“The reality of the situation is, we need to play better baseball,” Tigers ace Tarik Skubal told the Detroit News last week, adding that “... or else come the [Trade] Deadline, you give the front office an option to reassess where this team is.”
Quite right. The sharks are already circling around the two-time defending AL Cy Young Award winner, who is also, importantly, an impending free agent. That's especially true given how good and healthy he’s looked since his improbably fast return from elbow surgery. With the Trade Deadline six weeks away and the 33-44 Tigers among the season’s biggest disappointments, we’re already starting to hear about which teams may be in the mix for Skubal, as though the truth of a trade is a foregone conclusion and that he'll be pitching in Atlanta or Chicago or New York by the end of the summer.
There's only one problem with that, really. What if the Tigers already are playing better baseball -- and the idea of a trade isn’t such as much of a given as it may seem?
After all, the Tigers have quietly gotten things back on the right track in June:
- They are 11-6 (.647) this month, the third-best record in the Majors and best in the AL, entering Monday night's series opener against the Yankees at Comerica Park
- Their pitching staff has MLB's second-lowest ERA (3.12)
- Their lineup has hit the second-most homers (35)
Even their defense, which had ranked 27th in April in Statcast's Fielding Run Value with a minus-11 mark, has shown a turnaround, rising to 11th-best in May and June, coming in with a solidly above-average +5. It’s now been a month since the Tigers had a starting pitcher allow more than four runs in a game, a 24-game run that’s currently the longest active streak in the Majors.
Consider, too, what’s happened in the rest of the American League Central.
The Twins lineup may be hot, but their pitchers have a 5.57 ERA this month; the Royals have a 5.12 ERA out of their rotation and have a concern about Bobby Witt Jr.’s knee; the White Sox, one of the best early-season stories, are at 7.88 from their June starters, which would be one of the worst months of the last five years. In Cleveland, the Guardians are without José Ramírez and Chase DeLauter for weeks to come, and are finishing up a month that has them as the AL’s weakest run-scoring offense, as Steven Kwan slogs through the toughest year of his career.
True, the playoff odds haven’t quite turned in their favor yet – the Tigers are at only 22% at FanGraphs as of Monday morning, as befits a club that is still 11 games under .500. Yet that's also more than double the 10% they had at the end of May. The Tigers are currently just five games out of a Wild Card spot and 7.5 games out of first in the AL Central, in a division that currently projects to be won with a mere 82-80 record. This is after all, a five-team group in which every team has been outscored, playing in a league where only the Yankees, Mariners and Rays boast a positive run differential.
You might remember -- or prefer not to if you’re a Tigers fan -- that a year ago today, the Tigers were 19 games over .500, with an 8.5-game lead over Cleveland in the Central. They had 91% odds to win the division. They did not win the division.
So what happened to turn things around for this year's Detroit team, one that endured a 6-22 May that was one of their weakest single-month performances of the 21st century?
It was, seemingly, a change that occurred the moment the calendar flipped to June. The Tigers finished off May by losing eight series in a row, culminating with a three-game road sweep at the hands of the White Sox from May 29-31. The next day, they went into Tampa Bay and swept the then-first-place Rays, and won series against Seattle and Minnesota. Then, after a brief skid against Cleveland and Houston, handed the White Sox a sweep right back over the weekend.
It's less about Skubal’s return than you’d think, as he’s started just two games, only one of which the team has won.
It’s about catcher Dillon Dingler, who has been the best player in the American League in June, and rookie Kevin McGonigle, who was part of the early-season defensive struggles (minus-2 Fielding Runs in April, +4 ever since) but has been a top-30 player himself this month, and Kerry Carpenter, who came back from a shoulder injury on May 31 to slug .532 in June while cutting his strikeout rate considerably from April.
It’s about the bullpen, which had a 4.39 ERA in April and 4.20 in May -- before cutting it down to an excellent 2.59 ERA in June. The pitching staff at large has cut its walk rate down from 10% in April to 8% in May to nearly 7% in June.
It’s not that the Tigers are suddenly a great team now, because they’re not. But there’s likely not a great team in the AL Central, and that even the somewhat moderate signs of life this team has shown over the last month means that the playoff race is far from over.
What it means, really, is that everything comes down to the fact that six of the next 10 games come against the Yankees, with three this week in Detroit and three more next week in the Bronx. (In between, the Tigers host the Astros, who are above them in the Wild Card race, for four.) This stretch should be a pretty solid test of how "real" this team is going to be. If the Yankees really want to gain access to Skubal via the trade market, then ironically, the best thing they can do is to absolutely crush him, as he’s slated to start on Wednesday in Detroit and likely again in next week’s rematch back in New York.
That, at least, would hinder Detroit’s chances and make selling Skubal a little more likely. If the Yankees can’t hit him -- and his teammates -- then they might not have a chance to trade for him. In what’s been an odd year in the AL Central, a team 11 games under .500 coming back to make a run at at it (and keeping the prize of the Trade Deadline off the market in the process) might not end up looking so odd after all.