From playoff disappointments to disassembling what once looked like it may be a championship roster, being a Detroit Tigers fan has been weird for the past decade or so. We’ve seen generational stars in Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera have their primes in Detroit, but we’ve also seen players become great in Detroit and then leave and play even better right after leaving, such as Max Scherzer, Rick Porcello, and now J.D. Martinez. For a roster to have the amount of talent that the Tigers had between 2010 and 2015 (4 pitchers who have won a Cy Young, 2 MVP’s, and 25 total all-star appearances in those years) to have never won a world series is somewhere between surprising and unbelievable. And for a team that consistently had bullpen issues, there were many big names to pass through the Detroit bullpen (Joe Nathan, Jose Valverde, Joakim Soria, Neftali Feliz, Francisco Rodriguez). However, each time the Tigers brought in a reliever that was supposed to help their bullpen issues it seemed they would have one of the worst years of their career. I want to talk about the bad performances, mismanagement, and moves that just didn’t work out for the Detroit Tigers that caused their downfall from a World Series Contender to a cellar dweller in their division.

Player Disappointments

Unfortunately, this is usually a part of all sports teams that could have, should have been great but never quite got there. And there’s nowhere else to start with this team than Prince Fielder in the 2012 World Series. The Tigers’ top 5 hitters in 2012 by OPS were Miguel Cabrera, Fielder, Andy Dirks, Austin Jackson, and Alex Avila. The last three of those 5 combined for 1 all star appearance in their careers, Avila in 2011. This team was based on pitching and relied on Cabrera and Fielder to carry the offense. Cabrera had 3 hits including a home run and 3 walks in the 4 game series. Just a .231 average, but a .837 OPS which, while below Cabrera’s standards, is still far above MLB average in 2012 (.724). Fielder, on the other hand, had just one hit, a single, in his 14 at bats in the series. That, plus a hit by pitch, gave him an OPS of .205 in the series. Zack Greinke, AL Cy Young award winner in 2009 now pitching with the Diamondbacks, has a .220 career batting average in over 500 plate appearances. That’s how bad Prince Fielder hit in the 2012 World Series. Everyone goes through slumps, but the World Series is an awful time to have one.

From 2013-2015, the Tigers saw a significant drop in production from ace Justin Verlander. After finishing in the top 3 in Cy Young voting 3 times in 4 years, including winning the award and MVP in 2011, he didn’t receive a single vote for those 3 years from ’13-’15. More specifically, in 2014 Verlander posted an ERA of 4.54, an ERA higher than league for the first time since posting a 4.84 ERA in 2009, which actually resulted in a better ERA+, which divides league average ERA by the pitchers ERA, adjusts for park factors and multiplies by 100 to give pitchers a rating where 100 is average and higher is better. Verlander’s 4.84 ERA in 2009 was good for a 92 ERA+, while his 4.54 in 2014 was just an 85, followed by a 5-8 season in 2015 where he battled through injuries, and as he was getting into his 30’s people wondered if he would ever be the same pitcher again. He bounced back in 2016 and has finished in the top 5 in Cy Young voting each of the last three years all but cementing himself as a hall of famer.

2014 saw a return of bullpen issues for the Tigers in a big way. Joaquin Benoit, who had taken on the closer role early in the 2013 season when it became clear that Jose Valverde wasn’t working out, went to the San Diego Padres in free agency, leading the Tigers to sign the 6 time All-Star Joe Nathan, who was coming off a 2013 season in which he posted an ERA of 1.39 with the Rangers. However, at 39 years old Nathan had lost some of the power in his arm and his ERA ballooned to 4.81 in what would be his last season spent fully in the major leagues. His struggles led the Tigers to trade for 2 time All-Star Joakim Soria as the trade deadline drew near, and he saw very little success down the stretch, giving up 7 runs in 11 innings of work through the end of the season. With Justin Verlander struggling and some pitching staff injuries, the Tigers tried working in 22 year old Robbie Ray, who had 9 appearances, 6 starts, totaling 28 and 2/3 innings and giving up 26 runs. He’s seen some success since being traded to the Diamondbacks that off-season, but it’s fair to say he was no help for the Tigers as a player.

Poor Management Decisions

Bad management decisions could range from bad trades/signings to coaches that weren’t successful in the Motor City, and missing out on good prospects in the draft.

In 2013, the Tigers first, second and third round picks have yet to play close to a major league level (compensatory first round pick Corey Knebel has made the majors and an All-Star game as a closer with the Brewers). The Tigers first round pick Jonathon Crawford, a starting pitcher from Florida, stepped away from baseball after the 2017 season after never making it to AA. Among the players still available when the Tigers made this pick were Aaron Judge and another starting pitcher in Sean Manaea. 2nd rounder Kevin Ziomek never made above A-level ball and stopped playing professionally in 2016. 3rd rounder Jeff Thompson is still playing in the Tigers organization, but hasn’t gotten past double-A and turned 27 in September. Other players from the second and third rounds from 2013 include Trevor Williams, who had 31 starts with an ERA of 3.11 with the Pirates this year, Chad Pinder, a utility player for the A’s who has played at least 10 games at every position other than pitcher, catcher and first base at the major league level, another A’s draft pick in first baseman Ryon Healy, now with the Mariners, who’s hit over 20 home runs in each of the past two years, and current Tiger JaCoby Jones, who was drafted by the Pirates in the third round. 2014 first rounder Derek Hill, who’s only 22 years old, was ranked #98 by Baseball Prospectus before 2015 but has yet to reach AA and hasn’t hit well enough for his speed to be worth a move up. Taken just 2 spots later was Matt Chapman, the A’s third baseman who hit for an OPS of .864 while winning the Gold Glove for American League third baseman in 2018, finishing 7th in MVP voting. But everyone has misses in the draft. Another thing about that 2013 draft is that #1 overall pick Mark Appel is only the third ever first pick to not reach the major leagues since the amateur draft started in its current form in 1965.

Not enough is said about how bad the trade in the offseason of 2014-15 for Alfredo Simón was. Simón would pitch just one season for the Tigers, going 13-12 with a 5.05 ERA in 2015, good for a WAR of -0.5 according to Baseball Reference. Baseball Reference’s quick guide to their WAR metric says that around 2 in a season is a starter, below 2 should be a backup, and anything negative is “replacement level” essentially meaning anyone good enough to be in the major leagues should be better. The Tigers sent Eugenio Suarez to the Reds in the deal, a 22 year old rookie for a 33 year old pitcher who had just had his first season of at least 20 starts in his career. Suarez made the All-Star team in 2018, and looks like a reliable power hitting third baseman for years to come. This trade came on the same day as the trade that sent Rick Porcello to the Red Sox in exchange for Yoenis Cespedes and Alex Wilson, a much better trade, and just under a week after they sent Robbie Ray to the Diamondbacks and received Shane Greene from the Yankees while Didi Gregorius went from Arizona to New York. It’s safe to say now the Yankees got the best of that trade, and the Tigers probably got the worst of it as other than a fantastic 2017 season in which Greene posted a 2.66 ERA, he has struggled with an ERA over 5 in each of his 3 other seasons with Detroit.

Bad signings and trades continued in 2015 and 2016, such as giving Jordan Zimmerman over $100 million, and part of this may have been due to the Tigers releasing GM Dave Dombrowski in August and promoting assistant GM Al Avila to the role. Signing Zimmerman didn’t look like a bad move at the time, but signings rarely look bad when they happen, it’s a matter of seeing how they turn out. Zimmerman had made 2 All-Star games in the 3 seasons prior to the 2015-16 offseason and from 2011-15 he had an ERA of 3.14 in 155 starts, with 4 seasons in a row of at least 32 starts. Since joining the Tigers, he’s posted a 5.24 ERA and only hit 150 innings once, in 2017 when his ERA was 6.08. They’re going to be paying him 25 million dollars each of the next two years, and I doubt he’ll suddenly get better again at 33 or 34. That offseason is also when they traded for Francisco Rodriguez, who they didn’t have to give up much to get despite him being an All-Star in each of the two seasons prior to the trade. That made 6 total All-Star appearances in his career, as well as 2 reliever of the year awards and 3 seasons in the top 5 of Cy Young voting in his younger years with the Angels. He was actually fairly good in 2016, with 44 saves and a 3.24 ERA, but he fell apart in ’17 with a 7.82 ERA over 25 1/3 innings before being unceremoniously released mid-June, and it appears he won’t ever pitch in the major leagues again. That offseason, they also signed the oddly inconsistent reliever Mark Lowe to a contract larger than he had made in his entire career to that point, and he ended up pitching 49 1/3 innings with a 7.11 ERA in 2016 and was released still being owed over 5 million dollars for 2017. The still new GM Avila also gave veteran starter Mike Pelfrey, who had a career ERA of 4.52, a 2 year, 16 million dollar deal. He went 4-10 in 22 starts and 2 relief appearances with a 5.07 ERA. The Tigers released him in March 2017 and still paid about 7.5 of the 8 million he was owed that year.

Lastly, the managerial hire of Brad Ausmus didn’t work at all for the Tigers. In the 4 years before his hiring, they went 357-291, went to the playoffs 3 times and the World Series once. In the 4 years under Ausmus, they had a record of 314-334, one playoff appearance and no World Series. Yes, at the end of his tenure they traded away many of their good players, but they were fully trying to win through the 2016 season, and they just couldn’t with Ausmus when they had under Jim Leyland. There were outside factors that helped cause this, mainly the rise of the Royals and then Indians in their division, but to lose 16 more games in 2015 than 2014 with a lot of the same pieces in place is hard to pin on anyone but the manager. We’ll have to see how Ausmus does now that he’s been hired by the Angels as to whether or not he’ll ever be a good manager, but he was not the manager that the group of players the Tigers had at the time of his hire needed.

Weird stories that I thought were fun

These were some things that I came across in my research for this that I just thought

Alex Avila: 2011 All-Star, Silver Slugger for Catcher, AL, received 13 points in MVP voting, putting him in 12th place at age 24. Since then, no All-Stars, no awards, an OPS below league average, and only decent defense behind home plate. He’ll probably be a backup catcher the rest of his career, and people will look back and be surprised he was ever an All-Star.

Matt Tuiasosopo: Career slash line of .251/.352/.397 in the minor leagues, .242/.348/.404 at AAA. In 2013 with the Tigers, in 191 plate appearances, he hit .244/.351/.415 for an OPS+ of 108, essentially saying he was 8% better than league average as a hitter. 191 plate appearances isn’t a large sample size, but for a single season it’s not too small to be insignificant. In the rest of his major league career, he had a .540 OPS with the Mariners in parts of the 2008-10 seasons, an OPS+ of just 49. He was a bad fielder, so teams didn’t really care about the small-sample success he had in Detroit and he would play in just 3 more games in his career, in 2016 with the Braves, but for about half a season (he played 81 games in 2013) he was an above average hitter at the Major League level.

Andy Dirks: This story isn’t actually all that fun, it’s fairly sad, because Andy Dirks could have been a good major league outfielder. He was up and down from 2011-13, posting a .857 OPS in 2012 but was around .700 the other two years. Assuming he could have found a middle ground between them, a .750 OPS is pretty close to, usually slightly above, league average. A more optimistic projection of a .775-.800 OPS would make him easily an above average player who might even make a few All-Star teams. But in March of 2014, Dirks underwent a microdiscectomy in his back to remove a piece of a disk that had come out of place in his spine. The original timetable for his return was 12 weeks, which would have put him back in the lineup in June. In reality, he would never play in the Major Leagues again. He suffered several setbacks throughout 2014, and the success of Rajai Davis and some guy the Astros had let go of named J.D. Martinez led to Dirks essentially being forgotten about.

Rajai Davis: When the Tigers signed Rajai Davis, they made it clear they intended to play him almost exclusively against left-handed pitchers. Instead, largely due to Dirks’ injury, he played 134 games, 118 starts, and he stole 36 bases. This was actually a low total for Davis, as the year before he had stolen 45 bases in just 360 plate appearances, but what makes it interesting is that the entire Tigers team stole just 35 bases in 2013, the fewest in the Major Leagues by 10 behind the St. Louis Cardinals. With Davis, as well as adding Ian Kinsler who was second on the team with 15 stolen bases, the Tigers stole 106 bases in 2014, nearly tripling their total from the year before, and going from 30th to 7th in the MLB. It’s also worth noting that the Tigers changed managers that offseason from Jim Leyland to Brad Ausmus.

 

Going into 2019, the Tigers know they’re not going to do anything special. They will be more interested in some of their minor league players than some of their major leaguers, as they hope to develop their prospects like 2018 #1 overall pick in the amateur draft Casey Mize, Matt Manning, Franklin Perez, who may be the best prospect they got back from the Justin Verlander Trade, Alex Faedo, and their top hitter in Christin Stewart, who may be about ready for major league action. The Tigers won’t be ready to get themselves back to the playoffs until probably 2022 or later barring unexpected development, signings or trades, as they’re still at a point where they’re trying to boost up their farm system. Once they hit that point, then they’ll look to start bringing those top prospects up and having them pay dividends in the big leagues, and after all that they’ll be ready to think about winning a lot of games and heading back into October baseball. All teams have playoff windows cycle between open and closed based on the talent they have, whether they’re getting old or if they have up and coming stars, but sometimes it happens quicker than expected, like these Tigers teams shutting down so suddenly, or the way the Braves jumped up in 2018. With just one prospect in the current top 50 according to the MLB Pipeline, the Tigers are still looking to sell some of their best players at the major league level to complete the tear-down from the mid 2010’s, mainly looking for teams to take Nick Castellanos. Hopefully the next time the Tigers get really good, they do what the past great Tigers team couldn’t, and get Detroit’s first World Series victory since 1984. Until next time,

CM

Stats and info courtesy of baseball-reference.com. Prospect info courtesy of MLB Pipeline