When Ron Gardenhire accepted the role of Tigers manager following the 2017 season, he knew what he was stepping into.
Detroit was on the ground floor of a massive rebuild; the structure left behind was still smoking. Long, painful years were ahead. The pain has arrived, and it might be even worse than the skipper was expecting.
At 29-62, the Tigers are on pace to lose 110 games -- their most since the dreadful season of 2003. They've won six times since the start of June. Their offense, which followed up a one-hit dud Tuesday night with 17 strikeouts Wednesday night, is the worst in baseball.
Gardenhire trudged through some lean years at the end of his tenure with the Twins, including a 99-loss season in 2011, but this is something else. When asked, he acknowledged that it stands as the toughest experience of his 15-year managerial career.
"Yeah," he told the Jamie and Stoney Show on 97.1 The Ticket. "Not winning, I mean, really struggling, going long stretches without winning ballgames is really hard, for myself and the staff, because we're at the ballpark early and we spend all day trying to get these guys prepared to play and the game goes on and it's just not going our way. So, yeah, it is.
"You have to keep up the good attitude, and we do that, and at the end of the day you end up looking at the ceiling at 3:00 in the morning every night. Those are the hard times. You're just trying to figure out, what can I do? How can I help this situation out? You just have to keep a positive attitude in the clubhouse every day. That's what we try to do."
To help ease the sting of losing, Gardenhire said he turns his focus to the small beams of hope -- like the fact that Spencer Turnbull, whose tired shoulder sent him to the injured list prior to the All-Star break, turned in a quality outing Wednesday night against the Indians.
"You just gotta keep going out there and playing. I appreciate the fact that our guys are trying real hard in the dugout, they're getting after the game. We're just outmanned," Gardenhire said. "Turnbull threw good last night against a good team, and that's a big thing for us, getting him back out there and having him throw well. You just kind of look at the little things that go well.
Through 12 games this month, the Tigers have lost 10 games. They haven't notched consecutive wins since May. They own the second-worst run differential in baseball -- fist-bump, Orioles -- and things figure to get even harder once the trade deadline passes in a couple weeks. Matthew Boyd, Shane Greene and Nicholas Castellanos, arguably the team's three best players, are all candidates to be dealt.
For the coaches and players alike, the frustration is impossible to shake. It's not a coincidence, for example, that Gardenhire leads the majors with seven ejections.
"More than anything else, it's the every-night losing," he said. "We have to win some games. You win a game and you feel like you're on top of the world. We've got to start wining ballgames. That's the only way to really get out of the funk, is to start putting together two or three wins in a row. We haven't been able to do that, and that's the frustrating part. I haven't been through a stretch like this."
Eventually, the skies will brighten. Take Gardenhire's former team. After losing the second most games in baseball from 2011-16, the Twins have become the best team in the AL Central. Or take the Astros, the only team worse than the Twins over that span. The 2017 World Series champs have turned into a perennial juggernaut. Who knows if the Tigers' fortunes will flip in the same fashion, but a turnaround is somewhere on the horizon.
And signs of better days will start to arrive later this summer. The Tigers are prepared to call up a number of their top prospects in September -- no, probably not Casey Mize or Matt Manning, but certainly the likes of Beau Burrows, Jake Rogers, Willi Castro and Daz Cameron.
"There are some players at Triple-A that will definitely get a chance to come up here toward September," said Gardenhire. "We just have to make sure that we don't rush them into a situation where they get beat up and we don't let them develop. You can't do that. As tough as it is up here right now, you have to hang with them and just do the things that we're doing right now, working every day and trying to make these guys better.
"Let those kids develop. When they get here, they'll get here, and that will be good for them. But we don't want to put them in a bad situation."
