Beneath this brutal season for the Tigers is one of the best stories in baseball. The next chapter begins in Detroit.
"It’s amazing," Kerry Carpenter said back in June. "It’s been a different experience. I’ve never had this kind of success at the professional level."
On Wednesday, Carpenter will reach the highest level of all. The 24-year-old who began the season as a little-known prospect in Double-A and now leads all of minor league baseball with 30 home runs is being summoned to the majors by the Tigers. He has mashed his way into the moment, one bomb after another.
"It’s wild. It’s like being greater than I ever imagined," Carpenter said on the Road to Detroit podcast. "The swing change I made was to try to be as great as I could possibly be, to maximize my full potential. And to actually do it this year has been surreal."
The swing change happened last offseason. Carpenter was coming off a solid but unsatisfying year in Double-A. He got to talking with fellow Tigers minor leaguer Jacob Robson, who told Carpenter he wasn't getting the most out of his left-handed swing. So Carpenter got with Robson's swing coach, made a few tweaks and discovered more power -- and that has been "the difference-maker," he said.
Slugging in the minors promises nothing in the majors. The Tigers' assistant hitting coach is proof: Mike Hessman is Minor League Baseball's all-time leader with 443 homers and topped out at 14 homers in the bigs. Carpenter, a 19th round draft pick in 2019, won't knock down walls in Detroit just because he plowed through pitchers in Erie and Toledo. This is his biggest test yet.
Then again, here's a smattering of big-leaguers who once led the minors in home runs: Giancarlo Stanton (2008), Mike Moustakas (2010), Joey Gallo (2013), Kris Bryant (2016) and Jared Walsh (2018). And while Carpenter was whiff-prone earlier this season, he had as many walks as strikeouts following his promotion to Triple-A. He hit lefties as well as righties. There's reason to believe his bat can thrive in The Show.
Carpenter's vision is coming to life. His ultimate goal is to win a World Series in Detroit. But these dreams weren't always his. They were planted in his brain by his mom and his sister, who saw his potential before Carpenter saw it in himself. He hardly even liked baseball until his junior year of high school, wasn't really great at it until his senior year. And by then, every college in his home state of Florida was done recruiting. His mom and his sister pushed him to pursue it anyway.
"They were just like, ‘Hey, you really like this game, but you could be really good if you loved it and you put the work in. You could play in college and you could achieve crazy dreams,'" said Carpenter, who lost his father to cancer in 2020. "So they pushed me toward that and I started working hard and I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. I’ve gotten really good. I just want to maximize my full potential now.' And at that point, my love of it started."
Carpenter wound up attending St. John's River State College, a junior college in Northeast Florida. He played well enough there to earn a scholarship to Virginia Tech, where he played well enough again to land on the radar of MLB teams. He heard frequently from the Tigers leading up to the 2019 draft, and eventually they invited him to a pre-draft workout. But so did the Yankees.
"It was pretty much the Tigers and Yankees when it came down to it," he said.
In the end it was the Tigers, who promptly watched Carpenter tear up Rookie Ball. He was ready to start climbing the ladder in 2020 before the minor league season was wiped out by the pandemic. When the MLB season ended that year and the Tigers stopped paying their minor leaguers, Carpenter, like anyone else, said he "needed to make some money." So he took a part-time job at DICK'S Sporting Goods. He went from swinging bats to selling bats.
"I was like, I’ve been out of work. Thankfully the Tigers paid us throughout the MLB season, but when that was over I was like, 'Alright, I gotta do something. I gotta give myself a schedule. I was taking classes and I worked there for that offseason," he said.
It wasn't exactly his calling. Carpenter laughed and said customers would ask him where to find certain products and "sometimes I wouldn’t even know the answer. So yeah, I was probably not the best worker there."
Two years later, he became the best power hitter in the minors. His .645 slugging percentage this season is first among all players in A-ball or higher. He leaves the farm hitting .313 with a 1.025 OPS in 97 games. He has a long road ahead of him in Detroit, but so he did to get here. Just a couple months ago, Carpenter said getting the call to the bigs "would be one of the coolest days of my life."
That day has arrived.
"When you get to play against the best of the best, that’s when it’s the most fun," he said. "That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to win a World Series and we’re trying to do that in Detroit. So it’s going to be an amazing feeling and I’m just going to be grateful whenever that day comes. I can’t wait to call my mom and let her know."