As happens each week from early April through September, Tigers minor-league teams and games were scanned the past six days (Mondays are off-days on the farm) for news and updates.
Some of it was good. Some of it was bleak.
Triple-A Toledo is having a time of it this month: 5-12, and not showing a great deal in the way of players who can help — now, in Detroit anyway — which might include a cooled-off Justyn-Henry Malloy (Reese Olson’s strong Saturday night start was a plus-pitching update), and an evolving Parker Meadows.
Double-A Erie is the best of the lot: Colt Keith, Ty Madden, Dillon Dingler, Wenceel Perez.
Single-A West Michigan: Definite promise in Jace Jung, Roberto Campos, Izaac Pacheco, Danny Serretti, and a handful of pitchers.
Low-A Lakeland: Precious little at the plate. A few arms.
Not shockingly, the Tigers’ farm in 2023 is ranked 25th among 30 MLB teams by MLB Pipeline, 27th by Baseball America, and dead last by The Athletic’s Keith Law.
While these pecking orders are fluid and don’t always tell the whole story, Tigers farm stock has been light since Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter all graduated a year ago.
It adds boldface ink to a view shared often and emphatically: The Tigers will go nowhere until their drafting gets better and their international signings bear more fruit than either source has provided in the past 10, 20, 30, and 40 years.
It’s that simple. Winning baseball in Detroit, contrary to popular lore, is not incumbent on payroll. You spend difference-making money when you have the nucleus of a difference-making roster.
Winning depends, at its root, upon scouting and signing young talent, establishing a core group. The Tigers have been a relative mess at this for more than four decades.
We’ll find out in July and in the ensuing months how much has changed. Scott Harris is the new front-office chief, and among his first moves last fall was overhauling his draft-day generals in the hiring of Rob Metzler (formerly with the Rays) and Mark Conner (of late with the Padres).
The Tigers cannot stick it to the farm any longer with sub-standard drafts. They cannot continue to pull from Latin America prospects who aren’t making a difference in a given year. This latter issue has been a parallel script, notwithstanding trades of Willy Adames and Eugenio Suarez, who together would have been a godsend on the Tigers’ left-side infield had they not been moved during Dave Dombrowski’s era.
Some will say this string of thin Tigers farm crops is a matter of poor “development.” That’s the cozy, catch-all term for implying there has been adequate talent pouring into the Tigers system — it simply hasn’t been nurtured or shaped properly.
It’s fantasy. Every bit of it.
Making a turnaround
Development is key, no question. You must refine to the nth degree players and pitchers and their skill sets. It was a process shabbily treated for too long in the Tigers’ past.
But Detroit, in 2023, is up to code. Lots of sharp staff, lots of NASA-grade technology have been added.
It brings into focus a more basic flaw. You cannot “develop” what you don’t have in baseball substance. You can’t change by some kind of “development” alchemy the nature of what’s there or not there.
Talent is the horse. Development is the cart. Not for a nanosecond can the order be altered.
Drafting and feeding a big-league skills warehouse has been the Tigers’ primary organizational failing since the mid-‘70s, when Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Lance Parrish, Jack Morris, Kirk Gibson, and Dan Petry were all drafted within a few years of one another.
Absent a nucleus of same-aged, high-horsepower personnel, you can forget about winning championships, no matter how much payroll is splashed on free agents who can only complement, not replace, a base cast of farm-produced players.
The Tigers have been doing fine enough on first-round draft picks through the latter years: Matt Manning, Alex Faedo and Casey Mize were either defensible (Manning and Faedo) or consensus picks (Mize). Their bad luck has been tied to what pitchers too often develop: injuries, which is what makes drafting first-round pitchers a risk the Tigers seem to ignore.
On the position side, Greene was a winner in 2019. So, too, was Torkelson in 2020, no matter how impatient fans have been for Torkelson to hit like a No. 1-overall draft prize.
Jung probably will work out, although the scouts who last July pushed for Zach Neto wish they had been heard and not overruled.
Same with those who pleaded in 2021 for Marcelo Mayer to be the choice over Jackson Jobe.
Errors, some of the needless variety, have been made on first-round picks, even if the Tigers have a couple dozen MLB clubs for company. The greater flaw has been Detroit’s later-turn shutouts.
Decade after decade since the ‘70s haul fueled a championship in 1984, the Tigers have missed on picks that should have sustained better teams in Detroit.
Harris, Metzler, and Conner, all of whom got their jobs for a reason, will either reverse some sorry habits here or continue in six weeks with a tradition that needs revamping.
Back to the farm, as it stands in 2023:
It’s not all bad, not at all. Toledo, Erie, and West Michigan as of Sunday were north of .500. There are legit talents at each stop, all being buffed and polished.
Keith, Jung, and Pacheco will hit in the big leagues, as will Malloy, although in Keith’s and Malloy’s cases, where they play, positionally, is uncertain.
The Tigers probably have solid outfielders in Parker Meadows and Roberto Campos. It’s hard to say with certainty how much they might shine, but they could be quality help.
Dingler is showing signs at catcher of becoming the two-way dynamo envisioned.
Likewise, some pitchers here and there (Madden, particularly) are moving closer to Detroit.
But the MLB Draft is six weeks away, and it cannot be said loudly enough how badly the Tigers need to get things right with their domestic talent shopping. Ditto for Latin America, another area of true need. Fortunes need to flip if Harris is to transform baseball in Detroit.
So, with 42 days to go, and with a Tigers’ farm system now suggesting way less than a bumper crop of talent is there for the plucking, it’s natural to think Harris, Metzler, Conner and Co. are setting some kind of organizational record for pre-draft fury.
It seems the Tigers aren’t so much a draft-day tale of woe as they’ve been an annual underachiever.
That legacy needs to change — as of July.
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and retired Detroit News reporter.