The Tigers’ season hasn’t been much to write home about, particularly on the offensive side, but one encouraging sign has been the play of Spencer Torkelson. The top pick of the 2020 draft was utterly overwhelmed by major league pitching as a rookie last year, to the point that he was demoted to Triple-A for a spell. He started this season slowly as well, but has shown significant signs of progress and has been red-hot this month.

Even while going hitless in his last two games — can’t win ’em all when it comes to timing these articles — the 23-year-old Torkelson entered Wednesday hitting .237/.320/.449 with 23 homers and a 112 wRC+. Those numbers may not jump off the page, but that represents significant advancement over last year’s dismal line (.203/.285/.319, 76 wRC+), not to mention a strong effort to overcome this year’s early-season struggles. After hitting just .206/.266/.309 (55 wRC+) through April, he’s at .243/.331/.480 (124 wRC+) since, including .267/.375/.653 with eight home runs and a 179 wRC+ in August, with a pair of four-hit games and a quartet of two-hit games. And he’s done this month’s damage against the Pirates, Rays, Twins, Red Sox, Guardians, and Cubs — mostly contending teams, if not necessarily powerhouses.

A hot month or six weeks may just be that, and while it’s too early to suggest that Torkelson is a finished product, there’s a lot to like about the evolution of his performance. Read the rest of this entry »

Troy Melton is fast emerging as one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Drafted in the fourth round last year out of San Diego State University, the 22-year-old right-hander has a 2.33 ERA and a 3.21 FIP in 81 innings between Low-A Lakeland and High-A West Michigan. Featuring plus command and a firm fastball that he delivers from a deceptive slot, he’s fanned 84 batters while allowing 21 walks and 66 hits. Over his last three starts, the Anaheim native has allowed just a pair of runs in 17 innings, with 10 strikeouts and nary a free pass.

Assigned a 35+ FV by Eric Longenhagen at the time our Tigers Top Prospects list came out in June, the young right-hander has since moved up to the 40+ FV tier thanks to his “burgeoning upside.” In the opinion of our lead prospect analyst, “his fastball’s impact alone should be enough to make him a good big league reliever even if his secondary stuff doesn’t develop.”

Melton, who has a marketing degree from SDSU’s Fowler College of Business, discussed his development path earlier this month.

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David Laurila: I was told that you have plus stuff. Would you call yourself a power pitcher?

Troy Melton: “I think I’m a mesh of a power guy and a control guy. Coming up in high school, I really didn’t throw very hard, so I kind of had to learn how to pitch. That definitely helped. There are always things to work on with command — you’re never going to be perfect — but that is something I feel I’m good at. I can throw four pitches for strikes, and kind of quadrant up with them too.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kerry Carpenter has quietly emerged as a productive big league hitter. Largely flying under the radar on a middling-at-best Detroit Tigers club, the 25-year-old outfielder is slashing .286/.347/.521 with 16 home runs and a 139 wRC+ in 285 plate appearances. Since debuting in the majors last August, he has 22 round-trippers and a 135 wRC+ over 398 plate appearances.

His success has been equal parts unexpected and untraditional in execution. Selected in the 19th round of the 2019 draft out of Virginia Tech, the left-handed-hitting Carpenter was an unranked prospect going into last season, only to bash his way to Detroit with 30 dingers in just 400 trips to the plate between Double-A Erie and Triple-A Toledo. He believes the lion’s share of the credit for his out-of-the-blue offensive explosion should go to a hitting instructor who employs unconventional methods.

Carpenter discussed his path to big league success when the Tigers visited Fenway Park last weekend.

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David Laurila: How did you go from a low-round pick to a guy putting up solid numbers against big league pitching?

Kerry Carpenter: “The short story is that I didn’t play very well at Virginia Tech. I got drafted in the 19th round and that’s about where I should have been drafted. It’s not as though I slid; I just didn’t have great numbers there in my junior year. I was in a bad mental spot, to be honest. I had a big slump that I couldn’t get out of for so long. I always thought I was better than a 19th-round pick, but again, I just didn’t play very well. Read the rest of this entry »

Kenley Jansen was a 19-year-old catching prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he played for the 2007 Great Lakes Loons. Sixteen years and 417 saves later, he looks back at his time in Midland, Michigan fondly. The All-Star closer didn’t hit much — his conversion to the mound in 2009 came for a reason — but the overall experience shaped who he is today.

“I loved everything about that city, man,” said Jansen, a native of Curaçao who also called Midland home in 2008. “It was cold, but probably also my favorite city from my time in the minor leagues. We played at Dow Diamond and that place was packed every night. The fans were great. I lived with Rob Wright and Lori Wright — Danny Wright, too — and I don’t even consider them my host family anymore; they’re part of my family now. I didn’t play very well, but a lot of good things came out of that whole experience. Great Lakes helped transition me from being a kid to being a man.”

The 2007 season was also notable because of his manager and a pair of teammates. Longtime Detroit Tigers backstop Lance Parrish was at the helm of the Midwest League affiliate, the club’s primary catcher was Carlos Santana, and a teenage left-hander was the most-prominent member of the pitching staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Jobe has added a cutter to the power arsenal that helps make him one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Every bit as importantly, he’s returned to full health following a back ailment that landed him on the shelf from early April to mid June. The recently-turned 21-year-old right-hander had incurred an L5 (i.e. bottom left vertebra) stress fracture, an injury he attributed to “rotating fast and throwing hard at a young age when I wasn’t really strong enough to support that.”

The pitch now augmenting his fastball/slider/changeup combination was portended in a conversation I had with him last August. As his second full professional season was concluding, Jobe told me that he wanted to develop something new, “probably a cutter,” and he went on to do just that.

“I added it in the offseason, and on paper it’s a really good pitch,” the third-overall pick in the 2021 draft explained prior to his last start, which came on Friday with the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. “I dive into all the TrackMan stuff — the vertical movement, horizontal movement, the spin efficiency, the tilt — and use the data in pitch-design. The cutter has performed pretty well.”

Asking the analytically-minded hurler about the metrics on his cutter elicited a response that was preceded by a pregnant pause. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies and Tigers are at it again. After a five-player swap back in January, Dave Dombrowski is making another trade with his former club. With the top five teams in the NL wild card race currently separated by a grand total of one game in the loss column, the Phillies, currently in command of the second wild card spot by a whopping half a game, decided to grab a reinforcement for the rotation and bullpen, trading prospect Hao-Yu Lee to the Tigers in exchange for right-hander Michael Lorenzen. They also designated veteran utility man Josh Harrison for assignment to make room for Lorenzen on the 40-man roster. And at least one Phillies player is very excited about this trade:

Brandon Marsh, who played with Michael Lorenzen in 2022 with the Angels, says he is a “great pitcher, an incredible teammate, and has big biceps.”

“He’s gonna be a great fit here. I’m super excited to see him again and give him a hug. I hope he picks me up. He’s strong.”

— Alex Coffey (@byalexcoffey) August 1, 2023

The 31-year-old Lorenzen, who will be a free agent this winter, is in the midst of his best season since 2020, running a 3.58 ERA and a 3.88 FIP. That improvement has largely come via limiting walks: after averaging a 9.9% walk rate from 2017 to ’19, he’s at 6.5% this season. He’s done that not by increasing his chase rate, but simply by throwing more pitches in the zone, with his zone rate rising from 39.8% in 2022 to 45.7% this year. Lorenzen throws four pitches more than 10% of the time — four-seamer, slider, changeup, and sinker — and is throwing all of them in the zone more often this season than last. In doing so, he traded some whiffs for some called strikes, a swap that has so far paid off. He’s also improved dramatically against lefties, with a .279 wOBA against them this year, down from a career mark of .323.

There’s a troubling trend worth noting, though. Lorenzen’s 4.80 DRA is higher than his 2022 mark of 4.32. His average exit velocity and barrel rate are at career highs, and while his .323 wOBAcon is right in line with last year’s .329 mark, his .362 xwOBAcon is the highest since his rookie season in 2015. Lorenzen might be getting a little lucky on balls in play or getting a little extra help from his defense. Both of those tricks will be harder to pull off at Citizens Bank Park than they were at Comerica Park. Still, it might help your wOBAcon just a bit when the center fielder is willing to run through a brick wall for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor May is a Miguel Cabrera fan. Moreover, he has some favorite Miggy moments. I learned as much when I caught up to the always-engaging 33-year-old right-hander on the Sunday leading into the All-Star break.

“I got my first jersey from another player in our last series,” said May, who broke into the big leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 and now plays for the Oakland Athletics. “We were in Detroit and I got a Miggy Cabrera jersey signed. I’m not a huge memorabilia guy, but he was my first, ‘Oh wow, I’m in The Show.’ It was like, ‘That’s Miguel Cabrera in the box!’ He’s one of the greatest of this generation.”

Nine years later, both players are nearing the end of the line. Cabrera, whose career has him Cooperstown-bound, is set to retire after this season. May, whose accomplishments have been far more humble, faces an uncertain near-term future. He has a 5.32 ERA in the current campaign, as well as a career-low 17.0% K rate.

May’s post-playing-days future is media-focused, and he’s already begun establishing himself in that realm. The Longview, Washington native has been an active podcaster and streamer — gaming is a noteworthy interest, Pat McAfee a notable influence — and just this past week he was part of MLBNetwork Radio’s All-Star Game coverage. His newly-signed jersey is ticketed for his home studio. As May explained, “the background has been kind of sparse, and I wanted to make sure that baseball has a spot there, along with all the nerdy stuff I’m into, whenever I’m in front of the camera.”

May has pitched in front of ballpark cameras many times, and while that includes more than two dozen appearances against the Detroit Tigers, a few of his Miggy moments likely weren’t captured. Even if they were, they went unnoticed by the vast majority of viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Grant Anderson had an especially-memorable MLB debut earlier this season. Pitching in Detroit on May 30, the 26-year-old Texas Rangers right-hander entered the game in the fifth inning and promptly fanned Zach McKinstry to strand an inherited runner at second base. He then returned to the mound in the sixth and struck out the side. In the seventh, he induced a line-out followed by a pair of punch-outs. In the eighth, yet another strikeout was followed by a Miguel Cabrera single that ended his evening. All told, the sidearming rookie had faced nine batters and fanned seven of them. He was credited with the win in Texas’s 10-6 victory.

He could have been working in a rubber plant instead. On two occasions — one of them as recently as this spring — Anderson seriously considered giving up baseball. More on that in a moment.

Five years ago, Anderson was at home in Beaumont, Texas following the draft with his father and twin brother Aidan [who now pitches in the Rangers system] when the Seattle Mariners took him in the 21st round with the 628th-overall pick. A half dozen or so calls and texts had come earlier. The Brewers, Mets, and a few other teams had reached out to say, “Hey, what do you think about this number and this round?” That none of them actually pulled the trigger wasn’t a matter of high demands. As Anderson put it, “I was coming from a small place and just wanted to play pro ball, so it didn’t really matter to me what the money was. I guess they all just found a better guy for those spots.”

Seattle and Colorado had shown the most interest prior to draft day, and had the former not drafted him, the latter presumably would have. The Rockies called to say they were planning to take him in the 21st round, only to have the Mariners do so a handful of picks in front of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

Across a career in baseball that spanned over 40 years, Roger Craig was at various points a hotshot rookie who helped the Dodgers win their only championship in Brooklyn, the first and best pitcher on an historically awful Mets team, the answer to a trivia question linking the Dodgers and Mets, a well-traveled pitching coach who shaped a championship-winning Tigers staff, and a culture-changing, pennant-winning manager of the Giants. He was particularly beloved within the Giants family for his positive demeanor and the way he shook the franchise out of the doldrums, though it was via his role as a teacher and evangelist of the split-fingered fastball — the pitch of the 1980s, as Sports Illustrated and others often called it — that he left his greatest mark on the game.

Craig didn’t invent the splitter, which owed its lineage to the forkball, a pitch that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s, but he proved exceptionally adept at teaching it to anyone eager to learn, regardless of team. For the pitch, a pitcher splits his index and middle fingers parallel to the seams, as in a forkball grip, but holds the ball further away from the palm, and throws with the arm action of a fastball. The resulting pitch “drops down in front of the batter so fast he don’t know where it’s goin’,” Craig told Playboy in 1988. “To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a fastball that’s also got the extra spin of a curveball.”

Given its sudden drop, the pitch was often mistaken for a spitball, so much so that it was sometimes referred to as “a dry spitter.” It baffled hitters and helped turn journeymen into stars, and stars into superstars. After pioneering reliever Bruce Sutter rode the pitch to the NL Cy Young Award in 1979, pitchers such as Mike Scott, Mark Davis, Orel Hershiser, and Bob Welch either learned the pitch directly from Craig, or from someone Craig taught, and themselves took home Cy Youngs in the 1980s. Jack Morris, Ron Darling, and Dave Stewart won championships with the pitch, as did Hershiser. Years later, the likes of Roger Clemens, David Cone, Curt Schilling, and John Smoltz would find similar success with the pitch, though it eventually fell out of vogue due to a belief that it caused arm problems, an allegation that Craig hotly refuted.

Not that Craig was a hothead. Indeed, he was even-keeled, revered within the game for his positivity. Such traits were reflected in the tributes paid to him after he died on Sunday at the age of 93, after what his family said was a short illness. “We have lost a legendary member of our Giants family.” Giants CEO Larry Baer said in a statement. “Roger was beloved by players, coaches, front-office staff and fans. He was a father figure to many and his optimism and wisdom resulted in some of the most memorable seasons in our history.” Read the rest of this entry »

May was a successful month for the Tigers, a franchise which in recent years has been lacking in happily remembered calendar pages. Detroit’s .577 winning percentage in May (15–11) is its best full month since a .615 mark (16–10) all the way back in July 2016. And while it would be a stretch to say that everything has been coming up bengal, given that the team’s run differential is still slightly in the negative for the month, the bleakness of the AL Central has allowed the Tigers to come within a game of the division lead. Even Spencer Torkelson, whose bat disappeared in 2022, has been playing better baseball, putting up a 119 wRC+ in May. Unfortunately, fate wasn’t even kind enough to give Detroit the whole month; a couple of days before the calendar flip, injuries to Eduardo Rodriguez and Riley Greene have ended May on a decidedly sour note.

These Tigers certainly aren’t strangers to injury. Every team faces injuries sooner or later, but Detroit managed to win in May despite an entire rotation’s worth of promising pitchers — Tarik Skubal, Matt Manning, Spencer Turnbull, Casey Mize, and Beau Brieske — out with injuries. The contributions of Rodriguez and Greene had a lot to do with that. The former’s hot April start continued in May with a 2.03 ERA/2.61 FIP over five outings; the latter hit a star-level .365/.435/.573 for the month. That came crashing down on Tuesday with two bits of very unwelcome news. Read the rest of this entry »