Detroit Tigers’ Unexpected Strategy Is Shaking Up Baseball—Here’s How They’re Making Every Position Work Wonders

Is it just me, or does watching the Detroit Tigers this year feel like witnessing a baseball renaissance? Picture this: no two games starting with the same lineup, a manager seemingly brewing baseball’s equivalent of a magic potion, and a team that’s not just playing well—they’re rewriting what it means to be adaptable in the 2025 MLB season. Since their last playoff burst, the Tigers have been quietly crafting their best start since 2006, mixing analytics with a splash of gut instinct, and the results are stunning. Could this be baseball’s ultimate remix—the Motown sound reimagined on the diamond? If unpredictability is the new power, Detroit’s got a dynamite playlist going right now. LEARN MORE
The irony here is that the rotation, which was piecemeal last October, has been the reliable anchor of the team’s 2025 success.

The post Surprising Detroit Tigers Are Making the Pieces Fit Anywhere and Everywhere appeared first on Opta Analyst.

Instead, Baez is close to locking down the AL Comeback Player of the Year award. He’s batting .319 with an .870 OPS – his OPS was .881 when he finished second in the 2018 NL MVP race while playing for the Chicago Cubs – and has been a revelation in center field, a position he hadn’t previously played in the major leagues. His WAR after the massive game Tuesday night is 1.3 – just a stunning turnaround. The hip surgery he underwent last September has helped him immensely. 

Through the first three years of his six-year, 0 million free-agent contract, Baez was – let’s not sugarcoat it – awful. He had a .221/.262/.347 slash line. His WAR in 2024 was minus-1.1 in 80 games. He was trending toward infamy as one of the worst free-agent signings not just in Tigers history, but in all of baseball.

Folks, it’s working.

Folks, it’s working. The team’s on-base percentage, which was a putrid .300 in 2024, is up to .334, which is good enough for second in the American League and fifth in the majors. That improvement can’t all be placed on the matchup game Hinch is playing – and rest assured, the Tigers aren’t just simply playing lefty/righty platoons – but the analytical gymnastics certainly haven’t hurt.

The Tigers haven’t just given Hinch permission to concoct magical matchup potions, they’ve given him a big ol’ cauldron and all the necessary ingredients: eye of newt, toe of frog, lizard’s leg and all the advanced analytical data he can synthesize.

The Tigers have scored the most runs of any AL team that doesn’t have the incredible Aaron Judge on its roster and they lead the AL in run differential, which is a big reason they fare so well in TRACR (Team Rating Adjusted for Competition and Roster), a projection model that loves what the Tigers are building. They’re projected to finish with 98 wins – the franchise hasn’t won that many since 1987 – with a 93.8% chance of making the playoffs, a 70.7% chance of winning the AL Central and a 9.5% of capturing their first World Series title since 1984.

Torkelson was another Tiger who basically played himself out of a spot with a poor 2024 season. The former No. 1 overall pick (2020) hit another home run in the win over the Red Sox Tuesday night, his 11th in only 43 games. Last year, he hit 10 in 92 games, and he struggled so badly that Detroit sent him to Triple-A for more than two months. It was quite the downfall for a slugger who popped 31 homers in 2023.

Entering Wednesday’s games, The Tigers are 28-15, tied with the New York Mets for baseball’s best record. No other AL team has more than 25 wins.

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Chances are, you saw how Detroit won Tuesday night’s game against Boston – on Baez’s walk-off three-run home run (let the celebration at home plate and in the Comerica Park stands begin). It was his second homer of the game, and his fourth, fifth and sixth RBIs of the contest. He now has four homers and 16 RBIs through nine games this month, which is better than any month of his entire Tigers’ tenure, save for September 2022.

With a 2.08 ERA and an AL-best raw value 46.9, the left-handed Skubal is looking like he might become the first AL pitcher to win back-to-back Cy Young awards since Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000. Reese Olson has built on his strong work in the postseason with a 3.38 ERA through eight starts. The Tigers have won all seven of rookie Jackson Jobe’s starts. Jack Flaherty has had a couple hiccups lately, but his 11.0 strikeouts per nine innings mark a career high.

And that’s a great lead-in to maybe the most surprising element of the 2025 Tigers: The redemption tour that’s currently taking center stage, starring Javy Baez and Spencer Torkelson.

Casey Mize is a former No. 1 draft pick (2018) who is authoring a redemption story. The right-hander made only two starts in 2022 and was sidelined in 2023 – his injury history isn’t quite spotless, to say the least – but he finally showed an ability to stay somewhat healthy last year, posting a 4.49 ERA in 22 games (20 starts). This year, Mize has a 2.53 ERA and the Tigers have won six of his seven starts.

The Motown sound is a crack of the bat and the whoosh of a fastball this year. The Detroit Tigers are building off last season’s MLB playoff campaign with their best start since 2006.

If this approach somehow feels familiar, there’s a reason for that. Hinch’s mindset with the 2025 lineup is very similar to how he managed his pitching staff during Detroit’s magical run through September and into the 2024 postseason. Because of rotation injuries and other issues, the Tigers used, essentially, one “normal” starting pitcher – Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal – and then went with a bullpen game for every other contest. That unorthodox approach helped sweep the Houston Astros in an AL Wild Card Series and got them to a winner-take-all Game 5 of the Division Series versus the Cleveland Guardians with Skubal starting.

Through the first 43 games of the 2025 season, Detroit Tigers manager A.J. Hinch has written out the same batting order for consecutive games exactly zero times.

This year, Torkelson has shown better discipline at the plate, and he’s doing a much better job driving fastballs and staying with the breaking balls that gave him so much trouble in 2024. He’s become the middle-of-the-order No. 4 or 5 hitter the Tigers need, the consistency – relatively speaking – that allows Hinch to mix and match elsewhere.

Compare that to the preseason predictions and you start to see how the mix-and-match is positively impacting the results. To start the season, the model projected the Tigers to finish with 84.4 wins, a 19.4% chance of winning the division and a 3.7% chance of winning the World Series.
He’s used five different hitters in the leadoff spot, with his best power hitter in terms of at-bats per home run, Kerry Carpenter, up top more often than anyone else. Nobody has been in the same spot in the order for even half of the team’s games. Gleyber Torres, with 20 starts in the 2-hole through the team’s first 43 games, sits atop the “consistency” list. Seven different players have batted third and 11 different batters have hit in the No. 6 spot.