2025-2026 Tigers Off Season Thread

[casimir]

12 hours ago, Tenacious D said:

Tigers dont have to worry about catching this offseason—Dingler and Rogers are set. Nido is Toledo, Briceno and Liranzo are in the minors this year.

I think this makes sense.  Depending upon how one looks at a roster, at least the position players, catcher might be the most set going into the offseason.  I'd say C, 1B, and LF are set.  RF and SS are likely stable enough to be set, and maybe CF gets lumped in as well.  Figuring out 2B and 3B is the offseason is the position player priority.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, casimir said:

I think this makes sense.  Depending upon how one looks at a roster, at least the position players, catcher might be the most set going into the offseason.  I'd say C, 1B, and LF are set.  RF and SS are likely stable enough to be set, and maybe CF gets lumped in as well.  Figuring out 2B and 3B is the offseason is the position player priority.

I think CF is pretty questionable - at least from the LH batter's box.  Parker's performance last season is not going to cut it. OTOH, in '24 Vierling had virtually zero platoon split, so if that holds sending him out against RHP doesn't matter. IDK if that is good enough for the Tiger brain trust though - they love them those LHB.

[romad1]

Player advancement is not linear.  Player breakdown is also not linear.   The bad seasons of Sweeny, Vierling and Meadows are all isolated and none should be taken as the definitive example of what will happen in 2026 too each or all.   I'd say that the collapse of Riley Greene in latter 2025 was most alarming.  He needs a reset of his swing/approach/ability to rest his old-man body. 

[gehringer_2]

10 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Player advancement is not linear.  Player breakdown is also not linear.   The bad seasons of Sweeny, Vierling and Meadows are all isolated and none should be taken as the definitive example of what will happen in 2026 too each or all.   I'd say that the collapse of Riley Greene in latter 2025 was most alarming.  He needs a reset of his swing/approach/ability to rest his old-man body. 

No doubt, but the question is which is the norm and which is the outlier. Parker has actually only had one good one-half of a season and he is 26. The reality is there just isn't much of a track record there give any GM confidence to pencil him in for 500 AB and expect production. The easiest way to get better offensively and cut down on men LOB  is attack the weakest links in your line-up where the most marginal improvement is available (and usually at the lowest cost), which means the bottom third of the order.

Edited November 1 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

34 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

No doubt, but the question is which is the norm and which is the outlier. Parker has actually only had one good one-half of a season and he is 26. The reality is there just isn't much of a track record there give any GM confidence to pencil him in for 500 AB and expect production. The easiest way to get better offensively and cut down on men LOB  is attack the weakest links in your line-up where the most marginal improvement is available (and usually at the lowest cost), which means the bottom third of the order.

He and McKinstry are the fastest on the team.  I think he's got to be reconfigured to take advantage of that. 

[gehringer_2]

44 minutes ago, romad1 said:

He and McKinstry are the fastest on the team.  I think he's got to be reconfigured to take advantage of that. 

To me the piece that is missing in the Tiger rhetoric about hitting is covering the holes in your swing. Hinch's whole philosophy (at least as stated ) seems to work in contravention to it. Hinch, always, everywhere stresses 'getting good pitches to hit' but to me that flies in the face of the reality that against good pitchers you are going to have a majority of AB where no 'good' or 'mistake' pitch is available. So you just throw up your hands and give in everytime you face a good pitcher? It's the one thing with Hinch that continually leaves me baffled about the way he describes the game. In Parker's case, his plate coverage is just poor. He is an easy out if you keep the ball down. IMO he doesn't need to work on 'getting good pitches to hit', because he doesn't control that. He needs to work on hitting more strikes where they are thrown so he isn't constantly down 0-2. To me this is exactly what Torkelson had to do at Toledo in '24  - ie. stop worrying about hitting the perfect pitch with the perfect swing and get back to being more 'athletic in the box' (his words), though I think he still falls back into that habit.

Hopefully Harris keeps his hand in on the selection of hitting coaches because I like what I hear from him better  - it is after all just the hitting side of 'controlling the zone'.

Edited November 1 by gehringer_2

[casimir]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think CF is pretty questionable - at least from the LH batter's box.  Parker's performance last season is not going to cut it. OTOH, in '24 Vierling had virtually zero platoon split, so if that holds sending him out against RHP doesn't matter. IDK if that is good enough for the Tiger brain trust though - they love them those LHB.

I agree, the CF performance from the LHH batter's box isn't going to cut it.  I think the defensive performance gives that offensive side some latitude at the beginning of the season and perhaps enough to bridge the gap between now and Max Clark.  I wouldn't be adverse at all to an immediate upgrade in CF, but that's not going to happen via free agency.  I think trades are trickier to figure out from our seats; well, at least as far as getting them done is concerned.

[gehringer_2]

4 minutes ago, casimir said:

I agree, the CF performance from the LHH batter's box isn't going to cut it.  I think the defensive performance gives that offensive side some latitude at the beginning of the season and perhaps enough to bridge the gap between now and Max Clark.  I wouldn't be adverse at all to an immediate upgrade in CF, but that's not going to happen via free agency.  I think trades are trickier to figure out from our seats; well, at least as far as getting them done is concerned.

yeah - this is pretty much where we are. Assuming they are trying to move him along ASAP I was a little surprised they didn't send Max to AFL. Hopefull that was because the judgment was made that he had worked so hard over the year he needed the R&R

Edited November 1 by gehringer_2

[casimir]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

Player advancement is not linear.  Player breakdown is also not linear.   The bad seasons of Sweeny, Vierling and Meadows are all isolated and none should be taken as the definitive example of what will happen in 2026 too each or all.   I'd say that the collapse of Riley Greene in latter 2025 was most alarming.  He needs a reset of his swing/approach/ability to rest his old-man body. 

That's fair with Sweeney.  It'd be great if he had enough offense/defense combined with adequate everyday options at 2B and 3B that would force McKinstry into a true 3 or 4 times a week starter resting guys around the IF and OF.  But his might have sailed if McGonigle is ready (which I'm not sure one way or the other is known).

Vierling was simply never healthy last season.  If he can rebound to what he was in 2024 and handle OF chores vs LHP and occasionally RHP, I'll take it.

As I mentioned above, Meadows has the defensive acumen to buy him a little time with the bat.  But the bat only plays in CF and Clark's time is getting closer.  So, he's got to figure out a way to hit line drives into the field of play rather than fall into 0-2 counts.

Old man Greene needs to level out the toes-to-his-nose bat path.  Assistance in the areas above should help him find a bit more time as DH which might keep his body in a healthier condition.  Its kind of funny, though, we complain about his physical condition, but is this the first season he's not made a trip to the IL?

[casimir]

8 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

yeah - this is pretty much where we are. Assuming they are trying to move him along ASAP I was a little surprised they didn't send Max to AFL. Hopefull that was because the judgment was made that he had worked so hard over the year he needed the R&R

Well, that could be.  Maybe the decision has been made with Clark and not quite so much yet with McGonigle.

[Tiger337]

43 minutes ago, casimir said:

That's fair with Sweeney.  It'd be great if he had enough offense/defense combined with adequate everyday options at 2B and 3B that would force McKinstry into a true 3 or 4 times a week starter resting guys around the IF and OF.  But his might have sailed if McGonigle is ready (which I'm not sure one way or the other is known).

Vierling was simply never healthy last season.  If he can rebound to what he was in 2024 and handle OF chores vs LHP and occasionally RHP, I'll take it.

As I mentioned above, Meadows has the defensive acumen to buy him a little time with the bat.  But the bat only plays in CF and Clark's time is getting closer.  So, he's got to figure out a way to hit line drives into the field of play rather than fall into 0-2 counts.

Old man Greene needs to level out the toes-to-his-nose bat path.  Assistance in the areas above should help him find a bit more time as DH which might keep his body in a healthier condition.  Its kind of funny, though, we complain about his physical condition, but is this the first season he's not made a trip to the IL?

He's too slow to get injured?

[casimir]

58 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

He's too slow to get injured?

Hmmm….  I’m slow.  I usually don’t get injured.  There might be something to this theory.

[Shinzaki]

Greene will be our 1B in a few years

[Tenacious D]

LFG!

[IdahoBert]

I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box, nor am I — to quote the confident protagonist in Sinclair Lewis’s book Babbitt, “a Rockefeller or a James J. Shakespeare“ who nonetheless “knows his own mind” — but I think this team as presently constituted has peaked. 

Unless serious changes are made the magic carpet ride is over, and when I cast my crone-like wandering eye into my gypsy crystal ball I see the beginning of this next season as an extension of what we witnessed in the slide at the end of 2025. 

This club has to do more than just “stay the course“ as the elder President Bush once put it. I’m almost up for erecting a gallows or rolling the guillotine out to home plate during the off-season to ensure that things change.

[romad1]

4 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box, nor am I — to quote the confident protagonist in Sinclair Lewis’s book Babbitt, “a Rockefeller or a James J. Shakespeare“ who nonetheless “knows his own mind” — but I think this team as presently constituted has peaked. 

Unless serious changes are made the magic carpet ride is over, and when I cast my crone-like wandering eye into my gypsy crystal ball I see the beginning of this next season as an extension of what we witnessed in the slide at the end of 2025. 

This club has to do more than just “stay the course“ as the elder President Bush once put it. I’m almost up for erecting a gallows or rolling the guillotine out to home plate during the off-season to ensure that things change.

If we spent $500m each season on our roster we could be the Dodgers. 

[IdahoBert]

6 minutes ago, romad1 said:

If we spent $500m each season on our roster we could be the Dodgers. 

I honestly don’t know what to do. I’m just a fan seeking an angry fix in the starry dynamo of the night.

Maybe “staying the course” will indeed reap dividends that surpass anything our imaginations can manufacture.

But I don’t think the collapse at the end of the season was merely indicative of statistical fluctuations beyond anyone’s control.

There was something seriously wrong that neither the players nor the coaching staff could address. I don’t know if newer and better players or a reshuffled coaching staff or philosophy will be an answer or not.

I just want the world and I want it now. 

[chasfh]

I think the team we see next March 25 will be substantially different than the team we saw this past September 25.

[romad1]

I'm reminded of the Egyptian public's response to their loss in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.  Many were excited at Sadat's turn toward peace and the Camp David summit.  Others, (not you in this metaphor Bert, but perhaps some) thought the "problem" that led to the defeat was a lack of religious ardor.   That led to Egyptian Islamic Jihad being founded with the intent to throw out the dictators who lost the war and bring the country back to where it needed to be spiritually. 

The structural problem is we don't have a level playing field.  If we did we would be able to resign our ace pitcher no problem and maybe add a bat.  Sadat realized that war with Israel was fruitless.

The spiritual problem is not really the issue.  We appear to need to overcome that structural problem somehow.  

Edited Sunday at 01:26 PM by romad1

[gehringer_2]

31 minutes ago, romad1 said:

The spiritual problem is not really the issue.  We appear to need to overcome that structural problem somehow.  

It possible that managing a mentally run down clubhouse is just not one of Hinch's strengths. He is the ultimate 'steady Eddie" guy, but maybe that is not an approach that finds way to recharge a team in the mental doldrums. He could probably also give his regulars more rest, I think Greene and Tork both played too many games. I'm with Sparky on that score.

[chasfh]

The only way teams like the Tigers, or the PIrates or Royals or Rockies for that matter, could effectively compete on an ongoing basis is if MLB were to substantially delocalize baseball as both a fan pursuit and an industry.

This is something the NFL and NBA have done very effectively. The NFL did it through pooling television and licensing revenues among the teams, and even though all teams keep their local money, because practically all 32 teams sell out every week, the local money is pretty close to the same for everybody. This is in large part how the NFL can have the teams in Green Bay (#68 ranked DMA in the country) and Kansas City (#32) be considered among the elites in their sport, while franchises can survive and even thrive in small markets such as Buffalo (#54) and New Orleans (#50)

The NBA has effectively delocalized their sport via the strategy of marketing players over teams, a tactic that by nature has generational appeal (i.e., young fans are more attuned to players as personalities than older fans are). That’s how Oklahoma City (#48) can come to be considered THE elite NBA team for decently long periods of time, as well as the league being able to support franchises in Memphis (#51) and, again, New Orleans (again, #50).

Of course, there are also key structural differences when it comes to baseball versus football and basketball. Football is a sport dominated by a quarterback personality who controls the ball for roughly half the entire game; plus, as a once-a-week event, every NFL game is considered a spectacle worthy of national or super-regional broadcast practically regardless of which teams are playing. Basketball is a sport where one guy out of five can take over and control an entire game or stretch of games or even a whole season, touching the ball and making magic happen practically anytime he wants; plus, the games are also somewhat locally event-like in that there are only one or two games in town in any given week, and since the arenas are relatively small and similarly-sized, there cannot be vast attendance differences among the teams.

Baseball is practically the opposite of all of these things. In terms of players, even a superstar comes to bat only four or maybe five times in a game, and he hardly ever touches the ball on defense (not that you would want many of them to do, anyway). As for pitchers, superstar starters pitch only once every five or more days; and superstar relievers, who already have short shelf lives career-wise, are in the game for only one inning at a time, if they come into the game at all. Plus, while the stadiums are humongous all around the league, the attendance differences are vast between team groups such as the Yankees/Dodgers/Cubs versus the White Sox/Marlins/Rockies. (Baseball even has two teams playing in literal minor league stadiums right now!) Low attendance versus stadium capacity occurs in part because a team will play at home every day for a week and a half several times a year, almost eliminating the possibility that games could be considered must-see events. No amount of marketing can change the effects on the business of any of that.

MLB could go a long way toward fixing this inequity among franchises by, again, delocalizing the money part of the sport by pooling all revenues—national broadcast and maybe even local broadcast, licensing, digital media, perhaps even ticket sales and other gameday sales—into one pool and dividing it evenly among the 30 teams, with perhaps some minor concessions to local cost of living differences (e.g., a touch more to New York teams, a touch less to St. Louis). They could also implement and enforce a narrow band of payroll, marketing, and perhaps even infrastructure spending, requiring a low ceiling and high floor of spending to ensure that none of the 30 teams have a substantial spending advantage over any of the others when it comes to attracting and keeping top players—something the NBA does right now, and very successfully. That would go a long way towards equalizing opportunities to compete among the 30 MLB franchises.

The dirty little secret, of course, is that there is exactly zero appetite for any of this at either the team level or the league level. The league makes much, much, much more money overall when the Big Six teams (Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants) are successful on the field versus when they are floundering; and too many small franchises are only too happy to spend next to nothing on players, fielding 90-plus-loss teams year after year, and pocketing the money from whatever revenue they do get, while franchise valuation continues to skyrocket and gives them attractive parachute options when it’s time to cash in on that.

So, really, the only way fans of franchises outside the Big Six could enjoy seeing their teams rise to the level of contender for multiple seasons at a time is to go through natural cycles where they compete for a few years and then have to reload for a few more years, because they simply can’t generate the revenues needed to compete for decades on end like the Dodgers and Yankees do; or like the Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, or Giants all could if they were simply smarter organizations when it came to the actual on-the-field baseball stuff.

Edited Sunday at 02:17 PM by chasfh

[romad1]

3 minutes ago, chasfh said:

The only way teams like the Tigers, or the PIrates or Royals or Rockies for that matter, could effectively compete on an ongoing basis is if MLB were to substantially delocalizes baseball as both a fan pursuit and an industry.

This is something the NFL and NBA have done very effectively. The NFL did it through pooling television and licensing revenues among the teams, and even though all teams keep their local money, because practically all 32 teams sell out every week, the local money is pretty close to the same for everybody. This is in large part how the NFL can have the teams in Green Bay (#75 ranked DMA in the country) and Kansas City (#32) considered among the elites in football, and franchises can survive and even thrive in Buffalo (#54) and New Orleans (#50)

The NBA has effectively delocalized their sport via the strategy of marketing players over teams, a tactic that by nature has generational appeal (i.e., young fans are more attuned to players as personalities than older fans are). That’s how Oklahoma City (#48) can come to be considered THE elite NBA team right now, plus, the league can support franchises in Memphis (#51) and, again, New Orleans (again, #50).

Of course, there are also key structural differences when it comes baseball versus football and basketball. Football is sport dominated by a quarterback personality who controls the ball for roughly half the entire game; plus, as a once-a-week sport, every game is considered a spectacle worthy of national or super-regional broadcast. Basketball is a sport where one guy out of five can take over and control an entire game, or stretch of games or even a whole season, touching the ball practically anytime he wants; plus, the games are also somewhat locally event-like in that there are only one or two games in town every week, and the arenas are all similarly-sized to be relatively small, so there cannot vast attendance differences among the teams.

Baseball is practically the opposite of all of these things. In terms of players, even a superstar comes to bat only four or maybe five times in a game, and he hardly ever touches the ball on defense (not that you would want many of them to do so. As for pitchers, superstar starters pitch only once every five or more days, and superstar relievers, who already have short shelf lives career-wise, are in the game for only one inning at a time, if they come into the game at all. Plus, while the stadiums are humongous all around the league, the attendance differences are vast between team groups such as the Yankees/Dodgers/Cubs versus the White Sox/Marlins/Rockies. (Baseball even has two teams playing in literal minor league stadiums right now!) Low attendance versus stadium capacity occurs in part because a team will play at home every day for a week and a half several times a year, so there are few games that are considered must-see events. No amount of marketing can change the effects of the business of any of that.

MLB could go a long way toward fixing this inequity among franchises by, again, delocalizing the money part of the sport by pooling all revenues—broadcast local and national, merchandise, perhaps even ticket sales and other gameday sales—into one pool and dividing it evenly among the 30 teams, with perhaps some minor concessions to local cost of living differences. They could also implement and enforce a narrow band of payroll, marketing, and perhaps even infrastructure spending, requiring a low ceiling and high floor to ensure none of the 30 teams have a substantial advantage over any of the other when it comes to attracting and keeping top players—something the NBA does right now, and very successfully. That would go a long way towards equalizing the 30 MLB franchises among one another.

The dirty little secret, of course, is that there is exactly zero appetite for any of this at either the team level or the league level. The league makes much, much more money overall when the Big Six teams (Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants) are successful on the field versus if they are floundering; and too many small franchises are only too happy to spend next to nothing on players, fielding 90-plus-loss teams year after year, and pocketing the money from the revenue they do get, while franchise valuation continues to skyrocket and gives them attractive parachute options when it’s time to cash in on that.

So, really, the only way fans of franchises outside the Big Six could rise to the level of contender for multiple seasons at a time is to go through natural cycles where they compete for a few years and then have to reload for a few more years, because they simply can’t generate the revenues needed to compete for decades on end like the Dodgers and Yankees do; or like the Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, or Giants all could if they were simply smarter organizations when it came to the actual on-the-field baseball stuff.

This is the post of the week. 

[irishpack]

That is an interest

20 hours ago, Shinzaki said:

Greene will be our 1B in a few years

That is an interesting thought.  

[gehringer_2]

3 hours ago, chasfh said:

So, really, the only way fans of franchises outside the Big Six could enjoy seeing their teams rise to the level of contender for multiple seasons at a time is to go through natural cycles where they compete for a few years and then have to reload for a few more years,

So are we all up for bringing Dombrowski back to replace Harris? 😉 

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, irishpack said:

 

That is an interesting thought.  

Well, somebody's 1B.

Edited Sunday at 05:10 PM by gehringer_2