A little after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, my inbox received perhaps the most ill-timed promotion in the history of sports marketing.
It was from the Detroit Tigers to its fan base: “It’s go time: Claim your postseason tickets before they’re gone.”
Oh, they might be gone, all right. Less than 8 hours later the team lost to the Cleveland Guardians and handed over the AL Central Division lead that the Tigers held for 184 days of this season.
And they didn’t just hold it: On July 8, the Tigers had a 15.5-game margin over the Guardians and were on pace to get a first-round bye and home field advantage in the playoffs. Now, with five games remaining, there’s a real possibility Detroit will miss the playoffs altogether.
The Tigers have lost seven games in a row, their longest losing streak of the season, at a time when the games matter the most. As I write this, they are 5-14 in September and have just completed the largest collapse of a division leader in modern baseball history.
I want to be clear: I am not writing this as an objective journalist. I am writing this as an incredulous and frustrated fan, one who has stuck by the Tigers through a decade of mediocre baseball, has endured $40 parking fees, increased ticket prices and $12 beers and finally started to feel rewarded for the devotion.
How we got to expectations so high that we can be epically disappointed is a remarkable story in and of itself.
Late in the 2024 season, the Tigers gelled and went on a 31-13 run to end the regular season. They stormed into the playoffs as a wild card team and knocked out the powerful Houston Astros.
They eventually bowed out to the Guardians in the divisional round, but there were good feelings galore in The D about “The Gritty Tigs!”
That carried over into this season. In June I interviewed MLive beat writer Evan Woodbery, and he agreed that covering a team with the best record in baseball was more enjoyable than a team in constant rebuilding mode.
We talked about how players were bought in to Manager A.J. Hinch’s style of baseball, how they got the most of their roster – which has no superstars beyond pitcher Tarik Skubal – and how the future looked bright with a strong farm system.
It never occurred to me in that conversation to ask, “Any chance they’ll miss the playoffs?” My guess is Woodbery would have said “not likely.” Even as recently as last week, baseball analytics trackers had playoff odds at 99% for the Tigers.
“I don’t think it’s fair to view that stretch as a time in which everything went right, and they somehow stumbled into the MLB’s best record,” said Woodbery this week. “I think it’s more accurate to view the last month in particular as a time in which everything has gone wrong.”
The frustrated fan in me is upset that the Tigers ownership did not add talent to their lineup at the trade deadline (July 31). Instead, General Manager Scott Harris brought in warm bodies, names that will be forgotten by next spring training.
In the two weeks around the All-Star Game, the Tigers lost 12 of 13 games, making clear there were significant weaknesses in the lineup. Sure, it would have cost farm system prospects to add star power, but what fan doesn’t want to win now?
But let’s be fair – the objective journalist in me knows there is another side to this. Woodbery says the cost of the best available players would have been to “mortgage the future” by losing players like Kevin McGonigle, a minor league shortstop who is the #2 prospect in all of baseball.
“Scott Harris is getting a lot of criticism for ‘not doing anything’ at the deadline, but if anything, he may have done too much,” Woodbery said of the trades that were made for middling players.
“I would have preferred to see more (existing Tigers) Keider Montero and Brant Hurter and ‘pitching chaos’ than a handful of players that were just barely above waiver-wire fodder.”
Sigh. Stop making sense, Evan, I want to sulk over here. That’s a fan’s prerogative, right?
Now I’ll take a deep breath, summon all the positivity I can muster for the rest of this precarious season and say, “Go Tigs!”