Detroit — To Robbie Grossman, who hasn’t been here the last few miserable years, it just didn’t feel right celebrating a losing season. The Tigers, despite all the growth a progress they made, still finished eight games under .500 (77-85) and long out of playoff contention.
So when he was asked about the season on Saturday, he said it would’ve been better if they were popping champagne in the clubhouse.
“Once you get a taste of that, once you pop champagne in the clubhouse and your eyes burn — you chase that for the rest of your career,” he said. “It’s something that if you don’t get to do it, you feel like it’s a failure.
“It’s something that’s really special. I’m looking to be a part of that next year.”
If want to pick one player who was emblematic of the Tigers’ turnaround in 2021, pick Grossman. He signed a two-year, $10 million contract last winter and produced a career-year at age 31.
On a team that had ranked at or near the bottom of the league in walks and chasing pitches out of the strike zone, Grossman was a season-long object lesson in taking professional at-bats.
He walked 98 times, second-most in the American League.
On a team that was trying to establish a culture of aggressive play, Grossman produced just the seventh 20-20 season in club history — 20 homers, 20 stolen bases.
On a team that was trying to learn how to win, he delivered four of the team’s walk-off wins — with a walk, a home run, a sacrifice fly and, believe it, a sacrifice bunt.
If the Tigers learned how to win in 2021, which their 68-61 finish suggests they might have, Grossman taught a lot of the lessons.
A cast of characters provided plenty of memories over 162 games. Here’s a look at some of the best:
The three amigos
Sunday afternoon, three young pitchers walked together from the bullpen area in Guaranteed Rate Field toward the dugout. Their rookies seasons had ended, but they were still out watching bullpens and early work of their mates and presumably busting each other’s chops, as they’d been doing all year.
It was quite a picture.
Of all the things that went right this season, Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal and Matt Manning establishing themselves as cogs in the Tigers rotation has to be near the top of the list.
“The emergence of our young pitching has really earned respect,” manager AJ Hinch said. “When you face us, we’re going to throw a pretty good starting pitcher at you virtually every day. We didn’t always go five, six or seven innings, but still you’d hear talk from other players, coaches and managers about how our rotation was pretty good.”
Mize, 24, made 30 starts and pitched a team-high 150 innings. Despite a rocky start, he maintained a mid-3.0 ERA most of the season and had 12 quality starts.
Skubal, 24, made 29 starts and pitched 149.1 innings. He, too, scuffled early, but he ended up establishing a rookie strikeout record (164).
Manning, 23, didn’t pitch at all in 2020 and thus was allowed to ease into the season, spending the first two-and-half months in Toledo. But he still made 18 starts and pitched 85 innings.
His growth from his first career start in Anaheim to his last in Chicago was astounding. In three of his last seven starts, he limited the Blue Jays to a run over six innings, limited the Brewers to a run and two hits over six innings and then finished his year blanking the White Sox over five innings.
Bursting onto the scene
Talk about memorable first impressions, the Tigers had two of them — Akil Baddoo and Eric Haase.
That Baddoo even made the team was remarkable. A Rule-5 pick in December, he hadn’t played in two years because of Tommy John surgery and had never played above High-A. But he was a revelation in spring training, winning a roster spot handily and putting a couple more experienced outfielders on shaky ground — JaCoby Jones and Christin Stewart, both of whom spent most and all of the season in Triple-A.
The plan was to ease Baddoo in, let him develop slowly. But he hit the first big-league pitch he saw into the left field seats at Comerica Park on April 4. He hit a ninth-inning grand slam the next day. Ripped a walk-off single the next. So much for easing him in.
Although he went through a miserable 5-for-50 stretch, he fought his way out of it and by the end of the year was batting in the leadoff spot and playing almost every day, even against some left-handed pitching. He finished the season with a .259 average, a 113 OPS-plus, with 13 homers, seven triples, 60 runs, 55 RBIs and 18 stolen bases.
Well beyond even the most optimistic expectations.
Haase was so far down the catcher depth chart in spring training, Hinch started giving him reps in left field and first base, to maybe increase his value for other clubs who may have interest. Injuries to Wilson Ramos and Grayson Greiner accelerated his call-up from Triple-A Toledo on May 13.
On May 17, he hit a pair of home runs in a 4-1 win in Seattle. The next night he caught Spencer Turnbull’s no-hitter. Haase hit two more home runs on June 1 in Milwaukee, giving him six in his first 18 at-bats. On July 3, Haase hit two more home runs including an inside-the-parker.
Haase cooled off considerably in the last two months, but he finished the season with 22 home runs and a .745 OPS. The Tigers ended up getting 41 home runs out of the catcher position in 2021 — again, well beyond expectations.
Miggy’s milestones
What a year it was for Miguel Cabrera.
It started with his snowstorm homer on Opening Day and it seemed like every week he was climbing past one black-and-white photo after another on the game’s all-time lists.
His two hits on May 7 pushed him past Babe Ruth on the all-time hits list. On May 17 he became the Venezuelan hit king. He had a pair of two-home run games — May 21 against the Royals (including a grand slam) and two on July 29 against the Orioles. He ripped a walk-off single on July 17 to beat the Twins. On Sept. 20 he registered his 1,800th RBI.
Then, after an exhilarating and agonizing week of homer-less games at Comerica Park, when he was sitting on 499 home runs — huge crowds standing in anticipation, cell phones recording his every at-bat, MLB Network cutting in to bring it live — Cabrera blasted No. 500 in Toronto off Steven Matz, becoming the 28th player in major league history to hit that milestone, and the first to do it wearing a Tigers’ uniform.
Cabrera will enter the 2022 season 13 short of 3,000 hits and three short of 600 doubles. Only Albert Pujols and Hank Aaron have scored the trifecta of 500 homers, 3,000 hits and 600 doubles.
Schoop catches fire
On May 14, Jonathan Schoop was hitting .197. Three months later he was hitting .291 and carrying the Tigers’ offense.
From May 15 through Aug. 11, Schoop slashed .329/.376/.548 with an OPS of .925, 16 home runs and 57 RBIs. He’d finish with a .278 average, 22 homers, team-high 84 RBIs and a 110 OPS-plus. He was rewarded with a two-year, $15 million contract extension on Aug. 7.
He also has the distinction of having the hardest-hit ball by a Tiger in the StatCast era. He ripped a double on July 10 that had an exit velocity off his bat of 117.1 mph.
Terrific Turnbull
His postgame comments were vintage Spencer Turnbull.
“It’s a landmark stamp on my career to this point,” he said in Seattle on May 18, just minutes after finishing off the eighth no-hitter in Tigers’ history by striking out Mitch Haniger on three pitches.” I don’t know how to think of it in historical terms. But personally, I’m just happy to have my name written on something that can never be taken away.”
It was Turnbull’s 50th big-league start. He threw 117 pitches, 77 strikes, and posted nine strikeouts. It was the first no-hitter by a Tigers pitcher since Justin Verlander’s second no-hitter on May 7, 2011.
Two walks were the only scuff marks on his scorecard.
“The whole night I was just, I’m not going to be afraid to make any pitches,” Turnbull said. “I’m not going to second-guess or doubt or have any fear about anything. I am just going to attack and stay in that mindset.
“If they hit one, they hit one. I just wanted to stay aggressive and I didn’t want to beat myself. I wanted them to beat me.”
Didn’t happen on that night. Turnbull’s season, though, would end prematurely. He left his start on June 4 complaining of forearm tightness. He had Tommy John surgery a few weeks later and won’t be back until 2023.
Oddities and firsts
►Harold Castro had a remarkable year for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was his .325 batting average with two outs and runners in scoring position, or his .357 average in high-leverage at-bats, or, for that matter, his team-leading 0.00 ERA in three innings on the mound — redefining super-utility.
Castro has the distinction of delivering walk-off hits against All-Star closer Craig Kimbrel on two different teams. He delivered a walk-off knock to beat him and the Cubs on May 15, then he did it again on Sept. 20 after Kimbrel had been traded to the White Sox. Castro administered two of Kimbrel’s five losses.
►On May 28, reliever Kyle Funkhouser walked Yankees Gio Urshela on three balls. Huh? Yep, that happened. It was a long at-bat and a 1-2 pitch that was up and in and hit off Urshela’s bat somehow got called a ball. Though nobody seemed to know it. There was no review or no challenge. Fortunately, Urshela didn’t score, or as AJ Hinch said, “That could’ve been ugly.”
►There must be something about the rain and the White Sox that brings out the beast in Daz Cameron. He only hit four home runs this season, but two of them came in the ninth inning on rainy nights against the White Sox, both opposite-field shots to right.
On June 11, the Tigers were down 4-2 at Comerica Park when the rains came. After a 49-minute rain delay, one that enraged White Sox manager Tony La Russa and closer Liam Hendriks, Cameron sliced his first big-league home run to tie the game. Then, on the last day of the season, he broke a 2-2 tie with a rain-shot to right field at Guaranteed Rate Field.
►The Tigers did something on June 14 in Kansas City that had never been done before. They used nine pitchers in a nine-inning win. Matthew Boyd, Joe Jimenez, Jason Foley, Alex Lange, Funkhouser, Buck Farmer Jose Cisnero, Michael Fulmer and Daniel Norris all worked in a 10-3 win. The downside to that bit of history, Boyd left the game with left arm discomfort. He would make just two starts the rest of the year.
►The Tigers had another first-ever on July 17 against the Twins. Robbie Grossman led off the game by homering off Charlie Barnes and then four Tigers’ pitchers made that skinny run hold up for a 1-0 win. Never happened before, apparently not even in a seven-inning game, which, as the first game of a doubleheader, this was. Jose Urena, Norris, Funkhouser and Gregory Soto ran a string of zeroes.
►Can you stand one more? On July 27, in a 6-5, 11-inning win at the Target Center in Minneapolis, opposing catchers hit grand slam home runs in the same game for the first time since baseball started keeping track of these things. Twins Mitch Garver hit a grand slam in the first off Tyler Alexander. Tigers’ Eric Haase erased a 5-1 deficit in the top of the ninth with a grand slam off Hansel Robles.
Just for kicks, the two teams played four-hour, nine-inning game the next day, which the Tigers won 17-14, scoring all 17 runs without hitting a home run. That hadn’t happened since 1961.
►Victor Reyes had himself a day on Aug. 5 against the Red Sox. He tripled from both sides of the plate, right-handed and left-handed, bringing back echoes of Dimitri Young, who last did it for the Tigers in 2003.
Reyes had another rare and memorable moment later in August. Pinch-hitting for Zack Short in the bottom of the eighth inning of a 1-1 game with the Blue Jays at Comerica Park, Reyes hit a ball into the triples alley and never stopped running — the first inside-the-park, pinch-hit homer since 1961.
chris.mccosky@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @cmccosky