LAKELAND, Fla. -- The Tigers have become a trendy pick to contend for an American League Central title. They boast a bevy of young talent, made sneaky offseason upgrades and have assembled one of baseball’s top farm systems. It is, by many evaluations, an organization on the rise.

By the evaluation of the people in charge, it’s an organization with still some ways to go. That’s why -- as the Tigers opened a highly anticipated Spring Training -- president of baseball operations Scott Harris and manager A.J. Hinch talked Wednesday about keeping their heads where their feet are.

“The goal right now has to be the step in front of us,” Harris said. “This is a talented group, but it’s a young group. It’s going to be one of the youngest position-playing groups in all of baseball. Candidly, we haven’t earned the right to talk about division titles or playoff berths yet.

“We have to focus on getting a lot better over the next six weeks. We have to focus on outlining for our players how they can get better as individuals. Because if they get better as individuals, we’re going to stack those games and get a lot better as a team.”

Hinch sounded a similar tone a few hours earlier. His anticipation going into Spring Training is more about a competitive camp and roster spots that will be tougher to win than in previous years, and less about a division that’s arguably up for grabs.

“We’re going to have plenty of time to talk about that as we form this team,” Hinch said of expectations. “We are at 58 players. We’re going to get it down to 26 [by the end of camp], and the message is going to get more and more centralized about how we’re going to attack the first series. But we understand where we want to be and what we want to do. We’re unafraid to talk about winning games. We obviously want to have a winning record, but I’ll give you [the answer] you expect: We haven’t really earned it yet. We haven’t played any games, and I’m not consumed with it.”

The players have gotten a head start on that. Not only did nearly all pitchers and catchers arrive well before reporting day, they’re well ahead of a traditional throwing schedule. Several pitchers have already faced hitters, which doesn’t happen in camp until full-squad workouts begin next week.

That’s partly a reflection of young, energetic arms ready to tackle a bigger workload. That also reflects players looking to take another step up from last year’s 78-84 record and second-place finish.

“I think the eyes are set on the division, right? Win the division and get in the playoffs and anything can happen,” Tarik Skubal said Monday. “We’ve got to be a little bit better early in the year. I thought we played our division really, really well last year. Do that again and then maybe play the AL East a little bit better this year, and we’ll be in a really good spot.”

Detroit went 35-17 against AL Central opponents but 7-25 against AL East clubs. The Tigers lost nine of their first 11 games and ended April with a 10-17 record, building a hole they couldn’t completely climb out of.

Those will be points of discussion before Opening Day. For now, the emphasis is on player development.

“We have to focus on what we’re doing right in front of us,” Harris said. “We can’t get caught up in division titles and playoff berths or the AL Central or all of the narratives that are out there. It’s fun to see them, but we just don’t really talk about that internally.”

Internally, Harris said, the Tigers talk about quality at-bats and pitching depth and how to help the learning curve of young hitters who will struggle at some point during the season.

“Coming into this year, we knew that we were going to have a lot of young hitters populating our lineup. We should expect these young hitters to struggle at times,” Harris said. “We should be expecting the offense to sputter at times, so we tried to build a dynamic pitching staff around them to keep games close. But we have to support these players at every turn. It has never been harder for a young hitter to translate their Minor League numbers into big league performance, so we have to create the right influences around them. That’s why [veteran outfielder] Mark Canha’s here.”

On the flip side, that’s also a reason the Tigers are committing to playing their young hitters, and why they stayed away from the free-agent hitting market.

“If you go around the diamond right now, we have a young hitter either in the big leagues or pretty close to the big leagues at almost every position,” Harris said. “We have to commit to those guys. If you look around the diamond, there aren’t a ton of at-bats available for another everyday-type bat.”