2026 DETROIT TIGERS REGULAR SEASON THREAD

[NorthWoods]

6 hours ago, 4hzglory said:

Rookie eligibility isn’t what is currently holding him down.  His lack of tearing up triple A is. He has to show he can come out of his May long slump (which I believe he will) before it’s worth even considering bringing him up.  
 

At this point they’d be bringing him up, just to bring him up, while he’s been in a relative slump for a month.  That’s setting him up for failure.

I agree for now, I was commenting on the hypothetical.

[chasfh]

8 hours ago, NorthWoods said:

I understand the logic of it, but if I were Clark and feeling that was holding me down I'd hate it.  

If he’s as levelheaded a kid as the beat writers are always writing he is, he gets it.

[NorthWoods]

54 minutes ago, chasfh said:

If he’s as levelheaded a kid as the beat writers are always writing he is, he gets it.

I'm sure he understands it, of course that doesn't mean he has to love it.   He'll probably get a cuppa at the end of the year either way.

[chasfh]

20 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

I'm sure he understands it, of course that doesn't mean he has to love it.   He'll probably get a cuppa at the end of the year either way.

I agree with you that he doesn't love it. Just saying a levelheaded kid would get that half a season of .262/ .341/.376 at Toledo, good for 95 wRC+, ain't gonna punch your ticket to the Show. At least not yet. 

[Shelton]

It’s obviously true that the timing of any call-up has downstream effects on service time and related benefits. 
 

I think it’s fine to take those into consideration when it means a difference of a couple weeks. But I don’t agree that if you have a valid reason to make a move that you delay that move by months because of it. 
 

Whether or not Clark (or Anderson) is both ready for a promotion and can help the team is certainly debatable. But in my view if you conclude that he could be called up and he could help the team, I think it’s wrong to leave him in Toledo. 
 

We just had one of the worst months of baseball that we have ever seen, and we played the entire month without a CF. I’m not necessarily saying max clark would have helped us win more game in May. But I don’t think he would have hurt us either, and now the season is basically over.

Sometimes call up timing is clear and easy like with Kevin this year. But that didn’t stop at least a few in the media from actually suggesting that he not be called up until August. That was crazy then and it is obviously hilarious to think about now. 
 

If it were August 2 instead of June 2 and we were in the same state as we are currently, then it would be a much easier call to make. 

[gehringer_2]

33 minutes ago, Shelton said:

We just had one of the worst months of baseball that we have ever seen, and we played the entire month without a CF. I’m not necessarily saying max clark would have helped us win more game in May. But I don’t think he would have hurt us either, and now the season is basically over.

It's one thing not to panic, it's another to let the season go down the drain without trying *anything*

I guess like frogs in warming water, we became inured to the inaction in the face of the continued losing, but if one steps back and considers the whole month, is it in any way acceptable that a POBO can't come up with is a single idea/move/trade/call-up to try and break his team out of an epic tailspin before they got so hopelessly behind that their probability of getting back into the race is effectively zero (as per Chasfh's well appreciated but dismal research result)? That after 3 1/2 years of his work to build the system it had no assets he could leverage to help his MLB team? That his league wide scouting couldn't identify one obtainable player with a reasonable chance of helping?

Whatever confidence I ever had that  Harris is anything special has pretty much evaporated. 

Edited yesterday at 01:38 PM by gehringer_2

[Shelton]

6 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's one thing not to panic, it's another to let the season go down the drain without trying *anything*

I guess like frogs in warming water, we became inured to the inaction in the face of the continued losing, but if one steps back and considers the whole month, is it in any way acceptable that a POBO can't come up with is a single idea/move/trade/call-up to try and break his team out of an epic tailspin before they got so hopelessly behind that their probability of getting back into the race is effectively zero (as per Chasfh's well appreciated but dismal research result)? That after 3 1/2 years of his work to build the system it had no assets he could leverage to help his MLB team? That his league wide scouting couldn't identify one obtainable player with a reasonable chance of helping?

Whatever confidence I ever had that  Harris is anything special has pretty much evaporated. 

Yes, and as Chas pointed out recently, the guys in the locker room are indeed human and I believe there can definitely be inertial confidence / depression when things start moving in a certain direction. They can say all the right things to the media in the locker room about “next man up” or “we come back tomorrow and try to win a baseball game”, but it has to be frustrating to see that your reserves are the likes of Zack short and gage workman. These guys know. It’s not a secret which guys have high ceilings and which guys are placeholders. 
 

It’s fine to play roster games for a week or so, but when the roster games result in having a month worse than 2003 (I think last I checked their offense in May was worse than the 2003 tigers), I doubt it is going to be received well. 

[chasfh]

First of all, I reject the premise often repeated by some fans that Scott Harris is merely sitting on his hands and doing nothing, implication being that he as a major league PBO does not care about the losing as long as the calendar continues to turn on whatever his plan is. That doesn't pass any reasonable smell test.

But mainly, I have to believe that there is only so much Harris can do anyway, especially in the middle of a season. He can't just go out and pick up an average major league starter, let alone a team-changing All-Star, off the free agent pile or waiver wire whenever he wants. And he can't simply acquire one in trade in which he is giving up nothing of any value to us. To believe as much is just magical thinking.

Scott Harris fielded this particular iterational team reasonably expecting that there would be offensive improvement in those guys with ceilings, and hoping that most of the remainder would hold some of their gains from last year. What he didn't do was to stockpile an entire major-league-starting-level replacement team in reserve if/when his first team players start populating the injured list like rabbits, and he didn't do that because practically nobody does that, because that takes resources almost no team has. So I believe he can hardly be fairly criticized for that.

It's hard (or perhaps more like inconvenient) to remember now, but before guys started going down to injury, our offense was doing a pretty good job, as Jay Jaffe pointed out on FanGraphs:

And this is with the team fielded this year by Scott Harris. 

I get that this may be an unwelcome reminder to those fans who demand dramatic (or drastic) action NOW. But that kind of action may not even be necessary even with this 40-man roster, especially as guys start coming back off the list to help out. But maybe all we have to do at this point is wait for the guys to come back and get our roster a lot closer to what it was always supposed to be this year. And also, imagine if Scott Harris takes the action those fans want, starts replacing players and field management willy nilly, and fails because the new players, coaches, and manager are all worse. Are those fans going to be understanding of that and conclude, well, we're still losing, but at least he tried, so I'm back on board with him?

 

[Shelton]

My list of Scott Harris complaints is very short. I was very happy with the roster exiting spring training. I personally didn’t see the need for McKinstry, but that was about it. 
 

My in-season complaint is that I think he should have just called up max clark to play CF and bat 9th when Javy went down. I don’t care that he he had gone cold following his hot start. The cold streak was as limited a sample as the hot streak. And I do not agree with any sort of rigid rule for PAs at a certain level. I think development can continue at the major league level similar to AAA. The issue is whether or not that development will hurt or hinder the major league team’s performance, but we needed a CF and he was the AAA CF. And he was also quite likely to end up on the roster at some point this season.

I of course understand that the first and easiest move is to call up a guy like Lee or Jung that is already on the roster. But that only goes so far and once more guys start dropping like flies, for example the point where Kerry got hurt, it’s time to break that emergency glass a take a chance. Instead we got gage workman added to the 40 because he had a hot streak. 
 

We still continue to be without a CF. We still continue to carry both Short and McKinstry to backup SS. 
 

I know Clark is not forcing the issue. If he was that would a completely different complaint. I think he could hold his own at the major league level right now, and there is nothing stopping them from sending him back down if he doesn’t. 

[Tiger337]

I don't have any major specific complaints about Harris, although it's fun to poke his ardent supporters  I liked the roster going into the season and liked their chances of making post-season. May was a disaster which I think was due primarily to a large number of injuries at the same time and then things just snowballed.  I don't think there was much Harris could have done.  I suppose rolling the dice on Clark was one thing, but I doubt it would have added many wins.  If he did poorly, would it have slowed down his development?  I don't really know.  

[chasfh]

4 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I don't have any major specific complaints about Harris, although it's fun to poke his ardent supporters 

I acknowledge that you mean me, specifically, although all I've wanted to do since he got here is give the guy the chance to spool out his plan, which I've liked from the beginning, and see whether it works, and he hasn't gotten his full chance to do that yet. If it makes me an "ardent supporter" for not jumping on the bandwagon to call him and A.J. a complete failure for the last month's worth of baseball, then I guess I'll have to wear that.

[Tiger337]

4 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I acknowledge that you mean me, specifically, although all I've wanted to do since he got here is give the guy the chance to spool out his plan, which I've liked from the beginning, and see whether it works, and he hasn't gotten his full chance to do that yet. If it makes me an "ardent supporter" for not jumping on the bandwagon to call him and A.J. a complete failure for the last month's worth of baseball, then I guess I'll have to wear that.

All the Harris slappys are among my favorite posters.  It's not just you.  

Edited 8 hours ago by Tiger337

[chasfh]

33 minutes ago, Shelton said:

My list of Scott Harris complaints is very short. I was very happy with the roster exiting spring training. I personally didn’t see the need for McKinstry, but that was about it. 
 

My in-season complaint is that I think he should have just called up max clark to play CF and bat 9th when Javy went down. I don’t care that he he had gone cold following his hot start. The cold streak was as limited a sample as the hot streak. And I do not agree with any sort of rigid rule for PAs at a certain level. I think development can continue at the major league level similar to AAA. The issue is whether or not that development will hurt or hinder the major league team’s performance, but we needed a CF and he was the AAA CF. And he was also quite likely to end up on the roster at some point this season.

I of course understand that the first and easiest move is to call up a guy like Lee or Jung that is already on the roster. But that only goes so far and once more guys start dropping like flies, for example the point where Kerry got hurt, it’s time to break that emergency glass a take a chance. Instead we got gage workman added to the 40 because he had a hot streak. 
 

We still continue to be without a CF. We still continue to carry both Short and McKinstry to backup SS. 
 

I know Clark is not forcing the issue. If he was that would a completely different complaint. I think he could hold his own at the major league level right now, and there is nothing stopping them from sending him back down if he doesn’t. 

I suspect the reason Max is not in Detroit is that he's simply not ready. There might be more to it than just his AAA wRC+ which trumps our short-tern need to lift us out of contention for last place right now whatever the cost. Even if our primary and secondary CFs are out, the backup backup CF options we are putting out there are probably considered to be still better options at the big league level than Max is today, June 3, 2026.

[CMRivdogs]

To paraphrase an old Danny Murtaugh quote on fans and players and apply it to GMs

Quote

“I’d certainly like to have the GM who never misses on a draft pick, signs every free agent at the perfect price, trades away every player just before he declines, and keeps the payroll under budget while winning the pennant every year. The only trouble is getting him to come down out of the stands.”

 

[monkeytargets39]

My only complaint entering the season was the bullpen.  I expected good performance out of Vest/Finnegan/Jansen, and was hopeful they had found something good with Anderson…..but the rest of the pen seemed like a soft underbelly waiting to be cut open.  

[oblong]

Make no mistake, there is a decent bloc of Tiger "fans" who enjoyed what they saw in May because for some reason they have a hatred of Scott Harris... I see it as a combination of his youth and intelligence.  Many are not cut out to be baseball fans because it's every day and requires some balance.  You can't over react to every play and every game but talk radio and podcasters and twitter folks need something to talk about.

[SoCalTiger]

Has Verling been that bad of a centerfielder apart from his one bonehead play ? Has centerfield play been the main cause of May's disaster ? Serous question what do you folks think ?

[gehringer_2]

18 minutes ago, SoCalTiger said:

Has Verling been that bad of a centerfielder apart from his one bonehead play ? Has centerfield play been the main cause of May's disaster ? Serous question what do you folks think ?

CF was not the major source of their problem- if anything IF D was as bad or worse, it was poor run production and poor pitching = mostly relief. They gave up 19 more runs in may than april, but scored 37 less.(one game difference in total games I'm ignoring)  The increase in runs against is both pitching and defense - say you split xs runs allowed 50/50 between fielding and pitching then ~46 of the 56 run differential was still in hitting or pitching, mostly hitting.

Edited 6 hours ago by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

Make no mistake, there is a decent bloc of Tiger "fans" who enjoyed what they saw in May because for some reason they have a hatred of Scott Harris... I see it as a combination of his youth and intelligence.  Many are not cut out to be baseball fans because it's every day and requires some balance.  You can't over react to every play and every game but talk radio and podcasters and twitter folks need something to talk about.

I think for a lot of the fans you describe, there's not just a little anti-intellecualism going on with that, and to your point, I also believe it's driven by his youth and intelligence, but also, his slight build and soft face that do not resemble those of most major league ballplayers. If he were an ex-ballplayer in the exact same position saying and doing the exact same things in the exact same way, he'd be getting a far wider berth from those fans you describe. 

Edited 6 hours ago by chasfh

[NorthWoods]

2 hours ago, monkeytargets39 said:

My only complaint entering the season was the bullpen.  I expected good performance out of Vest/Finnegan/Jansen, and was hopeful they had found something good with Anderson…..but the rest of the pen seemed like a soft underbelly waiting to be cut open.  

I'll be contrary here.   I expected exactly what we've gotten from Jansen based on Tigers history.   Old closers come here to die.

[NorthWoods]

The overarching thing with Harris is that people simply love to have something to bitch about.

[monkeytargets39]

24 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

I'll be contrary here.   I expected exactly what we've gotten from Jansen based on Tigers history.   Old closers come here to die.

You’re probably right and I was a bit naive.

 

i was more focused on how we went all offseason and then all of spring training and then just added De Jesus and Seabold right at the end and put them directly in the MLB bullpen.  Was the plan always just to hope you can find some folks at the last minute?  

[Edman85]

38 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

The overarching thing with Harris is that people simply love to have something to bitch about.

And social media algorithms amplify that.. 

[gehringer_2]

4 hours ago, NorthWoods said:

The overarching thing with Harris is that people simply love to have something to bitch about.

LOL - a team that has a total disaster month in each of three consecutive seasons is not a team where you have to search very hard for something to bitch about. 🙄

Edited 1 hour ago by gehringer_2

[NorthWoods]

14 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

LOL - a team that has a total disaster month in each of three consecutive seasons is not a team where you have to search very hard for something to bitch about. 🙄

Agreed.   But the counterpoint would be that the Harris carping has been going on for long before the month of May.   Even as we were winning and making the post season in the last 2 years it was very nearly a constant.