Tigers' downfall was quite simple. Will Scott Harris fix it?

Over a season-ending press conference that spanned an hour, Scott Harris took lots of accountability for what he called "a missed opportunity" for the Tigers this season. He did. He pointed the finger squarely at himself, while motioning over his shoulder to all those injuries.

And both things are true: the Tigers lost a crippling number of key pieces -- ultimately putting 41 players from their 40-man roster on the injured list, Harris said -- and Harris failed to construct a team that could endure it. They weren't knocked out of playoff contention until the middle of September, but the season, in Harris' view, all but ended in May.

"You can’t go 6-22 in a month at this level and expect to punch your ticket to the postseason," said Harris. "We woke up on June 1st in last place in the American League. It felt like we had lost a player and a game every day for about a month. It felt like we were sunk in that moment. Upon reflection, our inability to overcome adversity in real time starts with me. I didn’t build enough depth into this roster. The vulnerabilities of this roster got exposed in May, and it cost us."

But the clearest vulnerability of the roster got exposed from start to finish. What cost the Tigers most was a bullpen that failed in high-leverage spots to an almost unfathomable degree. And that had little to do with injuries. The Tigers wound up with as many blown saves -- 32, most in the American League -- as saves. It explains almost unto itself how they went an MLB-worst 23-52 in games decided by two runs or less, which explains how they wound up with the best run differential (+77) by a losing team in 20 years.

Harris was deliberating the Tigers' direction at the trade deadline until the final series of July. It wasn't until another meltdown by the bullpen in a 10-9 loss to the Orioles that he decided to sell. Had the Tigers closed out even a few more games over the first four months of the season, they may well have kept Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize and gone for it.

And they wouldn't have been wrong to do so. Not in the least. Not when they were trying to make the most of what they knew was Skubal's last lap in Detroit. The league average save percentage this year was 64 percent. For the Tigers, that would have meant nine more wins and a record of 85-77 -- tied with the Guardians, who won the AL Central.

Yes, injuries hit hard in May. The absences of Skubal and Gleyber Torres, in particular, loomed large. But the Tigers still played well enough to weather the storm. They just lost nine games when leading after six innings. A league-average bullpen converts six of those leads into wins.

This is really on no one other than Harris, and his pro scouting department by extension. Detroit's three highest-paid relievers, Kenley Jansen, Kyle Finnegan and Drew Anderson, all of whom were signed last winter, combined to blow 22 saves: 10 by Finnegan, tied for the most in the majors, and six apiece by Jansen and Anderson, tied for 10th in the majors.

Relief pitching is notoriously fickle from year to year. But the Tigers whiffed on their three biggest bullpen signings, even if Anderson was better later in the year as a starter. Ironically, whiffs are exactly what their bullpen was lacking. While Detroit's relievers generated a higher rate of strikeouts and swings and misses than last year, they still ranked toward the bottom of the bigs in both categories. Finnegan's plunge was particularly vexing.

Did the Tigers miss Will Vest? Yes. The normally-reliable right-hander, who was supposed to form a sturdy late-inning trio with Jansen and Finnegan, dealt with elbow and hip injuries and was done for the year by July. But he wasn't pitching well prior to that. Did they miss Brant Hurter? Sure. The typically-dependable lefty missed most of the summer due to a back injury.

But the Tigers also cost themselves by DFA-ing righty Dylan Smith in the spring while keeping relievers like Connor Seabold and Enmanuel De Jesus. Smith was picked up by the Giants and carried a sub-3.00 ERA deep into August while pitching late in games.

The Tigers' bullpen needs more high-octane arms that can miss bats in the zone. Watch the playoffs for proof. The top four bullpens in strikeout rate this season, and eight of the top 12, belong to teams that are still playing. Of the bottom 12 bullpens in strikeout rate, 11 belong to teams (including Detroit) that are sitting at home.

To fix this, the Tigers are looking within. Harris believes the organization is much deeper on the mound than it's been in quite some time, which positions some of the best starting pitchers in the system to become big-league relievers. He pointed to arms like Brady Smith, Ben Jacobs, Lucas Elissalt, Kash Mayfield, Jackson Wolf and Andrew Sears, the latter of whom debuted for Detroit this year. Harris also highlighted lefty Drew Sommers, who had one of the best strikeout rates in the majors this season in 43 outings for the Tigers.

Trouble is, most of those arms on the farm are a good ways from Detroit. Sommers, Sears and Wolf are the only three who could realistically help the Tigers next season. And even then, Sears and Wolf are entirely unproven at the big league level.

"Both in season and moving forward the next three to five years, our plan is to acquire and develop as much starting pitching as we possibly can and the spillover is going to improve our bullpen," said Harris. "It's also going to create a core of relievers that are going to be able to continue to grow together and be reliable options for (A.J. Hinch) to call down to every single year, as opposed to the revolving door of a new cast of characters every year."

The concept can work. The Guardians are a good example of a team that's turned a number of minor-league starters into a formidable group of swing-and-miss relievers. But the Guardians have a long history of mining quality bullpen arms. If it was so easy, every team would do it.

"I think due to some of the areas of need in the organization when we came here, we've had to play in those waters of waiver claims and small trades and relievers to fill our bullpen," said Harris. "But in the future we're going to be able to develop a group that may have started throughout their career in the minors but end up in the bullpen as reliable options for us that also miss a lot more bats because they have deeper mixes because they were developed as starters."

Free agent relievers are always a gamble. Harris is right that very few of the big-money bullpen signings around the league last winter worked out. (The two biggest, Edwin Diaz to the Dodgers and Devin Williams to the Mets, completely flopped.) But some were hits: Luke Weaver to the Mets, Robert Suarez and Raisel Iglesias to the Braves, Tyler Rogers to the Blue Jays. There are quality arms to be found.

Harris has work to do this winter to fortify the bullpen by next spring. Jansen will be gone, Finnegan will be coming off a sharp regression, and Vest will be coming off elbow and hip surgeries. The solution can't be as simple as churning more arms in the system. Who will the Tigers turn to in the late innings? Who will they trust?

The ERA (3.84) will say Detroit's bullpen ranked 12th in the bigs this year. But that's not real, and Harris knows it. His bullpen had the worst high-leverage rating in the majors. There was nothing false about that. Just faulty pitching, in pivotal moments.

Due to injuries, said Harris, the roster that the Tigers built "never really saw the light of day." But there was plenty of light at the end of the tunnel, even in the miserable month of May. In too many games, the bullpen just left the team in the dark.