Tigers' 2023 start offers little hope of rebound from disastrous 2022 season

Three games into a season might be too early to panic, but the alarm bells are ringing loud in the Motor City.

Everything seemed to go wrong for the 2022 Detroit Tigers. Star pitchers got hurt, rookies dramatically underperformed expectations and veterans hit well below their career norms. That led to the dismissal of general manager Al Avila.

In came Scott Harris to oversee baseball operations. He remained mostly quiet in the offseason as fans expected another losing season in the now seven-year rebuild. But 2023 couldn’t be worse than 2022 when everything went wrong, could it?

Three games into the year, it might be.

Detroit has managed a meager three runs in its first three games, all against the Tampa Bay Rays. Two runs came after Tampa had already jumped out to a big lead in the second game.

The team has five extra-base hits over three games and is dead-last in the league with a .419 OPS. The next lowest is the Kansas City Royals, nearly .8 points higher. The low production might be explained against Cy Young contender Shane McClanahan. The other two games were against Zach Eflin, with a career 4.47 era, and Jeffrey Springs, who bounced around as a reliever before landing in Tampa last year.

"It was a bad weekend,” said Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said, according to MLive.com. “We’ve got to do a lot better in a lot of areas if we want to play competitive baseball.”

That is an understatement. With the Tigers already struggling offensively in 2023, it appears their historically bad offense from 2022 wasn’t just an aberration. There's a long way to go, but early returns indicate that the Tigers will be in the race for the No. 1 overall draft pick instead of playing important baseball late in the year.

It isn’t going to get easier for the Tigers, who face the world champion Houston Astros next. The team also has games with Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, Milwaukee, the New York Mets, St. Louis and Seattle before mid-May. All played above .500 in 2022 and are expected to compete in 2023.

The Tigers’ season could quickly head to the basement before it really gets going. It’s a shame for a city desperate for a playoff appearance in any sport, as it’s been more than 2,000 days since a Motor City team won a playoff game.

"It just is what it is," outfielder Matt Vierling said, according to the Detroit Free Press. "There's some adjustments we're making. It's not the start we wanted to get off to, but it's better to figure this out now than for something like this to happen later on in the year."