DETROIT -- The Tigers woke up on Monday to the best weather of the spring, the type of weather they would have liked to be playing baseball in. The forecasted high temperature around 70 was 30-some degrees warmer than it was for the first pitch of the home opener last Thursday.

Instead, the Tigers took their off-day while sitting in first place atop the American League Central, three or four places higher than many have them forecast to finish in the standings this season. Figures, then, that many questions for this week’s Inbox involve whether they can keep this up.

No, the Tigers aren’t going to pitch to a 2.30 team ERA or .933 WHIP, though I do think they’ll be better than expected. Likewise, the Tigers aren’t going to hit .181 -- the lowest batting average in the AL entering Monday -- with a .569 OPS for a full season. I think the offense is so far out of the norm that it has more room to improve than the pitching has to fall back, though it’s close. Detroit at least has some pitching reinforcements to call upon, though depth is becoming an issue with Matt Moore joining Michael Fulmer among injured starters.

The Tigers did not crack MLB.com’s top 20 power rankings this week. As explained at the top of the rankings, it’s a big-picture look, and a hot start isn’t going to drastically alter the preseason rankings from just a couple weeks ago. The Tigers will need to keep this up a few more weeks, and probably hit some more, to get on the list. A good week against the Indians and Twins this week could make a dent.

 Top five could be tough. The Rays were really good last year, and the Astros and A’s will be back there. The Yankees will be better once they get their injured starters back. Cleveland has a good ERA right now, even with Corey Kluber and Carlos Carrasco off to rough starts. I do think the Tigers can finish in the top half of the league, though. The starting pitching has shown a lot of reason for optimism over last year, when Detroit was 10th in ERA among AL teams, and the bullpen is deeper with Victor Alcantara emerging and Drew VerHagen back.

The Tigers’ long-term plan is based around pitching and defense, evidenced by the talent in the system, so they’re hoping it can be done. But the Royals of 2014-15 had an offense that worked for them. They were middle of the pack in a lot of statistics, but they could hit their way on base and move runners around. Between Ron Gardenhire’s philosophies on putting the ball in play and testing defenses, plus some of the position prospects in the Tigers' system (Daz Cameron, Jake Robson, Danny Woodrow and Brock Deatherage are all in MLB Pipeline’s Top 30 Tigers Prospect rankings with running grades of 60 or better), Detroit has the ingredients to try something similar.

 That’s long term. For this year, the Tigers need to hit more than that to carry this fast start into the summer.

Miguel Cabrera is healthy by all indications, and the metrics suggest he’s due for a bounce. His average exit velocity of 93.7 miles per hour entering Monday ranked among the top nine percent of hitters league-wide, and it is on level with his 93.6 exit velo from 2015 and '16. His hard-hit rate is exactly 50 percent. However, his average launch angle is just 6.3 degrees, so he’s specializing in hard-hit grounders and low line drives. Even so, his expected batting average (XBA) of .271 is 36 points higher than what he’s actually hitting.

One thing that stands out so far is that Cabrera is pulling the ball way more, partly due to how he has been pitched. His long single to the wall in right-center in Thursday’s home opener is his only hit to the opposite field so far. He’s basically using half the field right now, which I would expect to change.

Shouldn’t be long. Could be Cabrera. Could be Castellanos. Could be Niko Goodrum, who has a sneaky good hard-hit rate of 54.2 percent and ranks in the top nine percent of the league in expected batting average (.341) and slugging (.674) given exit velocities and launch angle so far.

Tigers management would have to legitimately feel like their window of contention is now. Keep in mind that the pitching prospects who have been supposed to lead Detroit back to contention aren’t here yet. The Tigers will not block their path. What they could conceivably do is target short-term free agents while trying to identify who they want to keep around for the long term, though the Tigers haven’t jumped on the extension trend yet. Castellanos can be a free agent next winter, and as noted a week or so ago, nothing is going on with contract talks. Matthew Boyd can't be a free agent for another few seasons, so what they’d be looking for is cost certainty.

The Tigers needed to pick one style of lettering for their logo and stick with it. If they were to change it on the jersey, they’d probably have to change it on the hat, too. They’ve done that plenty of times over the years (they even had block lettering for a few years in the 1930s), but considering how much uproar has followed simply changing the size of the Old English D on the hat the last couple years, I can’t imagine them changing it to the jersey D, at least not anytime soon.