Tim KeownOct 8, 2025, 07:37 AM ETCloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Follow on X
Seattle Mariners vs. Detroit Tigers: Game Highlights (1:11)Seattle Mariners vs. Detroit Tigers: Game Highlights (1:11)
And while those numbers might evoke visions of the 1975 Kansas City Royals, the reality is far less flashy. The Tigers’ style is best described as reasoned but only mildly feral, especially since they are not a fast team: 29th of 30 in team sprint speed. But what they do well is read situations, get good jumps and understand better than anyone that putting pressure on the defense is one way to offset physical limitations.
“This team has been built to maximize everybody’s strength,” Hinch says. “We are obsessed with getting players better, and the players have bought in. We use 13 different position players and five different closers on some nights, and because the player buy-in has been awesome, it’s really opened the door to a really fun team.”
Fry tried to bunt a 99 mph Skubal fastball and had it tip off his bat into his face. It was a terrifying moment; Fry went down, Skubal tossed his glove and his hat into the air and crouched near the mound with his hands over his mouth. Fry was carted off, and Skubal was clearly shaken, as evidenced by a wild pitch and a balk that led to two more Guardians runs.
Skubal went to the hospital later that night to visit Fry, and he watched as a doctor stitched Fry’s nose, broken in two places and sliced open in two more, back together. Skubal apologized and Fry waved it off, saying, “I already knew I couldn’t hit you. Now I learned I can’t bunt you, either.”
This rare fastball is not particularly fast, especially in today’s game, and its natural habitat is in hitters’ heads, where it resides in peaceful slumber. Kahnle started throwing his changeup more often after coming back from Tommy John surgery in 2022. By last season, when he threw 61 straight in the postseason while relieving for the Yankees, it veered close to obsession.
“It just keeps working,” he says in a tone that suggests he doesn’t understand it either. “I think it works because I can command it, and also because guys know I’ll throw a fastball every once in a while.”
Kahnle pitched a perfect seventh inning in the Tigers’ Game 1 win over Seattle, throwing 10 pitches. The first nine were changeups, and the 10th was a two-strike, 92 mph fastball that gave a surprised Luke Raley no chance. It doesn’t always work — Kahnle had an up-and-down regular season and ended up with a 4.43 ERA — but when he’s on, it’s as close as baseball gets to an in-game comedy routine.
TORKELSON AND MIZE seem destined to their shared fates, conjoined top overall picks — one-one, in the game’s parlance — who succeeded and failed and dealt with the doubt and the pressure to come out on the other side. Both of them fought the internal battle against external expectations long enough to cast it all aside to pursue their own ideas of who they are and what they should be.
But overhaul he did, and he arrived at spring training with a couple of new pitches, each a variation on the slider. Remarkably, he went 19-2 at Springville High in Alabama and dominated in college at Auburn and made the big leagues without being able to throw a pitch that could turn left. Nothing he threw — not the hard, hard sinker that went down or the changeup that dived toward the knees of a right-handed hitter — could veer away from a right-handed hitter or toward a left-handed hitter.
More than anything, he showed up to camp with an attitude that belies his easygoing personality. “I wasn’t being mean to anybody, but I think guys could tell I had a little edge to me,” he says. “It was a make-or-break time in my career, and it could have gone a couple of different ways.”
He was so intense and self-directed, in fact, that several teammates felt compelled to ask him if he was OK.
He was promised nothing but a chance to compete. (“I felt like I was on the outside looking in,” Mize says.) He came out of spring training as the Tigers’ fifth starter and climbed from there, winning 14 games and making his first All-Star team. Back when Hinch told him he’d break camp as a starter, Mize says, “It was good, and I celebrated it, but I also understood that I don’t want to look back on my career and say, ‘Look at all the spring training battles that I won.'”
ARE THE TIGERS a team that roused itself in the nick of time, or one that peaked early and ran out of juice? It’s one thing to create confidence, another to sink it deep enough to overcome whatever nastiness gets in the way.
They went from exalted to doubted so fast it’s hard to pinpoint the transition. But is this their sweet spot? That question, in so many words, was presented to infielder Colt Keith, who put a new twist on an old cliché by describing his team as “a grindy team that plays better when we’re looked at as the underdog.”
The Tigers are an odd outfit. Other than Tarik Skubal, the best pitcher on the planet, there are no universally feared hitters or transcendent talents. They have two former No. 1 draft picks, first baseman Spencer Torkelson and pitcher Casey Mize, who have had their once-gilded paths strewn with rocks repeatedly over the past few years. They are mostly a collection of interchangeable and highly complementary parts, a bunch of players molded into Hinch’s ideal of selflessness and self-awareness, guys who — and this is a compliment — succeed in large part by understanding their limitations.
The Tigers truly excel at one facet of the game, and it’s perhaps the most esoteric and least noticed: baserunning. They are the best team in the game, by far, at taking the extra base, whether it’s going from first to third on a single, scoring from second on a single, or turning a maybe-double into a real-life one. They led the league in XBT, or Extra Bases Taken, with a rate of 53%, the highest in more than 50 years (the league average this season was 42%). The strategy is not without risk: the Tigers also led MLB in outs on the bases with 63, 18 above the average.
I spent the better part of two weeks with the Tigers in May and June, those halcyon days when they were the best team in baseball and it didn’t seem close. “I race to work each day,” Hinch said in July, “and I’m fully aware it’s not always that way in this job.” And I returned this past weekend in Seattle expecting to see a different team, or at least detect a more cynical or maybe weary vibe, given the sharp turns the season had taken. But Hinch was the same Hinch, and the Tigers were the same mildly goofy collection of randomized parts. Despite everything, despite every unsustainable high and unsustainable low, nothing appears to have changed.
IT’S BEEN A ride. The low point for the Tigers came on a Tuesday night, September 23, in Cleveland. In the sixth inning, the Guardians put together the world’s least impressive rally to score three runs off Skubal on their way to a win that put them in a tie for first in the AL Central. There was a bunt single by Steven Kwan to lead off, and a sacrifice bunt by Angel Martinez that Skubal decided to long-snap — literally between his legs — down the right-field line to move the runners to second and third, and then an RBI infield single by Jose Ramirez.
Kahnle is a voting member of what has become known as Hinch’s “Pitching Chaos,” a term that refers to the Tigers’ insistence on using their relievers in situations rather than roles. It’s a practice born at least partly from necessity; it’s easier to ditch regular roles when the roster isn’t dotted with pitchers who fit into them. Will Vest is as close as Hinch has to a primary closer, but five other pitchers had saves this season. In Game 1, starter Keider Montero pitched the 11th inning for his first career save. It’s whatever it takes and whoever you’ve got.
“The culture on this team is to offer something every day to a win, and not get caught up in perceived roles or expectations or even the reasons we do what we do,” Hinch says. “We want to use our whole roster and make it really difficult on the other side. When you have players that buy in — common goal, common desire to be a winner — we get to do a lot of creative things. It’s not a magic potion, and it does take some getting used to, to pitch the fifth inning one day and the eighth the next, or to pitch one inning one day and 2⅓ the next. But over time, we’ve been able to establish that as our norm.”
MIZE, WHO WILL start Game 4 of the ALDS, was left off the postseason roster last season after an objectively bad ’24 season — 2-6, a 4.49 ERA, less than five innings per start. The season, and the indignity of the roster move, turned him into a roiling mess of emotions: angry and embarrassed, happy for his teammates to play in the playoffs, determined never to let it happen again. “I didn’t think I’d face a moment where I had to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘This isn’t good enough. You have to overhaul this whole thing.'”
Seattle Mariners vs. Detroit Tigers: Game Highlights (1:11)Seattle Mariners vs. Detroit Tigers: Game Highlights (1:11)
CloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Follow on X
He was the same guy when the Detroit Tigers were stomping their way to the best record in baseball and building a lead in the American League Central that reached 15½ games on July 8. He was the same in September, when the Tigers were losing series to the Chicago White Sox and Miami Marlins, and getting swept by the Cleveland Guardians and Atlanta Braves amid an unthinkable collapse that gave the division title to the Guardians, who won 16-of-17 to end the season.
“Yeah,” he says, “I told myself, ‘Hey, let’s just go back to being that guy.'”
“Yeah, I’m OK,” Mize told them, “I’m just taking this thing back into my own hands.”
Mize hits me with a look and says, “I see you’ve never been to Springville, Alabama.”