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Or—and I’m just spitballing here—Zach might have unlocked something? I notice his BABIP is .326, which is not that out there and unsustainable. He’s not going to hit .300, but if he can keep his walk rate well into the double digit percents, he’s going to continue to see pitchers have to come in to get strikes and give him something to hit.

Well, that Riley 3-2-3 DP sucked. But we do have the lead. Gotta hold it now!

All-Star Zach again with the steak!

And the game is tied, thanks to 2025 All-Star Zach McKinstry!

Skubal’s was close to a quality start. We have time to cover the deficit here. And the Sweeney base hit to start the fifth might be the good start we need. EDIT: oops that was Colt Keith with the leadoff single, wasn’t it? But Sweeney followed up with his own base hit and now runners on first and third with no out in the fifth.

Kerry Carpenter caught that foul fly near the stands for the second out. I wonder whether it would’ve been OK for him to just toss the ball into the stands to a kid? After all, nobody was on base to keep close, and they were going to use a new ball on the next hitter anyway.

Wouldn’t it be the most baseball thing to go into the fourth game of a series gunning for a sweep with your Cy Young winner on the mound and then he gets run off the mound in the second or third inning after giving up something like seven runs? #jinx

Speaking of which, an accurate throw is what McKinstry made to get the runner at third on that second base hit, except Javy flubbed it.

Individual contributors may not rule, but they do rock.

Dan said Carpenter would stop at second but he ran right on to third and dared the RF to throw him out there, which he couldn’t. Being super aggressive on the bases doesn’t work every time, but it’s working enough to make it a good strategy in general.

Yeah, so the lineup is basically what I’d said in the original reply to Bert.

That might be where this team ends up in 2028!

Good point. So that might mean Nido today, Dingler Monday and Tuesday, Nido for the finale.

Nobody said anything about lumbering sluggers—not you, for sure—until I brought it up as a counterexample to what Harris is doing. I brought it up because it was the Tigers’ offensive strategy during the period some fans think of as being a golden era in Tigers history. I think a lot of fans would like to see that be the Tigers offensive strategy once again, although probably not you, and certainly not me.

I think it’s true that some guys are so messed up that they need to be reconstructed practically from scratch, and other times hitting coaching screws up a guy who might be struggling a little but who needs something more surgical than reconstructive. But I would also bet a lot of hitting coaching at the major league level is helping guys with the little flaws that inevitably develop in an entire swing profile that is keeping them from achieving their maximum potential. You know, like, your leg kick is getting a little early, your shoulder is starting to drop, you’re starting to get too long on the swing—stuff like that. Today’s hitting coaches also have to be good at distilling and interpreting video for hitters as well.

I doubt Harris’s end goal is to obtain a bunch of lumbering sluggers a la 2012 and abandon the bold-faced approach. I don’t believe he sees it as a short-term strategy to get us to Dombrowskiland. I think he does see it as a permanent strategy, at last indefinitely. After all, it was the first thing he mentioned in his introductory press conference. But I’ll be very willing to admit I’m wrong if he proves the lumbering slugger strategy was his goal the whole time. As for our offense the last two months of last year, I think you might be giving it short shrift. They were not the bottom five offense they had been for the first four months, and indeed for the entirety of Harris’s early tenure. We were 11th in FanGraphs’ offense measure from August 11 on, or, if you don’t believe in that metric at all, you can re-sort the table and see we were 13th in runs scored. Either way, we were above sea level, and not lacking for offense. https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/major-league?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&month=1000&ind=0&startdate=2024-08-11&enddate=2024-09-30&season1=&season=&team=0%2Cts&sortcol=19&sortdir=default&pagenum=1

He’s not one of the best hitters right now, but I think Colt has shown he has enough going for a guy of his age and experience level in the best league in the world that he can eventually become something like what Tork is showing us right now. Maybe not that great on a sustainable basis—I mean, that’s MVP level across a whole year. But something in the neighborhood of that. Colt’s a work in progress yet. I do admit it feels almost a little disappointing to see him while also seeing rookies like Jackson Chourio and Tyler Fitzgerald and Junior Caminero just waltz into the league and absolutely crush it as rookies from day one while we see our top rookies struggle out of the gate and for years. Ain’t gonna lie, totally jealous of that. Maybe we’ll get that out of Max or McGonigle. We’ll see.

I don’t believe Kreidler is a guy Harris and company envisioned as being a key component to winning anyway. If the top three guys on the CF depth chart weren’t all hurt at the same time, Kreidler certainly wouldn’t be on the active roster, and maybe not even in the system anymore. So I’m not worried about Harris trying to build a winner with a bunch of Kreidlers, who’s a stopgap and nothing more. As for the plus fielding, it’s true a lot of the young guys on the 40 are not plus fielders, like Tork, Colt, Carpenter, and Jung. But remember, these were guys drafted by Al Avila. Harris went through the detritus he inherited and tried to save as much of it as he could, and the four I named are guys he thought we could get enough out of despite their defensive flaws to be win-positive, so we could, if not get a full six or seven controlled years out of them, then at least serve as a bridge to the more well-rounded contingent players Harris has acquired, like the Maxes and McGonigle and Rainer and the like. This is also why we signed Gleyber Torres: he’s a terrible fielder who can hit some, but he’s not anything like a key component of the future. We didn’t sign him for that. We signed him because he’s a guy we needed for one year as a bridge to getting a more stable, perhaps permanent solution on the field next year. Turning this organizational into a sustainable winner was an enormous task Harris took on and the roster and depth charts were never going to be completely turned over and fixed by now. It’s all still a work in progress, and he’s sticking to his plan and is showing he’s not going to abandon it by, for example, liquidating the top of our system at a certain time to go for it NOW, THIS YEAR. That’s someone else’s style, not his. But until we get to the final version of whatever vision Harris has, probably in two or three years, we still have to field the best team and try to win today. And that’s why we have who we have on the field right now. And ya gotta admit, it’s been working pretty good.

I get what Klondike means, but there is something to this as well. I think fans are conditioned to believe the team should focus on and be great in one aspect of the game, either hitting or pitching, and bludgeoned their way to a championship that way. Me, I had always been focused on the hitting part over the pitching. I always wanted more offense and figured we’d be more successful winning more 8-6 games than eking out more 3-2 games. But I think what this Tigers regime is starting to teach us is that an organizational philosophy that strives competency in key areas—e.g., control the strike zone, be aggressive, be versatile—can lead us to a successful well-balanced attack by identifying the underrated players that exemplify these competencies and execute these objectives on the way to winning. What we don’t know is whether that can lead us to win across an entire 162-games game schedule. We do know it worked great for the final two months last year and it’s working great for the first month this year. It looks odd to be winning with guys who’ve been thought of as scrubinis and washouts being prominent components of the team, versus the veteran All-Star free agents and trade acquisitions from the early 2010s. But I will be eager to see whether this front office has identified a true underutilized resource as being a sustainable conduit to winning.

Michael Wacha is pitching so that means no Ibanez or Malloy. Gleyber sat today so he will probably play tomorrow. Colt will probably shift back to DH. That means Kreidler would sit. I think we play Dingler since Nido played Friday, although AJ might have Nido catch the ace. This one is a 50-50 proposition. And it’s not often you get a chance for a four-game sweep against a division rival, so I would think it’s pedal to the metal time. I think it’s the “A Team” tomorrow.

He's good now, so why not enjoy it while we can?

So, this is another story from the paper this morning, and it's really interesting in that it reveals that Tigers hitting coaching staff has been a bit of an unfocused mess when it comes to trying to help hitters on the team. It's wild that Jace would out them in the paper as being such. Either he's talking out of school, or the org has made some changes to address it. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2025/04/18/in-toledo-detroit-tigers-jace-jung-is-back-swinging-like-he-talks-freely/83001485007 Even as the Tigers stressed his defense was where he needed improvement, Jung said he was getting plenty of things to work on offensively, too ― perhaps even too much. Every hitting coach had some new suggestion, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to please them all. Eventually, Jung decided that he needed to do what works for him, and what made him a first-round pick. It's a strikingly similar situation to Spencer Torkelson, the No. 1 overall pick in 2020 who hit 31 home runs in 2023, was demoted to Toledo in 2024 and lost any guarantee of a roster spot for 2025. The two have talked about Jung's plight. ... Jung, who's never lacked for confidence, still ... just believes he has to do it, in large part, his own way. Too much advice can lead to too many tweaks, which can lead to being too mechanical, which can lead to being less athletic. Hinch has talked about getting Torkelson back to being more athletic in the box. For Jung, he's back to swinging like he talks: Freely. "You're trying to make the team so hard, you're trying to appease every single hitting coach, every single person in that office. I'm trying to appease every hitting guy telling me something different, so I'm trying to make it work and make them happy, because I think that's what's gonna help me make the team," Jung said. "And at the end of the day, you've gotta go out there and perform. You've gotta do what's best for you. You can't be listening to every single person, 'cause if you do that and try to appease too many people, it never really works out. "They're trying to help me. ... It just didn't help. ... It kind of got me thinking a little bit too much." Thinking is a good thing. Overthinking can be a bad thing ― especially when hitting is just half the job.

Here's a bit of good news from this morning's paper: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2025/04/18/twist-of-fate-lands-brenan-hanifee-back-in-detroit-tigers-bullpen/83156131007 Meadows throws The road ahead is still long, but Parker Meadows has initiated, at long last, a throwing program. “It’s a step forward,” Hinch said. “We’ll look forward to seeing more and more positive reviews of his catch play. We needed that to happen before we can get into the next phase of his rehab.” Meadows has been out since early spring with a nerve issue in his upper right arm. He’s been conditioning, doing some defensive work and hitting for a couple of weeks. He saw a nerve specialist in Arizona while the Tigers were on the road and he's been cleared to throw. He made a few soft, short-distance tosses before the game Tuesday. “Cross our fingers that initiating the throwing program can build a foundation and things can start going a little faster for him,” Hinch said. Meadows, on the 60-day IL, isn’t eligible to return until May 22.

Just as he's really settling in after a shaky first two starts, too.

Not me! Scary ninth innings keep me young!