Look, when the Tigers were blowing through the schedule like Superman zooming into space, many fans in Detroit remained cautious.
A.J. Hinch has a routine.
Every morning, if the Detroit Tigers are playing at home that night, he goes to a local coffee shop in Birmingham. Same coffee shop. Same time. Once he’s finished, he will head to Comerica Park – even though the first pitch is still nine hours away – and the business and busyness of baseball will engulf him. But for those few blessed caffeinated moments, he gets to be alone with his thoughts.
Unless fans come up to him and offer theirs. Which they do.
“Lately,“ he said, Saturday morning, with a chuckle, “they’re probably tiptoeing around me.”
It’s a long season and you gotta trust it. Of all the famous adages about baseball, that one, from the film “Bull Durham,” is the most succinctly true. It’s also the only smart way to address this wet, smelly blanket that has smothered the Tigers for weeks now, from four games before the All-Star break all the way to Friday night at Comerica Park, when, once again, their bats seemed as dead as the humid summer air.
The Tigers lost Friday, 6-2, to a streaking Toronto club. It was their 11th defeat in 12 games, the worst record of any MLB team during that time, by a club that had a better record than every MLB team less than a month ago. Detroit has given up 82 runs in those losses, an average of 7.5 per outing. Their bats have been, to be polite, tepid.
What to do? Or, rather, what not to do? Don’t think about it. Don’t dwell on it. Don’t try and chase it around and kill it.
“Sometimes in sports we get caught up with the last thing we remember,” Hinch said. “You get a few series playing poorly and you think it’s the end of the world. I do believe this team has plenty of character and plenty of talent to make it a memorable season.”
Pour that man a refill.
Because he’s right.
Seeing isn’t believing
Look, when the Tigers were blowing through the schedule like Superman zooming into space, many fans in Detroit remained cautious. They can’t be this good, right? Best record in baseball? Outdistancing the Dodgers and the Yankees? Fourteen games ahead in their division?
We didn’t quite believe it. And we shouldn’t quite believe what we’re seeing now. These Tigers shouldn’t lose 11 out of 12, or three straight to Pittsburgh, a team that entered Saturday 20 games under .500.
But they did. They did because things happen in baseball, and things don’t.
On Friday night, for example, the Tigers’ first hitter, Colt Keith, being aggressive, smacked out a hard single. Good. But the next batter, Gleyber Torres, immediately hit into a double play. Bad.
In the fourth inning. Riley Greene mistimed a jump. Instead of an out, it turned into a double for Vlad Guerrero Jr. Later that same frame, Javier Báez took a grounder that should have ended the inning and threw it badly; the ball got past Spencer Torkelson at first, and a run scored.
“We’re trying to address some of the things that are bleeding into our style of play,” Hinch said after the game. “Uncharacteristic mistakes. … You could write a laundry list of things when teams aren’t going well. … (But) baseball is gonna push back a little bit and make you play the next inning and the next day the next day. The Blue Jays or any team we play aren’t going to feel sorry for us.”
Right. There’s no victims here. No pity. The Tigers were playing a bit above their heads before and now they’re playing a bit below their feet. They’re young. And running from the front when you’re young is a trippy experience. It’s all about finding your balance. And not going mad in the process. Not overturning the furniture and ripping up the carpet in search of a magic cure.
“Have you yelled during this stretch?” I asked Hinch.
“Not at the team,” he said. “I've been frustrated, but publicly doing that is so counterproductive. If you think about any relationship you have, how many times has yelling helped it?”
The Tigers, so far, have kept the yelling down and morale up. Kept the belief in themselves. There’s no finger pointing. No grumbling by lockers. They are searching for the balance between being aggressive, which is how they won so many of those games, and pressing, which is partly how they are losing them.
“Pressing is doing things that aren’t characteristic of you as a team,” catcher Dillon Dingler said after Friday’s loss. “So I would say just try and play as free and loose and as possible, be the team that got us to this point in the season.”
‘You gotta run the race’
Of course, it helps when you have Tarik Skubal every fifth contest. He’s having a season for the ages, and was scheduled to pitch Saturday night, pending the birth of his second child. But once Skubal is done, the Tigers are back to where they’ve been. And where they’ve been lately hasn’t been good.
Detroit sent six players, including Skubal, to the All-Star Game. But since that night, Zach McKinstry is 2-for-22, Báez is 3-for-18, Greene has one RBI, Torres has none, and Casey Mize gave up 10 hits and five runs in four innings.
Did success wiggle its way to their heads? I don’t think so. Might they be pressing to try and return to that pre-break excellence? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the season balancing itself out.
“You can’t draw a lot of conclusions at the 60-game mark, the 100-game mark, the 120-game mark,” Hinch said. “You gotta run the race to find out who you are. …
“You can’t run effectively by looking in the rearview mirror. That stuff is done and over. We can’t replay the Pittsburgh series or the Seattle series, or the Texas series. We gotta keep moving forward.”
Maybe the Tigers will make a move before the MLB trade deadline Thursday. Maybe that helps.
Maybe Kerry Carpenter returning helps. The Tigers still have Skubal. They still have the power bats of Greene and Torkelson. They still have aggressive baserunning. They still have a considerable lead on everyone in their division. And they still have Hinch’s managing, which is steady and experienced and ideal for a young, rising club.
Hinch reminded me that some of his 100-win teams in Houston had multiple six- and seven-game losing streaks during their seasons.
“You wouldn’t think that,” he said.
And yet it’s true. Much as you wouldn’t think this losing streak would engulf the Tigers, yet it has.
It’s a long season, and you gotta trust it. The Tigers are still in the upper echelon of 2025. So far, they are relatively healthy. Keep doing the little things. Keep true to your identity. Keep going to the same coffee shop at the same time.
And if you see Hinch sitting there, don’t tiptoe around him. Nobody died. Baseball teams, like those espresso machines, can heat up in a hurry.
[ MUST LISTEN: Talking trade deadline, Tarik Skubal's future with ex-MLB GM Jim Duquette. Make "Days of Roar" your go-to Tigers podcast, available anywhere you listen to podcasts (Apple, Spotify) ]
Contact Mitch Albom: [email protected]. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tigers were never as good as we thought, but can't be this bad either
Category: General Sports
