Tigers sending message to themselves: 'We can win every series that we play'

On the final day of April, the Tigers reached the 30-game mark with a winning record for the first time in nine years. They entered May with their most wins since 1984, when they famously went 18-2 in April. And while that's partly the product of a jam-packed schedule, they started May by winning their fourth straight series.

Of course, it wasn't until the 40-game mark that Sparky Anderson said a team could be judged.

"No disrespect to Sparky, who was an incredible manager in this game, I look at it on a much more narrow scale," said A.J. Hinch after the Tigers' 4-1 win over the Cardinals on Wednesday. "What I preach to our players, in a hitters meeting or the cafeteria, is you better focus on where your feet are."

The Tigers were already in over their heads at this point last season. They entered May with a record of 10-17, without the talent to ever undo the damage. At 18-13 this season, they're on solid ground in a winnable division. The Guardians have raced out to a better start than anyone expected, the Royals have kept pace with the Tigers, and here come the Twins, but Detroit did exactly what it needed to out of the gate, exactly what it failed to do in its first three seasons under Hinch.

The blueprint for this team was built on pitching. The Tigers got another strong start Wednesday from Kenta Maeda, his second in row after his typical April struggles. Maeda had his best fastball of the season, said Hinch, on an 80-degree day in Detroit, and the off-speed pitches to keep the Cardinals off balance for six innings. The bullpen shut the door after a rare misstep in the first game of Tuesday's double-header, and the Tigers celebrated another win.

It'd be a stretch to say this is becoming routine. We're not even a quarter of the way into the season, and the offense will eventually have to shoulder more of the load. But the arms are clearly a strength: the Tigers are fourth in the majors in team ERA (3.12) and second in WHIP (1.10) and batting average against (.214).

"A ton of strikes," Hinch said of Maeda, and he could've been speaking of the entire staff.

The strikes against the lineup are clear: the Tigers are young and vulnerable, in the zone and out of it. Growing in the big leagues is painful. They wasted Jack Flaherty's 14-strikeout gem on Tuesday by failing to score more than a run, which came on a homer by Riley Greene. Greene homered again in the Tigers' win in the nightcap and led off Wednesday's game with a double, and carries a .906 OPS into this weekend's series at Yankee Stadium, where a short porch beckons in right.

"I’m gonna try to hit the ball to left," Greene said with a grin.

It was indicative of his approach at the plate, to use all fields. The power that comes with it is natural. The more he sees big-league pitching, the more the 22-year-old seems to know what to do with it: "If I get a good pitch to hit, I’ll be in a good spot." Greene has the tools to be an offensive star, for a team that hasn't produced one of its own in decades. And his rise this spring has helped offset the struggles of Spencer Torkelson, Parker Meadows and Colt Keith.

Keith entered Wednesday's game with the worst OPS in the bigs, then broke through in his first at-bat with an RBI double on a line-drive into the right field gap. Hinch joked that the 22-year-old, who has fallen victim to some hard outs, would have needed "a status check" had the ball been caught; Keith smiled and admitted that "it was a huge relief."

"I got on second and was like, thank god it fell," he said. "It’s been a tough little stretch, but I feel like if anyone’s going to come out of it on top, it’ll be me."

The blow that mattered most Wednesday came from Matt Vierling, the do-it-all player who smoked a curveball into the left-field seats for a two-run bomb in the third. It gave the Tigers a 3-0 lead, which was all they needed. Vierling is 27 with just a couple a big-league seasons under his belt, but feels like a vet among Detroit's position players. He's certainly a leader, "as respected as anybody we have in that room because of the way that he goes about his work," said Hinch.

Vierling arrived ahead of last season from the Phillies, after playing for them in the World Series in 2022. He knows what a winning team looks like. So does Hinch, who calls Vierling "a winning player," an infielder, an outfielder, a threat on the bases and, more and more, a tough out at the plate. Vierling perked up when asked about the Tigers' start this season compared to last and said, "It's what we preached all spring."

"And we want to keep it going. It’s just, when you look at last year, you don’t put yourself in that hole that you gotta climb out of. If we keep winning like this and keep it going, you’re able to put together a nice record and stay in the fight," he said.

Hinch doesn't pretend to know where this team is headed 31 games into the season. Youth is hard to define, and harder to predict. Take Wenceel Perez, an unheralded prospect who was summoned in a pinch last month from Toledo and homered from both sides of the plate Tuesday night. Or Torkelson, who hasn't homered at all after drilling 30 last season. Hinch does know this: "We needed to win the series today." The Tigers went out and did that before getting on a plane to New York, where the Yankees await.

"I think we’re proving to ourselves we can win every series that we play, and that in itself will build the type of months and the type of season that this city deserves," said Hinch. "But it’s May 1st. We’re not going to get too far ahead of ourselves."

Greene would agree. The Tigers have spent most of the past decade talking about the promise of the unknown. It's alluring until it isn't. When asked what a win like Wednesday's says about the future of this team, Greene said, "I mean, I feel like the future’s very bright, but we’re focused on right now."

"We’re going to worry about winning our next game."