Detroit Tigers' Scott Harris, A.J. Hinch douse optimism with talk of struggles, not playoffs
One day. That’s all it took for Scott Harris and A.J. Hinch to dash any hopes and dreams about the Detroit Tigers playing in the postseason this year.
Under sunny skies at Joker Marchant Stadium, the brain trust duo immediately summoned the dark clouds to douse any kind of wild optimism we might have. All on the first day of spring training.
“It's going to be one of the youngest position playing groups in baseball,” Harris, the team’s president of baseball operations, told reporters Wednesday in Lakeland, Fla. “We haven't earned the right to talk about division titles or playoff berths yet.”
Hinch wasn’t quite as forceful in quashing the postseason talk, and he shouldn’t be. He’s entering his fourth year with the Tigers and still looking for his first winning season. Few managers survive four straight losing seasons, but a recent oddly timed extension makes Hinch safer this year than Rickey Henderson stealing second with Brad Penny on the mound.
“We understand where we want to be and what we want to do,” Hinch told reporters. “We're unafraid to talk about winning games.
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“We obviously want to have a winning record. We haven't earned it yet, and we haven't played any games. The end-of-season review comes at the end of the season, not at the beginning.”
Mind you, Harris and Hinch were showering reporters with cold water only a couple days after staff ace Tarik Skubal was spitting fire, and truth, about postseason possibilities.
“Our division was pretty wide-open last year,” he told the Free Press. “I want to win the division and get to the playoffs. I think that's why you play the game, to play playoff baseball and compete for a World Series. That's where I'm at mentally.”
Skubal is right. The American League Central looks like it’s going to be the worst division in baseball for the second straight year. That means the Tigers don’t have to be great. They just have to be less-worse than the other mediocre-to-bad teams.
From what I’ve heard, there’s quiet optimism about the team’s potential to be good this year and flirt with a playoff berth. We have to remember that last year the Tigers won 78 games and outperformed just about everybody’s expectations when they finished second in the division, nine games behind the Twins.
For the record, I picked them to win 69 games last year. But I was an optimistic fool, compared to PECOTA’s prediction of 65 wins. (And no, I’m not telling you what PECOTA stands for). FanGraphs had them at 71.5 wins.
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This year, the computers got a software upgrade and changed their tunes. PECOTA predicts 74.7 wins, though that’s only good for third place in division behind the Twins (88.7) and Guardians (83.1). Someone rewired FanGraphs’ computer, which spit out 79.7 wins for the Tigers, though that’s also a third-place showing behind the Twins (84.8) and Guardians (80.4).
Any way you break it down, the Tigers should be within striking distance of a division title. The problem is that Harris doesn’t seem interested in taking any kind of a big swing to get there.
Their $92.8 million payroll is baseball’s 10th lowest and the only significant upgrades came through the modest acquisitions of outfielder Mark Canha and pitchers Kenta Maeda and Jack Flaherty. I feel stupid for even thinking there was a sliver of a chance they would sign Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Of course, that was way back in November. I was so young and foolish back then.
The biggest need they could have filled was at third base. They could have added free-agent veterans like Matt Chapman or Justin Turner at a reasonable price. They also could have done more to take advantage of Miguel Cabrera vacating the designated hitter spot and added some power there by bringing back a popular playing like J.D. Martinez.
But Harris said he didn’t want to add a stopgap and take away at-bats from players who are in the majors or close. The approach for now will be a DH-by-committee and a third-base rotation of Matt Vierling, Andy Ibáñez and Zach McKinstry.
Having a better pitching staff, the theory goes, will take the pressure off hitters and will allow them to grow — and struggle.
“Coming into this year,” Harris said, “we knew that we are going to have a lot of young hitters populating our lineup. We should expect these young hitters to struggle at times. We should be expecting the offense to sputter at times.”
Whoa! Anyone got the number for the season-ticket office?
I’m not trying to be too hard on Harris and Hinch, because they’re not paid to be optimists or salesmen. But Harris especially needs to understand it’s been 10 years since the Tigers made the playoffs. Last year marked the first time in seven years since they finished second in the division, so it’s natural for people to be hopeful.
Instead, Harris and Hinch sound like they’re running a lab experiment, trying to systematically cultivate players while fans have to pay for the privilege of seeing the experiment play out slowly in real time.
But I’m cringing at the expected production from the infield, where Colt Keith is a complete unknown at second, Javier Báez could remain an offensive black hole at short and the turnstile at third might stop long enough for Jace Jung to get called up and offer exactly what, more growth and struggle?
Right now, besides Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene and Skubal, there isn’t much to get excited about with this team. The guarded offseason spending and the early message from Harris and Hinch made sure of that.
Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Guarded spending, expected struggles douse optimism for Detroit Tigers
