Toss playoffs out the window, but Detroit Tigers have great chance to make up ground

Detroit Free Press

The Detroit Tigers have an opportunity heading into the MLB All-Star break.

The postseason goal is all but officially out of reach, with a month until the Aug. 2 trade deadline. (To reach 90 wins, the Tigers must win 70% of their remaining 87 games — or 61.) The offense is historically bad, averaging 2.97 runs per game and on pace to score fewer than 500 runs.

But the Tigers finish the first half of the season with 19 games in 17 days against three teams in the American League Central: Cleveland Guardians (eight games), Kansas City Royals (seven games) and Chicago White Sox (four games).

Detroit is already 0-1 entering Saturday.

“Every game is extremely important,” catcher Tucker Barnhart said Friday. “We haven’t started the way we’d like, but when you play so many division games in a row, if we want to get back into it, we’re going to have to win a lot of these games. If we want to do anything at all post-All-Star break, these games are extremely important.”

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The Tigers (29-46 entering Saturday) are in the midst of a three-game series with the Royals at Comerica Park, losing 3-1 in Friday’s opener and finishing 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position. The Royals, the worst team in the AL Central, are one game behind the Tigers, and the teams are the second- and third-worst in the AL.

The new Tigers goal, since snapping the franchise’s playoff drought isn’t happening, should be to avoid the AL Central cellar. The Tigers are 11-15 against their division. This stretch against the Royals, Guardians and White Sox serves as a chance to build momentum toward a strong finish in 2022.

“At the start of the season, we put emphasis on in-division games, whether it’s early April or September,” reliever Michael Fulmer said Friday. “If we have a winning record against in-division teams, we’re going to the playoffs. It’s as simple as that, most of the time.”

Entering Friday, the Tigers played average baseball over the past 10 games. They had a 5-5 record during this stretch, hitting 11 home runs and averaging 5.3 runs per game.

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Rookie center fielder Riley Greene sparked the improvement June 18 with his MLB debut. The 21-year-old is hitting .282 (11-for-39) with nine walks and seven strikeouts in 11 games, but he only has one extra-base hit.

A meeting helped shortstop Javier Báez — batting .308 with four homers in his past 13 games — finally find his groove at the plate, after he posted a miserable 46 wRC+ over his first 50 games. Backup catcher Eric Haase has a .296 batting average with three homers over his past nine games (six starts).

Still, the Tigers aren’t winning enough.

“We’ve got better pieces in here this year than we did last year,” Fulmer said. “Expectations were a lot higher, from us included, and they should be because we’ve got a team to compete, and we should compete.

“With this stretch of games right here, it’s going to tell us a lot. We’re not out of it. We’re happy with the way we’ve been playing better, but we got to keep it up, especially through these 19 games.”

Over the same 10-game span, from June 18-29, the starting rotation logged a 6.27 ERA and averaged less than five innings per game. Before then, the group had a 4.63 ERA in the first 64 games. Left-hander Tarik Skubal, who had a 2.33 ERA in his first 11 starts, has allowed 18 runs across 18⅓ innings in his past four starts, with 11 walks and 19 strikeouts.

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In Friday’s loss, the offense was to blame.

The Tigers stranded at least one runner in scoring position with no outs in the fourth, sixth and seventh innings. Runners were stranded on the bases in the eighth and ninth innings, too.

In the fourth and sixth innings, the same three batters — Nos. 3-5 in manager A.J. Hinch’s lineup — were responsible for the shortcomings: Báez, Miguel Cabrera and Harold Castro.

“We couldn’t keep the ball off the ground at the beginning of the game, and then at the end, we just didn’t get the big hit,” Hinch said Friday of his offense against Royals starter Brad Keller. “I think his outing changes if we can come up with one or two big hits.”

Here’s a look at the AL Central standings, entering Saturday: Minnesota Twins (44-36), Guardians (39-34), White Sox (36-39), Tigers (29-46) and Royals (28-47). The Tigers are 12½ games back of first place.

Barnhart, for one, isn’t oblivious to the Tigers’ reality.

And he understands the importance of this 19-game stretch.

“We talk about winning one game at a time, which you have to,” Barnhart said. “You have to be focused on that day and figure out tomorrow when it gets here. But I look at the schedule we play, the upcoming games and the standings. We are where we are. In order to get out from where we are, we have to beat a lot of division teams, beat them a lot. It’s just the reality of the situation.”

Contact Evan Petzold at epetzold@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanPetzoldRead more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.

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