Davis Martin had a first inning to forget on Tuesday. Pitching at Fenway Park, the Chicago White Sox right-hander was torched for six runs by a scorching-hot Red Sox team that went on to prevail 14-2. He settled down after the tumultuous frame — only one more runner crossed the plate before Martin departed in the sixth — but by then the damage was done.
What happened in the fateful first inning? I asked him that question the following day, but before we get to his thoughts, a quick recap:
With two on and one out, Willson Contreras singled home a run. Two batters later, Caleb Durbin launched a grand slam. Jarren Duran then followed with a solo shot on Martin’s 20th pitch of the game.
The hurler’s take?
“First, there is a lot to be said about how good this Red Sox team is, and what they’ve been doing,” said Martin, who is 9-6 with a 4.13 ERA and a 3.48 FIP over 122 innings on the season. “We studied the scouting report, and there weren’t a lot of pitches that I would want to take back. But yeah, I felt that they were one step ahead. They were doing a really good job of keeping me off balance.”
Red Sox hitters had clearly been more aggressive than the White Sox expected. Half a dozen runs coming on 20 pitches thrown to seven batters is notable, especially when you consider that Contreras saw six of them. His at-bat was arguably the key to the inning. After fouling off consecutive two-strike offerings, the slugger got his RBI knock on a breaking ball that was well wide of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »
With apologies to Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers, for my money the most eye-catching deal ahead of Monday’s trade deadline was the Red Sox acquiring Adley Rutschman in a six-player blockbuster with the Orioles. Not only did a switch-hitting All-Star catcher move from one Wild Card contender to another, but he did so within the same division — and he’s more than a rental, with one more year of arbitration eligibility before he reaches free agency. Though he’s currently on the injured list due to inflammation in his left wrist, Rutschman is reportedly nearing a rehab assignment, and once he returns, he should provide a substantial upgrade for a team whose catchers landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list a few weeks ago.
Rustchman wasn’t the only prominent catcher on the move to a contender on Monday, as the Marlins tradedLiam Hicks to the Rays, but he’s a part-time backstop whose hitting makes him a useful DH and first base option as well. While the concurrence of his being dealt illustrates that trading for a catcher on the fly in the midst of a playoff race isn’t unheard of, such moves do stand out. They’re not to be undertaken lightly because of the weighty responsibility that falls on a catcher’s shoulders in terms of quickly having to build relationships with a new pitching staff to understand repertoires, situational preferences, and interpersonal dynamics. Odds are that those newcomers are also expected to provide more offense than the catchers they replaced, because offensive slumps often spur teams to make such changes. Read the rest of this entry »
The Padres got the second-best pitcher traded by the Tigers at the deadline.
On Monday, Casey Mize was traded from Detroit to San Diego in exchange for pitching prospects Kash Mayfield and Jackson Wolf. The Padres also got minor league infielder Gage Workman in the deal.
Mize has been exceptional in 2026… when healthy. He’s posted a 2.70 ERA and 2.58 FIP in 86 2/3 innings. His 2.9 WAR is already a career best. He’s thrown strikes, missed bats, and kept the ball in the ballpark. He looks very much like the pitcher the Tigers were hoping to get when they drafted him first overall way back in 2018.
Unfortunately, Mize has also looked like the pitcher the Tigers ultimately got — or didn’t get — since his debut. He missed a few weeks in May with an adductor strain, and a few more weeks in June with adductor inflammation. Those trips to the injured list were the fifth and sixth of his career. He missed most of 2022 and all of 2023 while recovering from Tommy John surgery, and missed time with less significant hamstring injuries in 2024 and 2025. Mize exits Detroit having thrown just 526 2/3 innings over 105 outings spread across seven years; he’ll be a free agent this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »
Something about the the gut-wrenching way Tarik Skubal’s final Tigers start ended — with Detroit coughing up a big lead as it desperately clung to its playoff hopes — made it easier both to accept that he’d be traded and to understand that dealing him would probably be the right move.
Indeed, it was a sobering microcosm of the team’s season for Skubal’s final inning to end awkwardly rather than in triumph, and then for things to go sideways in unexpected fashion. Like a lot of us, I picked the Tigers to make a deep postseason run. For several reasons, including so that I might look smart (not dumb, like they say, but smart), I hoped during the last several weeks that the Tigers would stay hot enough for it to make sense for them to keep Skubal. As the schedule reached this weekend’s checkpoint, and Detroit stumbled deeper into a very crowded AL Wild Card field, it became clearer what the front office had to do. Late on Saturday night, the Tigers traded Skubal to the Dodgers for Triple-A starting pitcher River Ryan, Double-A outfielder Zyhir Hope, and Low-A pitcher Brady Smith. Read the rest of this entry »
What has Tarik Skubal been thinking about lately? The obvious answer is where he will be playing once the trade deadline passes, but that wasn’t how I posed the question to him a few weeks ago. What I was interested in were his thoughts on pitching as a whole.
“The evolution of the fastball,” replied Skubal, whom the Detroit Tigers dealt to the Los Angeles Dodgers late last night for a package of prospects. “What is a fastball and how guys pitch. In today’s game, more than ever, guys have two versions of the fastball. Maybe three. The cutter is still a fastball in my eyes, so cut-fastball, sinker, four-seamer. Lance Lynn was the guy who did it when I was first in the big leagues. He threw three fastballs. Now you see Cam Schlittler doing it, others guys doing it. The development of fastball offerings: just how much different it is now versus, say, 10 years ago? That’s something I would be interested to see.”
I dug up that info — more specifically, my colleague Jon Becker unearthed it for me — and we’ll get to that in a moment. First let’s hear more of what the always-insightful southpaw had to say.
“I think you almost have to have two different fastballs now, just to give them different looks,” Skubal told me. “Hitters are so good at covering one fastball, and if you give them two, that’s tough on them. I feel like that transition — multiple fastballs — is happening a lot right now.”
Skubal, whose arsenal is sans a cutter but includes an elite changeup, has thrown his four-seamer at a 36.5% clip this season, and his sinker at a 19.8% clip. The lesser used of his two fastballs isn’t great in a vacuum, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important weapon in his arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes, the trade deadline doesn’t need to be complicated. Sometimes the best team in baseball goes out and gets the best player available, perhaps the best pitcher in the game. The Dodgers, two-time defending World Series champions and tied with the Brewers for the most wins, are upgrading their rotation as much as it’s possible to upgrade it. On Saturday, they acquired Tarik Skubal from the Tigers in exchange for prospects Zyhir Hope, River Ryan, and Brady Smith, as Jeff Passan first reported.
The entire trade deadline has revolved around Skubal, the best player available time of year in ages. And who better to trade for him than the Dodgers, who have one of the deepest farm systems in baseball in addition to their major league riches? Oh, other teams can see Skubal’s magnificence just as plainly as Los Angeles can, and they have prospects too. But Andrew Friedman and the Dodgers make a habit of winning trade sweepstakes like these, with Manny Machado, Max Scherzer, and Trea Turner being the best other examples.
One ancillary effect of paying a bunch of stars to play for you is that you have fewer available roster spots for your minor leaguers to graduate into. That cuts both ways – there also aren’t enough at-bats to go around for young players – but the benefit is that the Dodgers don’t need to build their playoff lineup with three or four slots filled by pre-arbitration players. It naturally leads to trades; the Dodgers don’t have as many opportunities to hand to their own minor leaguers, because they keep having such good major leaguers. That means that they’re incentivized to go out and make trades just like this one, which leaves even less room for the good minor leaguers, which leads to…. well, you get the idea. Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday afternoon, Tarik Skubal threw what looked for all the world to be his last pitch as a member of the Detroit Tigers.
Skubal fanned six Orioles — including his 1,000th career strikeout — and held the Orioles scoreless into the seventh inning. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, wanting his ace to finish on a valedictory note, let Skubal pitch himself into some trouble in the seventh, but lifted him once Leody Taveras singled in Baltimore’s first run. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s still a chance Tarik Skubal pitches for the Detroit Tigers in the postseason this year.
Trading Skubal before the 2026 deadline makes sense for the Tigers. I think that’s pretty well established. Detroit has a losing record, less than one-in-three odds to make the playoffs per our odds, and one of the best players in the league on an expiring deal. This is the ideal trade deadline scenario.
But things have become more muddled in recent weeks. The Tigers are hot, having gone 25-16 since June 1. They finally look like the team we projected to win the AL Central before the season began. Still, they’d need to go 9-2 to even reach the deadline with a .500 record, underscoring the depth of the hole they dug early in the year. With less than two weeks before this crucial decision point, the Tigers have stumbled upon a universal truth: Being alive is complicated.
The Tigers’ season started well enough. They snuck out of April with an even 16-16 record and a positive run differential. They even began May by taking two of three from the Rangers. But on May 4, Skubal landed on the IL with loose bodies in his elbow, the latest in a string of injuries to the rotation. They lost that night and began a brutal 4-21 stretch that saw them sink to the worst record in baseball by the end of the month.
It wasn’t really the absence of Skubal that was the issue, as Jay Jaffe wrote at the time. In May, their batters posted a league-worst 69 wRC+ — nobody hit fewer homers, and only the Angels struck out more. When the offense did manage a lead, it was quickly given up by a shallow bullpen, which turned in 24 meltdowns in May. There aren’t many enjoyable brands of losing baseball, but slogging through a 1-0 game only to implode at the end is among the most frustrating. Attention understandably turned to Skubal’s return, and his seemingly inevitable departure at the deadline.
Then the calendar flipped to June. The Tigers began the month with a sweep of the first-place Rays, scoring 25 runs on 10 homers in three games, and they haven’t cooled since. Their 109 wRC+ in the last 41 games is top 10 in baseball, and their 72 homers are the most of any team. The lineup now has one of the best trios in the majors. Dillon Dingler (4.6) and Kevin McGonigle (4.0) each rank in the top 10 by WAR, and Riley Greene (2.8) ranks in the top 30. Colt Keith is on a hot streak, smacking eight homers since June 1 after going the first two months of the season without hitting any. The Tigers also just got Gleyber Torres and his 127 wRC+ back from an oblique injury on Monday. It’s suddenly a good, competitive lineup.
The bullpen has also been better of late. Their 3.19 ERA since June 1 is fifth in the majors. It’s a shallow group, and the end of games can still feel a bit dicey while closer Kenley Jansen runs a walk rate (14.7%) nearly double his career mark (7.9%). But the offense finally scoring a few runs has helped alleviate some of the pressure. In May, the Tigers bullpen faced the sixth-highest Leverage Index when entering games; since June 1, they’ve faced the lowest of any team. Again, it’s not a great bullpen, and this is likely the area the Tigers will want to address at the deadline assuming they add. But they’re asking less of them these days.
A competitive lineup and bullpen is all the Tigers should need with their rotation, which has allowed the fewest runs in the majors over this hot stretch. But that’s where the narrative of this article and the Tigers’ season recently became more complicated. Casey Mize pitched on Sunday, looking to continue his breakout season (his 2.79 ERA and 2.62 FIP would each be career bests), but he left the game early with the same groin tightness that’s landed him on the IL twice this year; he’s now day-to-day. Jack Flaherty pitched on Monday, hoping to build on a month-long hot streak (a 2.67 ERA and 3.25 FIP in seven starts since the beginning of June); he pitched poorly and was placed on the injured list with right flexor inflammation after the game. On Tuesday, Framber Valdez couldn’t make it out of the first inning in what ended up being an 11-2 blowout loss to the Cubs; he’s not known to be hurt, but he’s having the worst full season of his career, with a 4.57 ERA and 4.16 FIP in 20 starts.
Still, this has been one of the best rotations in the majors all season, even as they’ve dealt with injuries and inconsistency. They could still be that going forward… assuming Skubal remains their ace. He’s been great. He had solid numbers in seven starts before the IL stint (2.70 ERA and 2.11 FIP), he’s had solid numbers in seven starts after the IL stint (2.97 ERA and 3.66 FIP), and I assume he’ll have solid numbers the rest of the year, regardless of who he’s pitching for. He has been a little homer-prone, allowing 1.09 per nine innings, compared to 0.71 between 2022 and 2025. But his stuff and command metrics look the same as ever, and he hasn’t given up more hard contact or barrels overall. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s a sample-size blip, though it’ll certainly be something teams assess ahead of the deadline.
Again, while Skubal’s absence wasn’t the Tigers’ main issue in May, we can see they’ve largely played like a playoff-bound team the days he’s been on the active roster:
We can also see the Tigers have maybe been a bit unlucky to this point. They are six games under their pythagorean record — the largest discrepancy in the majors this year. That’s driven in part by a 10-17 record in one-run games. In games decided by more than one run, they’re an even 37-37 with a +31 run differential; they’re 20-12 with a +62 run differential since June 1. And so the Tigers seem to be better than their record would indicate, and they are indeed gaining ground. But at 6 1/2 back of the Guardians and White Sox in the Central, and five back of the Red Sox for the third Wild Card, they’re running out of time to make this a legitimate playoff push.
The Tigers must weigh what that long-shot postseason push is worth. They have a young, team-controlled core that could be competitive for years to come. Trading Skubal could obviously help add to their future ambitions. They also don’t technically need Skubal to get to the 2026 postseason. They’d still have an above-average rotation without him (depending on the health of Mize and Flaherty), and some of the players they’d get back in a trade could potentially help them this year. Plus, even if they do get to October with Skubal, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll advance — the Tigers lost both games he pitched in last year’s ALDS. Holding on to such a potentially valuable trade chip only to narrowly miss the postseason or suffer an early exit could generate some hard feelings and hot seats.
Still, this is a legitimate chance for the Tigers. This is the bird in the hand. It’s a fairly important bird, too. Skubal probably doesn’t have the longevity in Detroit to be considered the “best” pitcher in franchise history, but he’s the rare, era-defining player — one still largely in the prime of his career. This is the type of chance a front office typically builds toward, not away from. A late-season comeback and a deep playoff run on the shoulders of a franchise icon has to be worth something beyond long-term efficiencies in team building. And the Tigers will likely extend Skubal a qualifying offer this offseason, meaning they’d at least receive an extra draft pick should he sign elsewhere (assuming the system remains the same under the new CBA, of course). Sure, their midseason stumble raises questions about the team’s potential in 2026, but it should also raise questions about its potential in 2027 and 2028 and 2029. Nothing is guaranteed in baseball, especially when a player like Skubal walks out the door.
Last month, Ben Clemens declared 2026 to be The Year of the Bunt. “Bunts are making a comeback,” he wrote, and then he backed that contention up with numbers and graphs and such, because while the FanGraphs style guide doesn’t have a hard target for words per article, we’re generally expected to use more than five. Ben was right, of course. That’s what the graphs and the words were for. Bunts have gone from 0.7% of plate appearances in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026. We’re talking about very small numbers here, but that’s still a year-over-year increase of nearly 23%.
Not only are teams bunting more often, but they’re also bunting in optimal situations and laying them down more successfully. This year’s bunts have a .533 batting average, compared to .468 last year. Unsuccessful bunts, which result in neither a hit nor a sacrifice, are down from 22% to 19%. According to Baseball Savant’s Run Values, last year’s bunts were worth 13 runs. This season’s bunts are already at 50 runs, and we’ve still got a couple months left! Over the winter, the whole league seems to have finally figured how and when to bunt. But not the Detroit Tigers.
The Tigers have laid down eight bunts this year. Eight. That works out to just under one bunt every 12.5 games. In this article, I will show you all eight of them. It will not take long. The Tigers have more triples than bunts. The Rays have bunted 10 times more than the Tigers. Every team except the Phillies has bunted at least twice as often as the Tigers. Twenty different individual players have bunted more than the Tigers. The Tigers recognize The Year of the Bunt as a fad, and they want no part of such ephemeral frivolities. They didn’t attempt to bunt for the first time until May 4, their 36th game of the season. It, uh, did not go well.
At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contending clubs. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 10% when this series began), I’ve also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included it here because the team’s performance is worth a look.
At the other positions in this series, I have used 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the fifth full season of the universal DH, 0.2 WAR represents the current median, with 11 teams below zero, 12 between zero and 1.0, and just seven with 1.0 or more, with only five reaching 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .244/.325/.422 for a 106 wRC+ this season, down four points from last year’s final mark, the highest since the adoption of the universal DH.
It does appear that an increasing number of teams are investing more playing time in a single DH. From 2022 (the first full-length season with the universal DH) to ’25, the number of players reaching 450 plate appearances in the DH role increased from three to four to seven to nine; this year, they’re on pace for nine, as well. That said, all but one of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »
