DETROIT — Jim Leyland is one of the preeminent symbols of the last great era of Detroit Tigers baseball, and it was Aug. 3 when the manager’s number was officially retired at Comerica Park.
The gathering and corresponding festivities commemorated all Leyland accomplished in eight seasons as Tigers manager. That day also served as an ode to a different time: Meaningful games in September, packed houses at Comerica, yearly expectations of playing in October.
Soon after the ceremony honoring Leyland on the field ended, the old chain-smoking skipper approached the Tigers dugout. He leaned over the railing and told members of the current team: “Go get a f—ing win.”
Then he was up in the press box. Dark blue polo shirt, speaking in front of a dark blue backdrop. Leyland remains a special assistant to the team, but never in his five-plus decades in baseball has he been accused of being one to sugarcoat.
“I’m a little concerned because they’re struggling right this moment,” Leyland said, “and probably not gonna get in.
“But I think this team, I think they’re gonna get healthy and they’re gonna have a great September. It’s probably gonna be a little late, but I believe that. I don’t talk about this much, because I don’t want to preach patience any more to the fans, and I’m sick of hearing the word ‘patience’ in a lot of different areas, and I understand the fans are, too.
“But one thing I will tell you: If you trust my judgment as a baseball man — and I hope you do — there are a lot of good ingredients for a great cake here. I believe that. I truly believe that.”
On the day Leyland uttered these words, the Tigers had a 52-59 record. Their playoff odds were down to 0.5 percent. They had jettisoned nearly all their veteran capital at the trade deadline. The final two months, it seemed, would be geared toward development.
In the days since, Leyland has been proven right about so much. The Tigers have become the hottest team in the American League. With five games to go in the season, they have not only caught the Minnesota Twins for the AL’s final wild-card spot, but they have also pulled neck-and-neck with the Royals for the league’s second wild card.
Perhaps Leyland was wrong about only one thing.
Turns out it’s not too late.
The kind of comeback the Tigers are attempting has only happened once in MLB history. The 1973 Mets stand as the only team to ever make the playoffs in a non-shortened season after being eight or more games under .500 in August.
The @tigers were 55-63 at the end of play on August 10. They are now 80-73 and a half-game out of a playoff spot.
The only MLB team ever to make the playoffs in a non-shortened season after being 8+ games under .500 in August or later was the Mets in 1973. pic.twitter.com/gOlgnvLQU9
— OptaSTATS (@OptaSTATS) September 19, 2024
By Aug. 10, even after the Tigers earned a victory for Leyland on the day of his ceremony, the Tigers were 55-63. They were 10 games out of a wild-card spot. Their playoff odds dropped to 0.2 percent according to Fangraphs, and vacation plans were being booked.
Since the Wild Card Era began in 1994, never has a team been 10 games out on Aug. 10 and made the playoffs. The Cardinals overcame a nine-game deficit and 1.4 percent playoff odds to do it in 2021. The Twins of 2009 also clawed back from nine games down to make the postseason, beating the Tigers in an epic Game 163 to seal their spot.
But 10 games? Odds of 0.2 percent? Unprecedented.
“In all honesty,” utility man Matt Vierling said, “us being in this position right now, we didn’t really think … no one … I mean, we’re just really grateful and happy and just having fun. A lot of these younger guys up here, we’re starting to believe. This has all just kind of organically came about, and we’ve rolled with it.”
Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, shown here with outfielder Wenceel Perez, has brought his team back from the brink. (Duane Burleson / Getty Images)
The Tigers have staged this remarkable climb back to contention for many reasons, some of them explainable, others still just a tad mysterious.
As Leyland said, the team got healthy. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and Parker Meadows all returned from the injured list at different points in August. Together, the outfield trio has helped a Detroit lineup gain ferocity. Meadows, a second-round pick who once had to repeat High A, has been arguably the team’s most valuable all-around player in this run. Carpenter, a 19th-round draft pick, ranks third behind only Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge in slugging percentage among players with at least 60 plate appearances.
Even with those two and a legitimate All-Star in Greene, the Tigers’ team wRC+ since Aug. 1 is a mere 100, right in line with league average. Standard as the overall production might be, Tigers hitters have performed in outsized fashion when it has mattered most. Whether it was Parker Meadows’ grand slam in San Diego or Jake Rogers’ pinch-hit RBI single Saturday in Baltimore, the Tigers have rated as the American League’s best since Aug. 13 in pressure situations compared to the norm, according to FanGraphs’ “clutch” metric.
“First off, we believe,” manager A.J. Hinch said last week. “We come every day to try to win the game, and we are winning a lot. It’s fun to watch these guys learn and grow and compete their ass off to the end of the game.”
The morning after the trade deadline, Harris and Hinch met for breakfast. There, with the deadline gone and the dust still settling, the Tigers’ brass assembled a plan to cover innings for the month ahead. Perhaps some of it was baseball genius. Chances are there was also a level of baseball duct tape.
But the Tigers determined they could weather the storm despite only two healthy starters — Tarik Skubal and Keider Montero — fronting their rotation for the immediate future. In late July, the Tigers turned to modified bullpen games. They employed openers who would throw one inning and maybe a tad more. Then they would turn to bulk relievers who would throw 4-5 innings on most nights, enough to keep the bullpen healthy and fresh. This practice allowed young call-ups such as Brant Hurter and Ty Madden to avoid unfavorable first-inning matchups. It complicated lineup decisions for rival managers.
“We’ve got some guys in positions that we like to platoon, and we lose that advantage sometimes when you’re in that type of game,” said Scott Servais, who was fired as Mariners manager shortly after the Tigers beat Seattle five times in six August meetings.
Perhaps most surprising, a long list of new faces — Bryan Sammons, Sean Guenther, Brenan Hanifee and more — were called up to the majors and pitched in lights-out fashion. Guenther was a waiver claim who missed the better part of two years with Tommy John surgery. Hanifee was a minor-league free agent who had a 5.17 ERA in Triple A before his promotion. Sammons, who pitched well for 27 ⅓ innings before getting sent down, debuted at age 29.
Others such as Hurter (a seventh-round pick), Madden (a second-round pick who had a 6.98 ERA in the minors) and Beau Brieske (a 27th round pick) seemingly transformed overnight into pitchers who could do no wrong. Now, in aggressive push to clinch a postseason spot, the Tigers have promoted top pitching prospect Jackson Jobe and will use him out of the bullpen in the final days of the season.
“I know there aren’t a lot of people who are familiar with a lot of the names in our bullpen,” Harris said on the Turning The Corner Podcast. “(But) we are. You know, we’ve been working with these guys for a long time.”
Tigers president of baseball ops Scott Harris joined the pod and discussed Jackson Jobe’s promotion.
Full episode: pic.twitter.com/cpjX0nCxm0
— Turning The Corner Podcast (@TurnCornerPod) September 24, 2024
There have been elements of luck, undoubtedly. The Tigers as a staff have the AL’s third lowest strikeout rate over the past two months. Since Aug. 1, the Tigers’ BABIP from opposing hitters is .257, the second lowest in the league. As much as the randomness of batted balls can swing individual games, the leaguewide BABIP has hovered between .290 and .300 for the past 30 years. So unsustainable as Detroit’s batted-ball luck is in theory, there are also reasons the Tigers have been able to, well, sustain it.
Since Aug. 1, Detroit pitchers throw first pitch strikes (65.5 percent), induce groundballs (45.4 percent) and limit hard contact (30.6 percent) at rates at or near the top of the league. Pair that with improved defense behind them, and the Tigers just keep putting up zeroes.
“Are there elements of luck in this?” Harris said. “Of course there are. I think that applies to every team that is successful over a long stretch of time. You need you need favorable bounces. And we certainly have gotten plenty of those over the last six weeks. However, I will say that we’ve done a lot of things really well from a pitching standpoint that are creating our own luck here.”
For most of September, each Tigers victory has seemingly come in thrilling fashion. After their latest, a 2-1 win against the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday, Hinch sat down for his postgame news conference and began by expressing a mix of thrill and relief: Whew.
There is no grand consensus on the moment all this started to turn. Maybe it was that breakfast. Maybe, in the mind of Skubal, it was a series in early July, where the Tigers rebounded from losing five of seven in Anaheim and Minnesota to sweep the Cincinnati Reds.
Asked what kept the Tigers believing even after they fell to nine games under .500 on a dreary July 4 in Minneapolis, Riley Greene shrugged.
“Because we know,” he said. “We’re young. We know that we’re really good baseball players and we have a really good team here. It happens to everyone. Everyone loses baseball games. Really just trying to stay positive through it all.”
Vierling, who joins Kenta Maeda as the only player left on the roster with postseason experience, smirked last week in Kansas City.
“There was no team meeting,” he said. “Obviously we were trying to get to this point, but it’s not like we were putting pressure on ourselves to get there.”
If you are still searching for a grand explanation, though, consider the cosmic power of facial hair. Catcher Jake Rogers is one of the clubhouse’s great characters, a West Texan who now keeps a faux coyote-skin cap hanging in his locker. Last season, he shaved his mustache and recorded his first career two home-run game that night. This season, slumping and watching his team’s season slip further down the drain, Rogers decided to shave his beard. The next night, he drove in seven runs.
“I just resorted to the mustache,” he joked that evening. “I think that helped me a lot today.”
Since the day Rogers turned on the razor, the Tigers are 27-11.
Rogers is the lone remaining member of a 2019 team that lost a brutal 114 games, which makes this mustachioed magic all the more meaningful.
“Going back to 2019 and seeing what we’ve kind of built to now, it’s fun to win, man,” Rogers said. “Everybody in this clubhouse, I want them to get the feeling of being in the hunt and being able to push in September. We’ve got a good enough team to do it.”
Over the past two months, so many moments and images have come to define a team social media is now calling “the Gritty Tigs.” This weekend, it was Trey Sweeney sprinting into shallow left-field, colliding with Riley Greene as he made a fearless, game-saving catch. Tuesday it was Wenceel Pérez, the team’s underestimated spark plug, fouling off nine-two strike pitches over three plate appearances, working two walks and then finally slapping a two-run double down the right-field line. Pérez moved from infield to outfield after a difficult spring training and was not expected to be on this roster. Asked what he would have said if someone told him then he’d be coming through in crucial moments of a playoff chase, Pérez answered: “I would say, ‘Hell no.’”
On 31 occasions this season, Skubal has started games and blossomed from ninth-round pick to bona fide ace. So often saving his best for last, the likely AL Cy Young Award winner with a real shot to win a pitching Triple Crown has ended nine of those outings with strikeouts.
He did it again Tuesday in that 2-1 win against the Rays, when he fired a 97 mph fastball past Christopher Morel for the final out of the seventh on a foggy day in Detroit. Skubal let loose another mighty holler and walked off to a standing ovation.
In the clubhouse after the game, one of the songs on the team’s victory playlist is Asher Roth’s cult anthem, “I Love College.”
The song is fitting for a team that has devoted more at-bats (2,549 entering Monday) to players age 24 or younger than any team in the league.
Once counted out, once left for dead, this young team is now on the verge of completing a historic run.
Said Vierling: “I kind of feel like it’s house money.”
(Top photo of Tarik Skubal: Junfu Han/USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
