Nearly 30 minutes after the Tigers' 13-0 loss to the White Sox on Wednesday, the final blow of a three-game sweep in which Detroit was outscored by the reigning AL Central champs by 21 runs, the doors to the home clubhouse at Comerica Park remained shut. Staffers trickled out, but no players. Inside, the Tigers were talking as a team, hot and humbled, searching for a spark as they try to put out a fire.
"Just players," Eric Haase said shortly thereafter. "Management can only do so much. They're not on the field with us holding our hand. We know we have to play better."
They can't possibly play any worse. The meltdown was so thorough in Wednesday's stifling heat that A.J. Hinch was forced to send not one (Harold Castro), not two (Kody Clemens) but three (Tucker Barnhart) position players to the mound to protect his overtaxed -- and no longer over-achieving -- bullpen. The Tigers have now been held to two runs or fewer in half of their 62 games and taken nine shutouts on the chin, matching their total from last season.
"If you're not frustrated by today or even embarrassed that the game got out of hand to the point that we had to do what we had to do, this is baseball at its highest level and we expect better," said Hinch. "Obviously we're trying. Guys aren't caving in."
But halfway through June, the season is caving in on the Tigers. They are 14 games below .500 and tied with the Royals for the worst run differential in the American League after Wednesday's debacle, their second 13-0 loss this month. They are on pace to be the first MLB team in 50 years to score fewer than 500 runs in a full season. Hinch said this spring the Tigers were "tired of the AL Central being somebody else's division." Their fans are tired of this rebuild.
When the clubhouse doors finally opened on Wednesday, a few players bantered back and forth. They joked about something other than the game, which felt like a joke for the final three innings. The face of the franchise, Miguel Cabrera, declined to speak to the media. The leader of the pitching staff, Eduardo Rodriguez, wasn't present, estranged from his new team as he attends to a reported marital issue. The other prize of the offseason, $140 million shortstop Javier Baez, wasn't on the field Wednesday as he tries to fix himself at the plate. This was a team in disarray, amid a season gone astray.
Baez did eventually take questions, trying to answer for his own struggles and those of the team.
"We just gotta play better baseball and focus on the things we can control," he said. "Things are going bad for us and we obviously get frustrated, but we can't give up trying."
It would almost feel better if the Tigers had given up, if they were only this bad because they no longer cared. But as this team tries to dig deep, it only digs itself deeper. Haase, the only player besides Baez to face the cameras Wednesday, said "every guy is here doing early work or in the office looking at all the analytics, trying to pull out every stop." And this is the product, a historically bad offense and another season being buried alive.
"We are accountable to the performance," said Hinch. "This is unacceptable."
Haase said the players addressed "a broad range of issues that we feel like we're facing as a team (to) kind of get it in the open." He said they tried to keep things positive because "getting in the weeds with the negative stuff isn't going to be a good path." Baez said "everybody" spoke up. Nursing a sore heel and a broken swing, he had spent the first few innings of the game working in the cage, trying to recover the bat that hit 31 homers last season.
Haase had spent the afternoon crouched behind the plate, watching a beat-up pitching staff surrender 15 hits in six innings before Hinch put them out of their misery.
"No one likes going out there and getting their ass handed to them every night," said Haase. "We feel like we're a better team than that and for whatever reason, we're just not clicking."
The announced attendance for Wednesday's game, the Tigers' fourth straight loss at home, was close to 21,000. There were closer to 10,000 fans in the stands. The heat was brutal and the Tigers were worse, the boos stifled only by lethargy. This team hasn't stopped trying, but its fans might stop trying to care.
"If people want to let us know how they feel, great," said Baez. "I can't control that. Obviously we're losing a lot of games and it's frustrating for them. We understand. Trust me, we're frustrated in the dugout."
We trusted that the Tigers would be competitive this year. And after a brutal April that harkened back to last year, we trusted they would turn it around. We trusted that a slumping lineup would come back to life. We continue to trust that it can't get worse. At what point are we lying to ourselves to expect anything better?
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