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More Likely Than Not: The 2025 Detroit Tigers are winning, and winning matters

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Before the start of the 2025 MLB season, I noted the relatively dim projections of the Detroit Tigers’ chances to earn a postseason berth for the second consecutive season. And while I also noted a reason to be skeptical of those dour forecasts, I cannot say I thought things would turn so rosy so quickly.

Entering Opening Day, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA announced the Tigers’ playoff odds at below twenty-percent. FanGraphs’ ZiPS, while less hateful, still came in worse than a coin flip at under forty-four-percent. Then Detroit started playing the games. And then they started winning the games. In fact, they won nineteen games before May 1 for the first time in their 124-year history, and, the next day, they became the first AL team to reach twenty wins on the season.

Some bitter Cleveland fans pointed out that Detroit has notched all of those wins while playing a lot of teams with sub-.500 records. That may be true. I don’t know. I do know that, according to ESPN, the Tigers overall have faced the tenth-toughest opponent schedule to date, while the rest of the AL Central has been coasting on cupcakes:

Regardless, postseason eligibility depends on standings, and standings depend only on wins, and wins are wins, and the Tigers now have twenty wins in a month’s worth of games that even PECOTA and ZiPS can’t ignore. As a result, those playoff odds have skyrocketed. BP is up from 19.9% to 61.1%, and FanGraphs is up from 43.6% to 81.1%!

There inevitably will be fluctuations, but banked wins cannot be unwon, and if relative breakouts from the on-the-ropes gang of Javy Baez, Spencer Torkelson, and Casey Mize can last, so too can this team. At least for right now, this is the fun baseball place.

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Previously
Maximum Tork: How Spencer Torkelson is cranking up his hot start in 2025
Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

Maximum Tork: How Spencer Torkelson is cranking up his hot start in 2025

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Detroit Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson could come crashing down to Earth at any moment. For most people, the only surprising part of that statement would be the suggestion that the former top draft pick’s metaphorical elevation recently has been anywhere other than firmly entrenched beneath Comerica Park’s newly turf-covered keyhole path. But Torkelson has had himself a year in a week, or just about anyway. He clubbed eleven hits in nine games, including two home runs and four doubles, the latest of which walked off a ninth-inning comeback win against the White Sox on Sunday afternoon:

In 2024, Torkelson’s performance across ninety-two games for the Tigers was just above replacement value, contributing 0.1 fWAR. He’s already has bested that and more in a tenth of the time, pacing all Detroit batters (alongside Riley Greene) in 2025 with 0.6 fWAR.

How is the former confirmed bust doing this? To my amateur eye, the key thing looks like pull rate. He isn’t swinging faster or generating more hard contact than before, nor has he increased his launch angle; in fact, all of those things are ticking down in 2025. Instead of trying to spread his contact to all fields, though, Torkelson is absolutely cranking on everything on which he can get his bat to his pull (power) side. Not everybody can be Miguel Cabrera, obviously, and sometimes it can help to stop pretending otherwise.

Probably associated with that, Torkelson also appears to have made a conscious decision to alter his stance, moving back in the batters box and farther away from the plate while widening the angle of his feet. This, one assumes, allows him more time to see balls and turn on the meaty ones.

No, Torkelson is not going to maintain a .474 BABIP over the course of an entire season. But if he says good enough to justify his appearance in the lineup over the course of an entire season, that will be a win. And if he continues to deliver in some more key moments throughout the rest of the season, that’s icing on the cake and, even better, a real reason to rethink Torkelson’s career trajectory.

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Previously
Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

Everyone’s Going to be Worse: 2024 Detroit Tigers Season Preview Notes

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Many have published their previews of the 2024 Detroit Tigers season. What follows are my notes from those previews, primarily the corresponding Baseball Prospectus annual chapter and its PECOTA projections, along with my own annotations and recent news updates.

Everyone’s Going to be Worse

Only the really hopeless Athletics and White Sox scored fewer runs than the Tigers in 2023. The reason the Tigers’ offensive outlook today isn’t hopeless (as any good Detroit fan will tell you too many times) is because Spencer Torkelson had a really good second half last season, and that’s going to be his new baseline for his major-league career, which really will begin this year. His 121 wRC+ and a homer every 16.2 plate appearances– his second half– sounds a lot more like a good first baseman than a 95 wRC+ and a homer every 31.3 plate appearances– his first half. Torkelson is the case study that proves Tigers fans’ optimism for 2024 is grounded in reality: all good trends will be banked as established new normals, while any bad trends have reasonable explanations and therefore safely may and should be ignored.

The cold baseball computer isn’t buying the Midwestern thaw. PECOTA projects every Tigers hitter listed in the team’s BP annual chapter to be worse in 2024 than he was in 2023. Can that sentence really be true? I don’t know whether it can but it is. Sure, some of these guys are Not Ready For Primetime Players, minors types whose prospect statuses merit their mention but, at least for this year, understandably don’t project as majors talent. But it really is bad news for all of the alleged major-league talent.

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