2025 ZiPS Projections: Detroit Tigers

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

In a year with a few surprising playoff teams, the Tigers might have the best case to be called a Cinderella story. After a June swoon dropped them nearly 10 games below .500, the Tigers looked like a team playing for 2025, to the extent that with a losing record at the trade deadline, they traded away their second-best starter, Jack Flaherty. But a funny thing happened on the way to the MLB Draft Lottery: The Tigers suddenly started winning. Going 34-19 over the final two months was just enough to squeeze into the playoffs on the season’s final weekend. While Detroit eventually lost to the Guardians in the ALDS in five games, the Tigers did prevent the Houston Astros from reaching the ALCS, the first time that’s happened since 2016.

Looking at the lineup projections, one can see a big part of why A.J. Hinch would have been my pick for AL Manager of the Year, if I had voted in that category. The Tigers basically had one good offensive performance from a full-time player on their roster: Riley Greene. To get to basically being league average in terms of runs scored, the Tigers had to juggle a lot of players of incomplete value, with lots of platoons and matchup choices, in the way that Gabe Kapler ran the 2021 San Francisco Giants — though those Giants had a much better lineup.

But when the dust clears and you look at the projections rather than the 2024 accomplishments, there’s just a lot of average here. Some of the averageness has a lot of upside; there’s a good chance that Jace Jung will be a plus major leaguer, and if he’s over his early-2024 doldrums for good, Colt Keith will be too. Parker Meadows did enough to establish himself as a viable starter in center field. Kerry Carpenter’s a great big spoon in a DH platoon. Dillon Dingler and Jake Rogers are a quietly underrated catcher tandem. But after that, there are simply a lot of questions. ZiPS has no confidence in Wenceel Pérez, and the shortstops don’t combine for a very good projection even with the computer predicting some kind of, umm, bounce back from Javier Báez. The odds that Spencer Torkelson will become a foundational part of the lineup are a lot longer than they were a year ago.

This is a team that really needs to add another impact bat. There are a variety of spots in the lineup they can target, and players like Alex Bregman and Teoscar Hernández remain on the board. This is a team that has two years left before its Cy Young-winning ace Tarik Skubal reaches free agency, a team that plays in a division that has no big dogs; this is the perfect time to make a push. This is a team that could sign Bregman and Hernández and still be tens of millions of dollars below a $200 million luxury tax number. Jung and eventually Max Clark and Thayron Liranzo all project to be contributors in the majors, but 2025-2026 are too soon to realistically expect them to have star-level breakouts. There’s work to be done here.

Pitchers

Skubal projects as the best pitcher in the majors, so that’s a nice place to start. ZiPS is widely a believer in the rest of the rotation’s abilities, but not so much the rest of the rotation’s attendance. There’s a lot of injury risk in Alex Cobb, Casey Mize, and Reese Olson, and even Skubal’s just over a year removed from serious injury. Olson and Cobb both project with ERAs below four, Mize isn’t that far off, and Jackson Jobe, Keider Montero, and Matt Manning all project as legitimate starters in the majors. But how many innings will they get from this crew? That was a question that Hinch had to answer back in October, and he answered it by basically relying on Skubal and having the bullpen construct a Potemkin rotation behind him. That’s not a formula that can be repeated over 162 games. Maybe other needs and the possibility of extending Skubal prevent the Tigers from going after Corbin Burnes or pursuing a Flaherty reunion, but this is a team that just begs for a middling inning-eater. Kyle Gibson anyone? Really, the Tigers should give Justin Verlander the hard sell on one last season in Detroit to cap off his Hall of Fame career.

The bullpen, of course, projects to be terrific. What a change from a few years ago! The front four of Beau Brieske, Jason Foley, Tyler Holton, and Will Vest project to be as dominating a quartet as you’ll find right now, and Alex Lange will join them at some point later in the season, depending on his progress recovering from lat surgery. ZiPS also has a surprising fancy for Brant Hurter as a reliever. The only pitcher in the pen that the projections actually hate is Kenta Maeda, who struggled in 2024 before being exiled to the bullpen, where he was more passable. Given the work to be done elsewhere, I’m not sure the Tigers need to do much with the relievers but wish them a good holiday and look forward to their February return.

Right now, ZiPS projects the Tigers to be about a .500 team. A .500 team with some upside is a team to take seriously in the AL Central, and there’s still the theoretical possibility that the Tigers do more this winter.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

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Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky.