His return, as well as that of fellow starters Casey Mize<\/a> and Justin Verlander<\/a>, will surely help the cause. However, Detroit’s 2026 season can only be salvaged if they can produce more of the same with the bat in their hands as they did for the three-game series in Tampa. Even after the sweep, the Tigers have plated just 248 runs on the season, the sixth-fewest in Major League Baseball. They have the 17th-most home runs (61) and have collected the 18th-most hits (491) as well. Getting back to a full complement of starters will help the team overall, seeing that their major struggles have been on offense.<\/p>\n No Tiger has struggled with a bat like Spencer Torkelson<\/a>. He has twice hit 30 home runs at the major league level, and much was expected from the first baseman during Detroit’s 2026 season. He took some time to get going, but even in early June, he has only managed to hit eight home runs, putting him on pace for just under 20 big flies for the season. This is despite some decent underlying numbers; Torkelson is in the 100th percentile for launch angle sweet spot percentage and is in the 83rd percentile for barrel rate percentage. He has been undone not by chasing bad pitches, as in the prior season, but by simply missing strikes in the zone.<\/p>\n Riley Greene<\/a> was also expected to contribute heavily to Detroit’s 2026 season, but has also fallen short of expectations. His power is down, hitting just six home runs as of the time of writing, although he owns a .311 batting average. His underlying numbers suggest he is under-performing at the plate; Greene is in the 88th percentile or above in LA sweet spot, bat speed, and hard hit percentages in MLB. Both Greene and Torkelson are representative of the Tigers’ offense this season; they are a talented group who are collectively under-performing.<\/p>\n The underlying metrics suggest that the Tigers should be scoring more runs. In theory, alongside a strong starting rotation, this should set the team up for success for the remainder of the season. The bullpen will still derail the team at times, with their seven walk-off hits given up a high across MLB. They’ve dug themselves into a very deep hole early on, and even putting up a .600 winning percentage for the rest of the season may not get them to 85 wins, suggesting they would miss the playoffs entirely.<\/p>\n It’s too early in the season to count any team out just yet, but Detroit’s 2026 season may already be lost. There are still two months before the trade deadline, but it seems likely that the Tigers will be sellers at that time and will start to build towards 2027<\/a> by dealing short-term veterans and promoting prospects<\/a> such as Max Clark and Max Anderson. The series sweep of the Rays proves that this team is capable of great results, such as in the first half of last season. It isn’t enough however to prove that the Tigers will be able to make the playoffs this season.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Main Photo Credit: Jonathan Dyer-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Detroit’s 2026 season is off to an awful start. This team was expected to at least compete for the American League Central crown, which the Tigers last won in 2014. However, the season has not gone to script thus far, and as of the time of writing, the team owns a sub-.400 winning percentage. Entering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5825,"featured_media":123431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1071,35],"tags":[1994,247,29563,6366,2634,3682,3082],"class_list":["post-123394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tigers","category-mlb","category-news","tag-casey-mize","tag-justin-verlander","tag-max-anderson","tag-max-clark","tag-riley-greene","tag-spencer-torkelson","tag-tarik-skubal"],"modified_by":"Augustus Oswald, Site Editor","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5825"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123394"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123435,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123394\/revisions\/123435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Detroit](\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/baseball\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2026\/06\/USATSI_28966697.webp\")
Can Sweep Turn Detroit\u2019s 2026 Season Around?<\/h3>\n