How Tigers can inch closer to turning corner

This story was excerpted from Jason Beck's Tigers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

As we near the traditional boiling point of the Hot Stove season with front offices around the league preparing to set up shop in Nashville for next week's Winter Meetings, the question remains: How do the Tigers turn the corner from a team on the rise to a team in contention? And what can president of baseball operations Scott Harris do to help that transition?

To be fair, barring a shocking addition, a large part of the equation will depend on player development, both from prospects advancing from the Minors to the Majors and from young players who settled into big league roles in 2023. Riley Greene and Tarik Skubal need to show what they can do in a full, healthy season. Spencer Torkelson must build on his 31-homer campaign. Kerry Carpenter needs to add more run production to his 120 OPS+. Colt Keith has to hit the ground running and maintain his combination of power, production and discipline against Major League pitching. Parker Meadows and Reese Olson need to pounce on opportunities to stick in the big leagues and build on their encouraging play down the stretch of '23. Javier Báez needs to drive in runs.

What Harris can do beyond that is support the youngsters by adding talent around them and filling in the margins. He did that for his lineup by trading for Mark Canha at the start of the offseason, bypassing, for now, a thin crop of free-agent hitters. He did that for his rotation, too, by working a tricky starting pitching market to find a veteran starter with upside, adding Kenta Maeda on a two-year deal. Harris will likely seek another short-term addition that helps keep opportunities open for prospects Ty Madden, Wilmer Flores and, eventually, Jackson Jobe.

The Tigers have been linked to other potential shorter-term options on the free-agent pitching market, a list that includes Luis Severino and Seth Lugo.

“We have young talent that’s already in the big leagues, and we have more young talent coming,” Harris said at the end of the 2023 season. “I’m really bullish on this dominant young talent, so anything we do this offseason -- in free agency or trade -- we’re going to have to be mindful of walking the line between finding outside additions that can help us without blocking some of the young talent that may prove to be the best solutions we can find at those positions. We owe it to our organization and those individuals to give them enough runway to demonstrate that they can be solutions.

“You know, very recently, there were very few people thinking Kerry Carpenter was going to be a solution for us. He is a solution for us, which is a good reminder that we’ve got to be patient with young players, but we also have to give them opportunities to come up here and demonstrate that they can be solutions at positions moving forward.”

Harris' task is somewhat similar to what former president and general manager Dave Dombrowski faced going into the 2005 Winter Meetings. Justin Verlander and Curtis Granderson had shown promise in brief big league stints. Craig Monroe and Jeremy Bonderman were entering their primes. Ivan Rodriguez, Magglio Ordonez, Carlos Guillen and Placido Polanco had arrived over the past couple offseasons. What Dombrowski did at those Winter Meetings -- signing 41-year-old starter Kenny Rogers and 37-year-old closer Todd Jones to two-year contracts -- provided needed experience around the young core.

The ensuing 2006 team won 95 games, led the American League Central for most of the season and earned a Wild Card spot, which it leveraged into seven consecutive postseason wins and a World Series berth with Rogers starting Game 2 at Comerica Park. Those would be lofty expectations for the current club, but coming off a 78-win season and playing in the AL Central, the current Tigers face less of a jump than the '06 Tigers to contend in the division and earn a playoff berth.