A number of you reading this will share the same opinion: A.J. Hinch was suspended for his role in the Houston Astros cheating scandal, and for that reason he has no business managing a major league baseball team. It’s a reasonable stance. The integrity of the game matters, and while Hinch wasn’t fully on board with the shenanigans — he twice smashed the monitor used to steal signs — he nonetheless shares in the blame. That he didn’t put a stop to the outlawed actions is an indelible stain on his reputation.

On Friday — freshly freed from MLB’s sanctions — Hinch was named the new manager of the Detroit Tigers. Speaking at his introductory press conference, the club’s one-time catcher was understandably contrite.

“I’ve reflected back… from something that was very wrong,” Hinch expressed to a bevy of reporters. “As I told Mr. Ilich, and Al, that’s part of my story. It’s not the Tigers’ story… it’s not a part of the players I’m going to be managing. I’m sorry that they’re going to have to deal with it, [but] that’s our reality. Wrong is wrong, and I feel responsible, because I was the manager. It was on my watch.”

Mr. Ilich is Christopher Ilich, the Tigers’ Chairman and CEO. Al is Al Avila, the club’s Executive VP, Baseball Operations/General Manager. The latter, who’d phoned Hinch 30 minutes after the conclusion of the World Series to request he get on a plane to Detroit, was already well-acquainted with the now-free-to-negotiate candidate. Based on his history with Hinch, Avila wasn’t overburdened by what had happened in Houston. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West. Below is my assessment of the AL Central, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.

Chicago White Sox

Jonathan Stiever’s promotion was instructive because we got to see his velocity coming off of the forearm soreness that ended his spring. He sat 91-94, which is a little below his peak 2019 breakout when he would touch 6’s and 7’s. His changeup looked good, though, and it was a stabilizing force during a jittery first start. He’ll need to locate his slider more consistently for it to be effective, and the same goes for his heater if it’s going to live around 93. Stiever also incorporated his secondary stuff more often in his second outing — that’s probably the long-term strategy if this is where his fastball velocity is going to live.

You’re probably aware that Garrett Crochet made his major league debut over the weekend, becoming the first 2020 draftee to reach the majors and the first since Mike Leake to skip the minors entirely. He made just one pre-draft start this spring sandwiched between a February injury and March’s shutdown, so he was barely seen by teams this year, if at all, which is why some clubs were hesitant to draft him early in the first round. I’ve updated The Board to include his pitch data now that I have it, but neither his Future Value nor ranking has changed yet (45 FV is a late-inning reliever). He currently has the hardest fastball in baseball, and Crochet joins Zack Burdi and Codi Heuer as White Sox rookie relievers who have among the top 20 fastest heaters in the game. He’s yet another weapon in a bullpen that I consider dangerous enough to carry the Pale Hose deep into October. Read the rest of this entry »

Like nearly every team outside of Pittsburgh during this odd season, there were a couple of weeks in which it appeared the Detroit Tigers might actually be able to make a surprise run at the playoffs. After being given just 3.1% postseason odds by our projections even with the year shortened to 60 games and the field expanded from 10 teams to 16, the Tigers shot out to a 9-5 start, raising their playoff chances to a season-high 39.2% on August 10. Some struggles followed, but then another decent run got them back to 17-16 on September 1, with 31.1% odds at a playoff spot. Since then, there has been another rough patch that the team won’t have a chance to recover from. Detroit has lost 11 of its last 15, giving it a record of 21-27 that places their playoff chances at worse than a 1-in-50 shot. We can say with near-certainty that the Tigers’ surprise pursuit of the playoffs is behind them. One of the major engineers of that pursuit, however, is still worth paying attention to over the campaign’s final two weeks.

The 2019 season wasn’t an easy one for Jeimer Candelario. The Tigers demoted him not once, but three times to Triple-A Toledo amid struggles at the big league level, and he also missed time due to shoulder inflammation. He quickly hit well enough in the minors to get his job back in the majors, posting a .320/.416/.588 line over 39 Triple-A games. He could never make that stick when he got called up though, finishing with a .203/.306/.337 line in 94 games, good for a 72 wRC+. Once an impressive offensive prospect, those numbers didn’t match Candelario’s pedigree, and neither did the .225/.317/.393 line the season before.

This year it appears he has finally begun to put it all together. Candelario is hitting .333/.391/.572 with seven home runs in 174 plate appearances through Tuesday. His 158 wRC+ and 1.7 WAR both lead his team and rank him 18th and 26th in baseball, respectively. Those numbers have only gotten better as the season has gone on — after entering August 19 with a .242/.286/.424 line, he has hit .398/.462/.677 over his past 26 games, with a 207 wRC+ that ranks fourth-best in baseball over that time. After showing all peaks and valleys over his first few seasons, he’s only improved with each game in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after adding José Martínez, the Cubs continued to deepen their roster by adding Cameron Maybin in a last-minute trade with the Tigers. Heading to Detroit is shortstop Zack Short, the Cubs’ 20th-ranked prospect.

Maybin signed a one-year pact with the Tigers this past offseason after a late-career resurgence with the Yankees in 2019. It was his third stint with the Tigers after debuting with them way back in 2007 and a one-year stop in 2016. This is now the third time they’ve traded him away.

The biggest adjustment Maybin made last year was a swing change to elevate the ball more often without worrying about swinging and missing. Considered a speedy slap hitter for most of his career, he posted a career-high .209 ISO in 269 plate appearances in the Bronx, with an overall offensive contribution 27% higher than league average. His long journey toward these improvements was chronicled by The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler a year ago:

“I wanna play for as long as I can, so I felt like it was necessary for me to take a leap of faith and try something new,” Maybin said. “I’m having fun trying it. I love taking big swings now.”

It’s those “big boy” swings supported by Thames, molded by Wallenbrock and Antariksa, and encouraged by Haniger and Martinez that have turned Maybin from a fleet-footed clubhouse favorite to an unexpectedly productive part of the outfield depth on a first-place team. It took more than a decade in the league to find this version of himself as a hitter, but the evolution was fruitful.

Maybin set plenty of career bests in his half-season with the Yankees. His groundball rate dropped to 41.2% and his hard-hit rate was higher than ever. With all that hard contact in the air came a career-high strikeout rate, but the additional damage he was able to do on contact made the trade-off worth it.

Maybin hasn’t enjoyed the same success this year, but he’s been limited to just 45 plate appearances after missing time with a quad injury earlier in the season. In his limited time with the Tigers, Maybin’s groundball rate spiked back up to 60.7%, but his hard-hit and strikeout rates were higher than ever. With just 28 batted balls this season, though, that groundball rate could drop quickly with a handful of batted balls in the air. Even more encouraging is Maybin’s barrel rate, which is up to 14.3% in this limited sample.

With Steven Souza Jr. sidelined due to a strained hamstring and Kris Bryant on the mend from a finger injury, Maybin provides some much-needed depth to the Cubs bench. He’ll likely take the place of Albert Almora Jr., who has really struggled since a promising debut back in 2016. The right-handed-hitting Maybin could make a good platoon partner with the left-handed Jason Heyward (.238 wOBA vs LHP this year).

In Zack Short, the Tigers get a major-league ready utility infielder. He’s shown excellent plate discipline skills throughout his time in the Cubs organization, though his strikeout rates have ballooned as he reached the higher minor league levels. Here’s Eric Longenhagen’s report from this year’s Cubs prospect list:

Short struck out at an alarming rate last year, much more than he ever has before (32% last year, 21% career). Some of that may have been due to a smaller sample of at-bats, as he missed much of 2019 with a hand injury. He has good ball/strike recognition, hits the ball in the air consistently, and is a capable defender all over the infield, including at short. He’s now on the Cubs 40-man and I think he’s a big league ready utility man.

The Tigers already have a number of these types of utility infielders on their major league roster in Willi Castro and Harold Castro. Short will probably get an opportunity to differentiate himself from the two Castros this year with the deep 28-man roster.

Andrew Miller made his MLB debut on today’s date 14 years ago.Two months after bing drafted sixth-overall out of the University of North Carolina by the Detroit Tigers, the lanky left-hander pitched a scoreless eighth inning in a 2-0 loss to the New York Yankees. Five hundred-plus appearances later, he remembers it like it was yesterday.

“I faced some big names in old Yankee Stadium, which is hard to beat,” recalled Miller, who retired Melky Cabrera, Johnny Damon, and Derek Jeter. “It was part of a doubleheader, as we’d gotten rained out the day I was called up, and afterward, [pitching coach] Chuck Hernandez came over and put his hand on my chest. He asked if I was going to have a heart attack.”

A top-step-of-the-dugout exchange with Marcus Thames is also fresh in Miller’s memory. On cloud nine following his one-inning stint, Miller learned that his teammate had four years earlier taken Randy Johnson deep in his first big-league at bat. Ever the pragmatist, Miller acknowledges that Thames’s debut had his own “beat by a mile.” The previous day’s rain-delay poker game in the clubhouse was another story: Miller walked away a winner.

He wasn’t about to get a big head. Not only was Miller joining a championship-caliber club — the Tigers went on to lose to the Cardinals in the World Series — there was little chance he’d have been allowed to. While his veteran teammates treated him well, they also treated him for what he was — a 21-year-old rookie with all of five minor-league innings under his belt.

“It was a shocking experience all around,” Miller admitted. “In hindsight, it’s scary how little I knew, and how naive I was, when I got called up. Thank goodness Jamie Walker called my room and told me to meet him in the lobby to go over some ground rules and expectations. He saved me from a lot of mistakes. Of course, after that Jamie was maybe the hardest veteran on me. It was all good natured, but I couldn’t slip up around him.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part Two of an interview — the primary focus being his year-plus with the Detroit Tigers— with former All-Star outfielder Fred Lynn. Part One can be found here.

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David Laurila: In 1989 — your one full season in Detroit — the team lost over 100 games. What happened?

Fred Lynn: “It was an older team. They’d also traded Luis Salazar and Tommy Brookens, our two third basemen, and got Chris Brown from the Giants. That didn’t work out so well. Chris got hurt, plus Brookie and Luis had been really popular in the clubhouse. Sometimes you lose something in the clubhouse more than you lose on the field, and I think that was the case with those guys. As professionals you have to move on, but sometimes there’s a hole.

“Tram got hurt that year, too. He had a banged up knee and was kind of hobbling around. That hurt us a lot. Darrell [Evans] was gone, too. So there was a little bit of a changing of the guard, and with a pitch here and a pitch there… a lot of little things can happen that will turn around a season.

“And we didn’t play as well as we should have, to be honest. The pitching was… they had a tough year, and when that happens the offense feels like it has to score more runs. That puts a lot of pressure on the position players. The same thing is happening with the Red Sox right now. The offense feels like they have to score a million, and you can’t do that day in and day out. When the load is like that, it’s a tough one to bear.”

Laurila: Earlier we touched on how underrated Evans was. Chet Lemon is another guy who was better than a lot of people probably realize. Read the rest of this entry »

Most fans are familiar with Fred Lynn’s career. A superstar in six-plus seasons with the Red Sox — good for a 142 wRC+ and 30.7 WAR — Lynn subsequently fell short of those lofty standards after being dealt to the Angels following the 1980 season. Even so, he continued to be a solid player despite myriad injuries. Three of Lynn’s nine All-Star nods came with the Halos, and by the time he hung up his spikes at age 38, he’d accumulated 1,960 hits and 306 home runs. A four-time Gold Glove winner as a center fielder — and an AL MVP to boot — Lynn finished with 49.2 WAR.

The later of Lynn’s seasons aren’t nearly as well-chronicled as his earlier ones. Especially overlooked is his time in Detroit. Acquired by the Tigers at the 1988 trade deadline, Lynn joined a team in a pennant race, then returned the following year for what was to be his penultimate big-league season. What was Lynn’s Motown experience like? That’s the focus of this two-part interview, which was conducted over the phone earlier this month.

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David Laurila: You went from the Orioles to the Tigers in a trade-deadline deal. What are your memories of that?

Fred Lynn: “It wasn’t unexpected. We’d gone through that 0-21 start to the 1988 season, and during the All-Star break the A’s wanted to get me. The deal just wasn’t good enough for [the Orioles] to make the move. My wife and I both liked Baltimore. The fans were great, and while we weren’t playing well, it was a good bunch of guys, so I enjoyed playing there. And it was baseball-only. The Colts had exited, so baseball was the only game in town.

“So the Oakland thing hadn’t panned out during the break, and now the trade deadline comes around. We’re playing the Angels, I’m at my hotel room, and my agent calls and says the Tigers are interested in making a deal. This is probably around 4:00 o’clock, and I’m going to the park at 5:00. I have no-trade clause, and it doesn’t work out. I call my wife and tell her, ‘The deal is off, don’t worry about it.’

“I hang up the phone, and my agent calls back. The Tigers have sweetened the pot. I said, ‘Okay, deal.’ Then I had to call the ballpark. I called my manager and said, ‘Hey, Frank [Robinson], am I in the lineup tonight?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, you’re hitting third.’ ‘I said, ‘Well, you might want to change that lineup, because I’ve just been traded to Detroit.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Five of the first 12 picks in the 2016 draft were high school pitchers. In order, those selections were: Ian Anderson to the Braves (third overall), Riley Pint to the Rockies (fourth), Braxton Garrett to the Marlins (seventh), Matt Manning to the Tigers (ninth), and Jay Groome to the Red Sox (12th). Not surprisingly, their respective development paths have varied, injuries hindering the progress of fully half.

Chris Mears — at the time a pitching crosschecker for the Red Sox — was especially enamored with Manning.

“I liked his athleticism, his looseness, his fastball quality,” said Mears, who is now one of Boston’s two pitching coordinators, along with Shawn Haviland. “I thought he would be a longer-term development type guy — the Tigers have done a really good job; he’s made adjustments faster than I would have anticipated — but I remember him being a guy I really wanted.”

Asked why he’d viewed him as a longer-term project, Mears cited Manning’s basketball background, and “less pitching experience than many high-school draftees have at that point in their careers.” Moreover, Manning is 6’ 6” and “usually those long-lever guys take a little bit longer to get the feel of repeating their delivery.” Mears also saw a breaking ball that while having good shape and spin, wasn’t always consistent.

Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t enthralled with his potential. Mears first saw Manning at the Arizona Fall Classic, and based on that look he and Josh Labandeira, Boston’s Northern California area scout, went to see him early the following spring. Read the rest of this entry »

The future of the Tigers arrived ahead of schedule this week — in Chicago, not Detroit, because necessity didn’t consult a travel itinerary. Faced with injuries, the majors’ most ineffective rotation, and a losing streak that erased a surprisingly strong start to the abbreviated season, the Tigers promoted three of their top prospects — third baseman Isaac Paredes, lefty Tarik Skubal, and righty Casey Mize, the last of those the number one overall pick of the 2018 draft — to provide immediate reinforcements. The moves aren’t likely to send the team to the playoffs, even given the field’s expansion, but they should make the Tigers an improved and more interesting club even as they endure growing pains.

After losing 114 games last year and an average of 103 over the past three seasons, the Tigers appeared likely to remain doormats this season. Back in March, before the coronavirus interrupted spring training, our Playoff Odds projected them for 95 losses, with a 0.1% chance of making the playoffs — higher than the Mariners and Orioles, both of whom came in at percentages too small to be viewed with the naked eye, but otherwise pretty hopeless. The pandemic-shortened schedule improved their odds significantly; though still projected for a .417 winning percentage (25-35 instead of 67-95) as of Opening Day, they were estimated to have a 1.4% chance at winning the AL Central and a 12.0% chance at claiming one of the AL’s eight playoff berths.

Those odds climbed to as high as 39.2% as the Tigers won nine of their first 14 games, the team’s best start since 2015, when they went 11-3. In that year, however, 14 games represented 8.6% of their schedule, where this year it’s 23.3%. Those Tigers finished 74-87, a reminder that even lousy teams sometimes bolt from the gate in impressive fashion; last year’s Mariners, to use an example in recent memory, opened by going 13-2 but still finished 68-94.

As if on cue, the 2020 Tigers hit the skids for what has become an eight-game losing streak, starting with five straight at home — two to the White Sox, then three to the Indians — and then all three games against the White Sox in Chicago. The skid has sent them to a 9-13 record, dropping their run differential into the red (-25 runs); even entering Wednesday, their actual winning percentage had been well ahead of their projected winning percentages, but they’ve regressed to the point that their .409 mark is looking up at both their Pythagenpat (.420) and Baseruns (.416) winning percentages, which is to say that they’ve apparently found their level. Read the rest of this entry »

Since he was drafted in the second round in 2015, Tigers left-hander Tyler Alexander barely needs two hands to count the number of times he’s struck out nine batters in a game. There was the first time, on April 23, 2016, when he was in High-A. There were two other nine-strikeout performances in 2017, and two more in the minors in 2019, along with one occasion in the majors in just his third big league appearance. That’s six instances of at least nine strikeouts in 126 career appearances as a pro, each one coming in a game he started.

On Sunday, Alexander struck out nine batters in a row. Not over the course of six or seven innings — just one right after another. Entering as a reliever in the third inning of the first game of Detroit’s doubleheader against the Reds, Alexander set the record for consecutive strikeouts in a relief appearance, and tied the American League record for consecutive strikeouts by any pitcher. And a two-strike fastball that drilled Mike Moustakas on his left arm is all that stopped Alexander from tying Tom Seaver for MLB’s all-time record. Actually, because he struck out Eugenio Suárez immediately after plunking Moustakas, that stray heater is all that stopped Alexander from having the longest strikeout streak in baseball history.

By any definition, it will go down as one of the most dominant relief appearances of the season. Of the 55 pitches Alexander threw on Sunday, 16 were called strikes, while 22 induced swings. Of those 22 swings, 11 were whiffs, and none resulted in a ball put in play. For 3.2 innings, Alexander was untouchable. That’s unquestionably a great day for him, and to a lesser extent, it’s also a good day for every other pitcher in baseball, because Alexander’s performance shows this is probably something any pitcher in baseball could achieve.

This isn’t to take anything away from Alexander. Every pitcher on earth would love to simply strike out every hitter he faces without ever allowing the ball to be put in play — that doesn’t mean anyone ever actually accomplishes it. It’s one thing to try to strike out nine guys in a row, and another to actually do it. In order to close that gap, one would think a pitcher would need to be working with some truly elite, lights-out stuff. Read the rest of this entry »