Detroit Tigers: Grading The 2019 Players For Their Performances

The Detroit Tigers had a season for the history books, historically bad that is. Finishing 47-114 and securing the first overall pick in the draft was the significant accomplishment from a team standpoint on the season, but individually players progressed and regressed, take a look at how some of the Tigers regulars fared.

At the helm of the organization is general manager Al Avila who had his contract renewed by the Illitch family after he felt Avila was doing an excellent job during this rebuild. At the helm of the team in the clubhouse, it is manager Ron Gardenhire who was the Detroit Tigers bench boss and will most likely be returning for at least one more year to finish out his contract.

Though the Detroit Tigers lost 114 games this season, Gardenhire proved that he is here to see growth from these players. It was known that they would struggle, but he aims to see growth from the younger players.

The goal was not necessarily to win but to see growth from the players on the field, in the sense of players making less fielding errors. Fine-tuning their defense, maintaining a successful approach in the box, or at least showing signs of good baseball.

Gardenhire does an excellent job of getting these young players to understand that on a team like the Tigers (in the current state), it is going to be about showing growth and progressing for the future of this rebuild. The Tigers went through a ton of different players between call-ups, injuries, and trades, so their roster is not as defined as a team like the New York Yankees.

For this piece, in particular, I chose all of the players who were “regulars” for the Tigers in 2019, to grade them on their performance and assign each player with a grade and analysis. For hitters, the qualifications were that the player played in sixty-five games or more for the Detroit Tigers this past season.

This rounds it out to thirteen hitters, excluding guys like Travis Demeritte, who was acquired in a trade for Shane Greene and Jake Rogers, who was called up towards the end of the year. These guys will be more mainstays shortly, but for the purposes of assigning MLB grades to the “regulars,” there are thirteen hitters with more than sixty-five games played.

For the pitchers, I chose the starting pitchers based on players who started in more than ten games, which round out to four starters that will receive grades. The relievers were a little harder to qualify since there are so many that were up and down between the minors or off the injured list.

I qualified pitchers with twenty-five games appeared in, which means that there are ten pitchers. In total, there will be twenty-seven players who are given grades in the form of fourteen pitchers and thirteen hitters for the Tigers 2019 regulars.