Although I don’t have much data to base this assumption on, I always got the feeling the Tigers had an unsystematic way of developing players.
The broadcasting staff at least gives this impression now where they talk about something akin to a “Tigers Way“ of developing players from the earliest stages up to the major league level, which by inference means they didn’t used to do it this way, that there wasn’t really a tiger’s way.
They talk about how the new guys who have come up, have risen through the system and been developed in the same manner so I get the impression that the system in the past used to be kind of scattershot.