Three games into a season might be too early to
panic, but the alarm bells are ringing loud in the Motor City.
Everything seemed to grow
wrong for the 2022 Detroit Tigers. Star pitchers got hurt, rookies dramatically underperformed
expectations and veterans hit well below their career norms. That led to the dismissal
of general manager Al Avila.
In came Scott Harris to oversee
baseball operations. He remained mostly quiet in the offseason as fans expected
another losing season in the now seven-year rebuild. But 2023 couldn’t be worse
than 2022 when everything went wrong, could it?
Three games into the year, it might
be.
Detroit has managed a meager three runs
in its first three games, all against the Tampa Bay Rays. Two runs came after
Tampa had already jumped out to a big lead in the second game.
The team has five extra-base hits
over three games and is dead-last in the league with a .419 OPS. The
next lowest is the Kansas City Royals, nearly .8 points higher. The low
production might be explained against Cy Young contender Shane McClanahan. The other
two games were against Zach Eflin, with a career 4.47 era, and Jeffrey Springs,
who bounced around as a reliever before landing in Tampa last year.
“It was a bad weekend,” said Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said, according to MLive.com. “We’ve got to do a lot better in a lot of areas if
we want to play competitive baseball.”
That is an understatement. With the
Tigers already struggling offensively in 2023, it appears their historically
bad offense from 2022 wasn’t just an aberration. There’s a long way to go, but early returns indicate that the Tigers will be in the race for the No. 1 overall draft
pick instead of playing important baseball late in the year.
It isn’t going to get easier for the
Tigers, who face the world champion Houston Astros next. The team also
has games with Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, Milwaukee, the New York Mets, St.
Louis and Seattle before mid-May. All played above .500 in 2022 and are
expected to compete in 2023.
The Tigers’ season could quickly
head to the basement before it really gets going. It’s a shame for a city
desperate for a playoff appearance in any sport, as it’s been more than 2,000
days since a Motor City team won a playoff game.
“It just is what it is,” outfielder Matt Vierling said, according to the Detroit Free Press. “There’s some adjustments we’re
making. It’s not the start we wanted to get off to, but it’s better to figure
this out now than for something like this to happen later on in the year.”
