We are just days away from the return of Detroit Tigers (ir)regular-season baseball, and the COVID altered campaign will undoubtedly look unlike anything we’ve seen before. A 60-game sprint to the finish line is what some are calling it. I think the 100-meter hurdles sounds more appropriate, given the fact that the Coronavirus – the undisputed champion of 2020 – is sure to take out many a ballplayer along the way as the rest of the league soldiers on.

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In an alternate universe…

…that featured a normal 162-game season it would have been easy to set expectations for the 2020 Detroit Tigers. This franchise is still in rebuild mode, so the logical path back to relevance would have involved at least one more year of development for the young guns and bats in the minors, while the big-league club racked up the losses – they are coming off the second-worst season in franchise history – en route to another premium draft slot in 2021.

They could have called up some of their highly-touted prospects in September just to give fans a taste of the future, but make no mistake, it would have been a long and hard (hehe) summer in the motor city. You’d have been better suited turning on Erie and Toledo notifications (is that a thing?) on your mobile device because the important baseball would be taking place in the minors.

Hey, normal 162-game season, Erie, and Toledo…’Rona asked me to pass along a message…

That’s right, COVID-19 – with an assist from an embarrassing negotiation process between MLB and the Players Association – has claimed over 100 regular-season games in 2020 while eradicating minor-league baseball entirely. As a result, most of the Tigers’ best prospects will be a part of their 60-man player pool – the list of players eligible to participate in major-league games in 2020.

The only games being played this season will be at the big-league level. Roughly half of the Tigers’ player pool will be on the active roster at any given time. The rest of the crew will be practicing at the Tigers’ alternate training site (ATS) and waiting for a call-up, but mostly just hanging out, playing Nintendo.

So, how do these changes (and the dizzying array of other season details) affect how Tigers fans should approach this season? There are a lot of things to consider, so I’ll go in order of how my thought process has evolved since the announcement of the 60-game season back on June 23rd.

Is prioritizing next year’s draft and rooting for the competitive loss – an art form in the world of Detroit sports – the way to go in 2020? Can this team actually make some noise in an abbreviated season? Let’s explore.

Anything can happen in a 60-game season

This is likely the first narrative you heard being spun after the short season was announced in an effort to drum up some Tigers optimism, and it makes sense at surface level. The standings are going to be much more condensed with 102 fewer games for the best teams to separate themselves from the pack. A slow start could be disastrous for a contender like the Dodgers or Yankees, while a mediocre team that has a hot stretch and treads water the rest of the way can fluke their way to the postseason with relative ease.

For maximum effect, Jayson Stark recently came off the top rope and kicked off his “Anything can happen…” article with a section titled “The Tigers could win the World Series!”. Yes, this is a real thought that was typed out and published by a respected baseball journalist. The theory was quickly debunked, but hey, at least it wasn’t so crazy that it actually required a debunking.

In case you’ve forgotten (or the memories are repressed) Detroit went 47-114 and was the worst team in baseball last season. By kind of a lot. That being said, the Tigers should be moderately-to-significantly better than they were a year ago. Some solid-yet-unspectacular free agent signings in 1B C.J. Cron, 2B Jonathan Schoop, and C Austin Romine (among others) should be much more valuable than the collection of dead bodies they signed in 2019 that gave them a net negative return-on-investment (Matt Moore, Tyson Ross, Jordy Mercer, Josh Harrison – $15.5 million total).

An MLB.com cellar-dweller piece ranked Detroit third out of the six last-place teams heading into 2020, so emerging from the league basement wouldn’t be a shock. But making the jump to mediocrity following a season where they won fewer than 30% of their games will be a tall order.

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Let’s put the World Series fantasies back in the impossible file and focus on a slightly more attainable dream: Is a 60-game season short enough for a team like the Tigers to make a worst-to-playoffs turnaround? Sadly, it appears the answer is no.

The Athletic’s Eno Sarris did a deep dive into season legitimacy as it relates to length and found that 60 games is a key benchmark. You tend to learn how good a team truly is by game 60 before the curve starts to flatten (see what I did there?). Of course, the 60-game season we are about to embark on has no precedent, so the data set isn’t apples-to-apples. Also, the 2019 World Series Champion Washington Nationals – who famously went 27-33 through their first 60 games last season – would like a word with all those fancy graphs and charts Mr. Sarris provided. But as it relates to the Tigers, Sarris’ findings, along with the fact that 27-33 would be considered overachieving by even the kindest of season projections, mean we can probably pump the brakes on the “anything can happen” narrative.

But wait…are the Tigers really that bad?

Yes, absolutely. At least, they were in 2019. However, they weren’t quite as bad as I had originally remembered. Particularly the pitching staff.

As a unit, Tigers pitchers collectively suffered the biggest gap between their FIP (fielding independent pitching) and their actual ERA last season. Matt Boyd, Spencer Turnbull, and especially (gulp) Jordan Zimmerman – all returning members of the rotation – were particularly unlucky last season. Zimmerman was an automatic loss in 2019 (1-13), but was absolutely brutalized by lady luck (.339 BABIP). An ERA around 5.00, still plenty bad but more accurately reflecting his performance than the 6.91(!) he actually logged, likely flips a few of his losses to wins or NDs.

Ready for a fun fact? Jordan Zimmerman’s WAR in 2019 was actually 1.3, somehow higher than the one game he actually won. This was better than that of Dakota Hudson (1.0), who garnered NL Rookie of the Year consideration while winning 16 games for the Cardinals on the back of a 3.35 ERA last season. Not sure if this tells us more about Zimmerman or Hudson. Maybe it just means we need to fly over a volcano and drop WAR inside, never to be heard from again. Numbers are for nerds.

This concludes the defending Jordan Zimmerman portion of this post, which I did not anticipate when I started writing. Someone needs to come check on me, pronto. I’m not well.

As for the offense…no. Not gonna let them off the hook. They were a bunch of hacks who couldn’t hack. It is utterly insane that the league-wide home run record was shattered last season yet somehow the Tigers team leader only had 15 dingers. And that guy – Brandon Dixon – isn’t even a lock to make the opening day roster.

The reason for optimism here is more hopeful than evidence-based. At some point, a random Tigers hitter is bound to have a breakout major-league-average type season. I’m not talking about the Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson level prospects – players we project to be franchise cornerstones at some point – but rather guys like Christin Stewert and Jeimer Candelario. It seems like we are overlooking players of this ilk just because we are future-focused and looking toward the best prospects who are still in the incubator. But it really isn’t that hard to stumble into a 20-homer season – 129 players did so in 2019.

That last part wasn’t hyperbolical or sarcastic. One hundred and twenty nine players had a 20 home run season in 2019, and that list included zero Detroit Tigers.

Remember when Brandon Inge hit 27 homers multiple times in the 2000’s, while mostly batting 9th and being one of the most polarizing players of that era of Tiger baseball?

Now imagine Brandon Inge being your best offensive weapon.

Want to learn more about Torkelson and the rest of the Tigers’ promising 2020 draft class? Click here for a “no grades allowed” draft recap

Speaking of the kids…

Here is where things start to pivot for me in terms of what I want 2020 to look like. There is a chance we will get to see prospects like 2018 1st overall pick Casey Mize much sooner than we would if this were a normal season. This certainly isn’t the way GM Al Avila drew it up, but is it worth the risk of stunting a kid’s development by holding him out of game action purely because it doesn’t fit your original rebuild timeline?

There is only so much players the caliber of Mize will be able to learn by working out and playing intra-squad games at the ATS. Here are some thoughts from Mize himself on this topic. From The Athletic:

“It’d be really tough, honestly,” Mize said of not pitching in games this year. “I think there’s gonna be a ton of value in facing hitters and trying to be as competitive as possible this season. I think we can get better if that’s not a possibility. It’s just gonna be a little tougher, in all honesty. In a perfect scenario, I would love to go compete against big-league hitters and try to get as much experience as I can this season to prepare to make a run in 2021.”

If Mize is saying things like this publicly than a) He’s probably not the only prospect that feels this way, and b) I’m not messing with the physical or psychological development of my future stars if I am the Tigers’ brass.

If the kids are playing early and often, I’d have a hard time rooting for the team to lose, despite viewing the postseason as a pipe dream and knowing that losing is what’s best for the accumulation of future draft assets. If we see Mize, Matt Manning, or Tarik Skubal on the mound in 2020, here’s hoping a W goes next to their name in the box score.

What will the format of the 2021 draft be?

The idea of extended playing time for the top prospects began to sway me towards winning in 2020. But the uncertainty behind what the 2021 draft will even look like has me fully on board.

I’ll admit I hadn’t even considered an altered format for next year’s draft, considering we are only a month removed from the 2020 edition. But the fine folks at Totally Tigers (they do good work, check ’em out) hinted at a potential lottery system being adopted, and while nothing has been announced, it would make sense given the circumstances. The usual format of slotting the draft in inverse order of the standings after an abbreviated season and a growing number of players opting to sit out rather than play doesn’t seem to be optimal.

A draft lottery system is the enemy of awful teams. Detroit is home to many awful teams. Therefore, draft lotteries are the enemy of Detroit. While hypothetical, it’s safe to assume the Tigers wouldn’t have such a bright young stable of prospects if a lottery system had been in play the past several years. Can you imagine suffering through one of the worst seasons in American League history only to be rewarded with the fourth overall pick when the dumpster stopped burning?

I’m here for you, Red Wings fans.

Casey Mize and Spencer Torkelson are (future) Tigers because Detroit was the worst team in baseball in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Not because MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred pulled an Old English D out of a gumball machine.

That being said, maybe a lottery system ain’t MLB’s cup of tea, with them being traditionalists and all. Perhaps they opt to combine the 2019 and 2020 standings for a cumulative draft order? In this scenario, the Tigers could shock the world, go .500-ish and still have a shot at the top pick – the Tigers finished 6.5 games behind the Orioles and 9.5 games back of the Marlins in 2019.

Now that sounds like something I might be interested in.

In this issue of fairness, MLB would ideally announce any draft changes prior to opening day. But I wouldn’t put it past them to botch this process as they do pretty much everything else. I’m assuming some kind of altered format until I hear otherwise.

Speaking of unknowns, that leads us to the final reason why I’ll be singing “Go get em’ Tigers” in 2020…

Auntie ‘Rona is going to decide all of this

There is always the possibility that COVID-19 wins the World Series when all is said and done. After all, it’s been throwing us curveballs since March and doesn’t seem to be on a pitch count. Maybe the Astros and their trash cans could steal a game at home, but I wouldn’t bet against the ‘Rona in a 7-game series.

That would be a bangin’ matchup, tho.

In all seriousness, the teams that have success in 2020 will be the ones that best navigate the COVID-19 minefield. In that respect, the Tigers might be in an advantageous position, relatively speaking. They have the lightest travel schedule in the American League and won’t have to leave the midwest – the schedule includes 40 games against divisional opponents, plus 20 games against their NL Central counterparts.

So far the Tigers have been only mildly affected by the virus from a personnel standpoint, and no one appears to be opting out over safety concerns. Daniel Norris is on the 10 day IL after testing positive and is awaiting his green light to return. Several of the youngsters are also on the IL, including Tarik Skubal, Isaac Paredes, and Daz Cameron, though it’s up to the players to disclose whether it is in fact COVID related, as we suspect it is. Regardless, these are players who will likely begin the season at the ATS anyway.

Long story short: We have no idea what next year is going to look like, let alone next week. My tendency to plan out every step and analyze every possible outcome could be rendered meaningless if COVID wipes out the MLB season 20 games in. Why waste time rooting for your team to lose when the future is clouded with uncertainty?

The only thing more miserable than Detroit sports is no sports at all. Let’s win some games while we got ’em.

The over/under on how long it takes for COVID to render this post outdated: 8.5 minutes.

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