There isn’t a more American sport than baseball. Sure, football is more popular, and basketball is more niche to just this country. But baseball has such a connotation with summer, hot dogs, and freedom, that you just can’t help but think of it as our national pastime. I grew up with that worldview: my first competitive sport was travel baseball, I dreamed of being a sports journalist, and there was never anything that could match the rotation that my Tigers gear got.
The Detroit Tigers were my first love in sports. Why wouldn’t they be? The hometown heroes of my favorite sport had my loyalty through thick and thin. And with the Tigers, there was a hell of a lot more “thin” than “thick”. The miracle run to the World Series in 2006 was one of the most magical experiences of my life, but otherwise it was years and years of dreaming that this would be the year they broke through.
In 2011, Detroit did break through and won the Central Division – their first of 4 straight division titles. There were so many great memories for a middle schooler, then a high schooler) – the huge win streak in August 2011, the World Series trip in 2012, going to a game with my dad in 2013. I cherish those days.
Part of the reason that those days are so cherished is because from 2015 onward, the Tigers reverted into a black hole of suck. They bottomed out extremely fast so that by the time I got to the summer after my freshman year of college (2017), they were but a long-gone memory. Who could miss a lowly MLB team when you were on campus of one of the premiere college football programs in the country at the same time as Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray, and Jalen Hurts? One love seamlessly transitioned into another in my life.
It was the covid pandemic that really started to change things. All of a sudden, my busy college life came crashing to a halt. There was nothing to do but sit around inside or go for a walk. So, when baseball returned, I started watching it a little bit. Not much – I could never get into watching other teams play, and the Tigers were still resolutely terrible – but some. Taking Scipio for a walk at The Links and listening to Dan Dickerson on a hot summer evening became the jam of summer 2021.
In 2023 I started to move toward becoming a serious sports bettor. In the summer, there’s no other sport to bet on, so you play a lot of your time and money on baseball – that’s just kind of how it goes. All of a sudden, a previously apathetic Nolan found himself an expert in baseball lineups – how the Phillies would use Schwarber, how Patrick Corbin’s season was going with the Nationals, and the breakout campaign that Corbin Carroll was having in Arizona. Through all of that the Tigers lingered – rarely on the TV, but I knew how they were performing and what their struggles were.
Detroit made a decent run late in 2023 to approach the .500 mark. That doesn’t sound like much, but for a team that had sat in the basement of the MLB for 7 years, going 78-84 and finishing 2nd in the worst division in baseball was cause for excitement. Most of the Tigers couldn’t hit the ball worth a lick in 2023, but young outfielder Riley Greene and equally young first baseman Spencer Torkelson had arrived and held their own against MLB pitching. Detroit appeared to have an ace in Tarik Skubal and some pitching depth behind him. Miguel Cabrera finished off his last swan song at the end of the season, capping off a historic career that I had been around for almost all of. It was bittersweet; I cried after his last appearance. It certainly felt like the end of a long era in Detroit baseball, maybe even the end of the last easy link to my childhood. But it also felt like the turning of the page to something new.
With all of that happening and some brand new additions to the team like Kenta Maeda, Jack Flaherty, Shelby Miller, and Mark Canha, the Tigers entered 2024 as trendy sleeper picks in the AL Central. Riley and I felt some optimism – though mine was certainly curbed, as I repeatedly said that I’d happily take the under 77.5 season win total for the team. It just felt like there was some expectation for regression.
The Tigers got out of the gate hot, winning their first 5 games. It was clear by the end of April that they hadn’t exactly fixed the hitting woes of 2023, but the team’s pitching (especially the bullpen) kept them afloat. Tarik Skubal had entered the year as dark-horse Cy Young contender, and by the end of the spring he had emerged as the clear-cut favorite to win the award. Jack Flaherty got better with each successive outing. Reese Olson, a little-heralded prospect who put up some eyebrow-raising numbers as a rookie in 2023, showed that it wasn’t a fluke.
It was this dominant top 3 of pitchers that kept the Tigers afloat. They managed to stay at .500 as late as early June, but a 10-0 loss against Milwaukee on June 7 dropped them to 31-32 and from there the bottom started to fall out. The offense, to put it bluntly, was putrid. There was a laundry list of issues with the team, but the obvious starting point was shortstop Javy Baez, who was having one of the worst hitting seasons of all time. It wasn’t just him, though; Torkelson took a huge step back after hitting 30 home runs a year ago, and center fielder Parker Meadows hit .131 in April before getting sent down to Toledo. Greene was having an All-Star-caliber seaosn, and Kerry Carpenter was mashing against righties before getting hurt, but after that the outlook was bleak. Sam and I spent most of the month of June stacking Tigers players under hits + runs + RBIs on DraftKings Pick6 with a ridiculous success rate, leading us to dub the strategy “Tigers Unders (infinite money glitch)”.
With that going on, and with Elizabeth and me buying a house, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I disassociated from the Tigers yet again. Old habits die hard, but when your team is losing its third straight game to the horrible Angels to fall to 37-46, you sort of have to cut your losses. There were building blocks in place, and even some very fun games but mentally I had already turned to the trade deadline.
One thing that absolutely has to be said, though: the Tigers never quit. Riley and I used that as our crutch against a woe-is-me mentality. They shoed some resilience early in July to start pulling back toward .500. The first half ended with a memorable 3-game series in Detroit against the Dodgers wherein the Tigers blew a 3-0 lead on Skubal Day in game 1 to lose, then overcame a 5-run deficit in the 9th inning of game 2 to win 11-9, and then came back from another 9th-inning deficit to win game 3 4-3. That showed some serious fortitude for a team that was increasingly composed of rookies and nothing else.
47-50 going into the All-Star Game wasn’t exactly what we wanted, but at least this wasn’t a basement Tigers team. They were pretty far from the fringes of playoff contention, though, so it was clear they’d have to at least get back up to .500 to not trade players away. They were never quite able to overcome that hurdle. So there Riley and I were, yet again at the end of July of a disappointing season. The MLB trade deadline is a little bit like Christmas for fans of crappy teams. You send away any player with a whiff of value and an expiring contract, and then you convince yourself that the presents you got back don’t amount to massive lumps of coal. Of course, the crappy team’s alternative to doing this is to not trade away your players of value, a fact which Tigers fans were sickeningly aware of after the debacle in (not) trading Eduardo Rodriguez at the 2023 trade deadline. That makes you feel like a real Scrooge.
Detroit was in an enviable position heading into the trade deadline. They’d signed Jack Flaherty to a one-year deal to try and help him improve his personal stock after a couple of bad seasons, and Flaherty had responded with an amazing first half. Everyone agreed he was the top free-agent-to-be starting pitcher on the market, meaning the Tigers could theoretically sit back and wait for some team contending for the World Series to put together the highest offer. Theoretically. In reality, the days of late July passed by one after another and I started to get more and more worried that team president Scott Harris was blowing it again. Away went backup catcher Carson Kelly and lefty reliever Andrew Chafin to the Rangers, but Flaherty remained.
Finally, on July 30 (deadline day), the other shoe dropped. Riley sent me a text while I was sitting in my kitchen that Flaherty was heading to the Dodgers. The return: 2 minor leaguers, catcher Thayron Liranzo and shortstop Trey Sweeney. Compared to what the Orioles and the Astros gave up for worse pitchers, this seemed like a pretty light return. All told, it felt like a gut punch. Why did I have to root for a team that was so poorly run?
Amid all the hubbub of those trades (and one that sent Mark Canha to the Giants), another question loomed: who was going to eat the innings for the team for the last 2 months of the year? Skubal was still plugging along as the Cy Young favorite, but now Flaherty was gone, Reese Olson was hurt, Casey Mize was hurt, Matt Manning was hurt, and Kenta Maeda had been sent to the bullpen. Rookie AAAA pitcher Keider Montero was available, but otherwise the team was going to have to be creative to eat innings. But as I pointed out to Riley when he expressed concern over that, this was the white flag. Detroit was 52-57 and fading from the playoff picture, so who really cared who pitched the meaningless innings?
Next time: The meaningless innings become less meaningless.
