Detroit Tigers are without hope for the first time in more than a decade
By Matt Snyder
It’s been more than a decade since the Tigers closed out a season without hope of competing for a playoff spot in the coming years.
The Detroit Tigers lost to the New York Yankees 10-2 on Wednesday night after losing 13-4 on Tuesday. The Tigers have lost 10 of their last 12 and have fallen 17 games below the .500 mark. They’re 10.5 games back in the American League Wild Card race and their FanGraphs playoff odds read zero percent across the board.
The Tigers haven’t really been in the playoff race since June and they sold off key pieces at the trade deadline in July. It’s not a surprise to any of us that the club is struggling, but Tigers fans haven’t really dealt with a reality like this since 2005*. The Tigers aren’t going anywhere this year and we have little reason to expect them to go anywhere in the coming years.
*Of course, in 2005 we had no idea that the team would reach the World Series in 2006 and kick off a decade of competitiveness.
The Tigers had down years in 2008 and 2015 — 74 wins in each, the only seasons below .500 from 2006 to 2016 — but in both those years we had reason to hope for the playoffs the following season. In 2009 the Tigers bounced back and came within one game of winning the division. In 2016 the Tigers were eliminated from the Wild Card race on the final day of the season.
2018 looks like it could be a disaster. The Tigers front office will head into the offseason with an eye toward building for the future. That’s could mean more trades of veteran players — Ian Kinsler and Justin Verlander will surely be on the market (if Verlander isn’t dealt in the coming week) — and a tightening of the payroll purse strings. Al Avila will certainly remain in the kiddie pool when it comes to the free agent market. The only signings will be small in value and limited in scope.
With Justin Upton set to make a decision on his opt-out clause, the Tigers could be looking at an underwhelming lineup. A worst-case scenario lineup card could look something like this:
- Mahtook, LF
- Machado, 2B
- Cabrera, 1B
- Martinez, DH
- Castellanos, 3B
- McCann, C
- Jones, CF
- Iglesias, SS
- Presley, RF
That is… pretty bad (and this is without even looking at the starting rotation which could be Michael Fulmer, Jordan Zimmermann, Daniel Norris, Matt Boyd, and maybe Buck Farmer). Retaining Kinsler and Upton (and Verlander) would make things look a little bit better, but we’re still staring at another year of sub-.500 baseball.
I was a teenager the last time the Tigers went through this sort of thing, so I’m going to have to re-learn how to be a fan during a rebuilding process. I’ve started to skip watching more than the occasional game and have had to find other ways to follow the team like keeping track of minor league prospects or starting to look forward to which free agents might be budget-friendly signings (Curtis Granderson!?).
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It’s probably going to get tiring to continue to follow a losing ball club in the Twitter age, but that’s our reality as Tigers fans. Hopefully the turnaround process can be navigated in a few short years and we can allow ourselves to believe once again.