubal, who laid out his All-Star case on Tuesday when the Phillies and NL ERA leader Ranger Suárez came to town. Suárez gave up four runs. Skubal didn’t give up any. The Freep’s Evan Petzold has the inside story of how Skubal bounced back from his worst start of the season to shut down the NL’s best lineup.
Not only is Skubal a lock for the Midsummer Classic, we can probably (at the risk of stealing the topic of an NTBNL — a Newsletter To Be Named Later) use most of the aforementioned stats to argue for him starting the game on July 16. The only real obstacle is the calendar; assuming he stays on four days’ rest the next two weeks, he’d have to throw the first couple innings July 16 against the National Leaguers in Arlington on a mere two days’ rest, after having started July 13 in Detroit against the National Leaguers from Los Angeles.
RHP Jack Flaherty — 3-to-1: Flaherty’s first two starts back from an ailing back seemingly cemented his All-Star bid: one run allowed on eight hits and three walks with 14 strikeouts over 10⅔ innings. But his most recent outing, in which he gave up three homers to the Angels on Thursday night en route to five runs allowed in 5⅔ inning suggests maybe that cement needs a bit of rebar added. He’s still among the AL’s best in the key stats, such as fWAR (11th, at 2.1), bWAR (11th, at 2.2), WHIP (sixth, at 1.000), strikeouts (third, with 115), K/BB (third, at 8.214), BB/9 (fourth, at 1.416) and K/9 (second, at 11.629).
But with likely only 9-10 spots available — at least until replacements are needed for injuries and Sunday starters — Flaherty could be left waiting for an All-Star nod. Or, he could fan 10 Twins on Wednesday, just as he did in their last meeting, on April 19, and lock up a spot early.
Flaherty’s success this year has been a callback to his 2019 season, when he finished fourth in NL Cy Young voting (without an All-Star nod) while striking out 231 batters in 196⅓ innings, a K/9 rate of 10.589. There’s a reason for that: His pitch mix looks a lot like it did in 2019, now that Flaherty has ditched his cutter. Our Man Petzold has the breakdown of how the Tigers, well, broke down the numbers behind his pitches.
OF Riley Greene — 9-to-2: The AL has five roster spots to fill after New York’s Aaron Judge locked up a spot with the league’s top fan-vote total and, unlike in past seasons, no fan-elected fish, er, Trout to allow for an injury replacement down the road. Indeed, the four remaining finalists from the fan vote have solid All-Star bona fides themselves, as they rank second (Juan Soto, 1.005) third (Kyle Tucker, .979), fourth (Steven Kwan, .961) and ninth (Anthony Santander, .803 despite being second in homers, with 22, among AL OFs) in OPS among AL outfielders. Tucker, at least, is likely out for another month with a shin injury, leaving, perhaps two spots in the first round of reserves.
Does Greene deserve one of them? His .831 OPS is seventh among his outfield peers, with Boston’s Tyler O’Neil (.876), Jarren Duran (.841) and Wilyer Abreu (.811) rounding out the top eight. His case looks a little better if we look at OPS strictly while playing in the outfield (entering Sunday); his .859 mark soars to sixth, behind Judge, Soto, Tucker, Kwan and Santander and ahead of Duran and a suddenly healthy Byron Buxton (.822 in 208 plate appearances) in Minnesota. The rankings are pretty similar if we use fWAR for AL outfielders, with the exception that then we have to ponder the possibility of old friend Willi Castro — sporting a solid slash line of .276/.357/.452 for Minnesota while becoming the second MLB player with at least 20 games at five different positions — also garnering a berth. And if we go by bWAR? Greene is 13th-best in the AL … among all position players, not just outfielders (he’s, yep, sixth in the outfield).
Power surge
Greene, of course, heads into the Tigers’ series in Minneapolis needing just one homer to match his total from … his first two seasons combined. So what’s behind the power surge? Well, to paraphrase that great Colombian baseball philosopher Shakira: Hips don’t lie. Our Man Petzold caught up with Ben De La Cruz, the trainer Greene credits for his increased power (and the trainer of Baltimore first baseman Ryan Mountcastle, an All-Star finalist). The secret, as Greene put it: "It was the small details. He ran a bunch of tests the first time I was there to get a feel for my flexibility, hips, whatever.”
Power outage
Greene and Flaherty are thriving in 2024. But there are plenty of Tigers who aren’t — there’s a reason they’re eight games under .500 already. Our Man Petzold analyzed the winners and the whiffers in his stock watch at the 81-game mark last week, including a rookie who has cooled off as the weather has warmed up.
Power arm
But hope can come from the unlikeliest of places. Like an unknown pitcher taking the mound for his home country in the World Baseball Classic, facing stars such as Rafael Devers, Julio Rodriguez and Juan Soto — Nicaraguan righty Duque Hebbert fanned that trio back in 2023, then signed with the Tigers. Our Man Petzold caught up with the 22-year-old, who’s now in Low-A Lakeland, to see how his life has changed since his inning that shocked the baseball world.
Happy birthday, Keider Montero!
Meanwhile, Keider Montero, the Tigers’ next big pitching prospect — or at least the one they’ve given a couple big-league callups this season — turns 24 on Saturday. He’s sporting an ugly 9.35 ERA this season after getting thumped for five earned runs by the Phillies in 4⅓ innings of relief Wednesday — though he also got 18 whiffs from the Phils, the most by a Tigers reliever dating back to the beginning of the Statcast era in 2008. As manager A.J. Hinch put it after the 94-pitch effort: "I think we all saw what's exciting about him, but also what some of the challenges are. The long at-bats are the challenge, but the stuff is real."
Other Tigers birthdays this week: Sean Casey (50 on Tuesday), Steve Sparks (59 on Tuesday), Frank Tanana (71 on Wednesday), George Mullin (would have been 144; died in 1944), Jason Thompson (70 on Saturday).
3 to watch
Montero isn’t the only Tiger looking to find his footing in Toledo — and Detroit. Here are three to watch this week:
COLT KEITH: The Tigers second baseman had just a .567 OPS in June, but he’s showing signs of putting it all together.
DREW MAGGI: The newest member of the organization knows about working in the minors; he spent 13 seasons on the farm before making the majors.
MATT MANNING: The team’s 2016 first-round pick is back to working on his delivery in Triple-A, which is why Montero got the call vs. the Phils.
Mark your calendar
There are no guarantees in life, or in baseball, but the Tigers could do worse than their pitching matchups this week against the Twins in Minnesota, in the three-game series that starts Tuesday. Not only do they have Skubal and Flaherty going in the first two games, but they miss the Twins’ two All-Stars from last season, righties Joe Ryan and Pablo López — each with 110 strikeouts in 17 starts. (They do catch right-hander Simeon Woods Richardson, a dark horse AL Rookie of the Year contender, on Tuesday, though.) After a Twin Cities matinee on Thursday, the Tigers head to Cincinnati for a trio of games against the Reds beginning Friday.
TL;DR
But back to the big question: Does Greene make the cut? It’s a tough call — the numbers say he deserves to — but we’re still going to suggest he make some other plans for July 15-17. His combination of power (15 homers) and walks (44, good for fifth in the AL) is the makeup of a modern hitter, but he’s still too much on the fringe of the OF picture. Then again, he could launch five homers over that weird right-field wall at Target Field this week and make all this academic.
Contact Ryan Ford atrford@freepress.com. Follow him on X (which used to be Twitter, y’know?)@theford.
