Scott Harris doubles down on young hitters: "Shortcuts don't end droughts"

The Tigers have plotted a path under Scott Harris. For better or worse, they'll be seeing it through.

"Our path forward has to depend on young hitters getting opportunity to make adjustments and demonstrate that they can really help us moving forward," Harris said on the Tigers' Have a Seat podcast. "That’s the path we chose over the last 20 months I’ve been here."

So far, it has led to one of the worst lineups in the majors. Harris prefers the term "high-variance" to describe an offense that occasionally puts up big numbers but mostly puts up zeroes, and isn't in any rush to fix it. He cites Riley Greene as a model for Detroit's vision: the former fifth overall pick has pushed his OPS from .682 as a rookie to .850 in year three.

"The best players in baseball often struggle really early in their career. ... We can’t just jump off the train with some of the young guys because we’re going to miss some really good years in the future," Harris said.

Harris does deserve time to execute his plan. Patience just doesn't appeal to a fanbase that's been fed false hope for nearly a decade. While Harris is in his second season as president of baseball operations, the Tigers are in their eighth straight season of losing. Their playoff drought is going on 10 years, tied for the longest in baseball.

"One of the differences between me and fans is I’m really emotional when I watch the Tigers play, but I actively have to divorce emotions from decision-making," Harris said. "I have to let those emotions energize me and motivate me without impacting my decision making. I have to push the organization forward in a healthy, constructive way. That means building it the right way. That doesn’t mean chasing shortcuts."

There was a clamor within the fanbase last offseason for the Tigers to add more veteran bats. Harris said they only had room on the roster for one: Mark Canha, before later adding Gio Urshela. He acknowledged on the podcast that "there were players available in free agency or via trade that seemed like great fits for us" the last two offseasons "and they would have won a lot of headlines. The optics would have been great."

"People would have been really fired up. It would have galvanized sections of our fanbase," he said. "But in hindsight, when you look at what happens to some of those players, not all of them, but some of them would have been mistakes. They not only wouldn’t have strengthened areas of our team, they may have under-performed and blocked a young player who deserves an opportunity to demonstrate that they can be a mainstay at that position."

The only mainstay the Tigers have among their position players right now is Greene. All of their other young hitters remain real question marks, from Spencer Torkelson and Parker Meadows, who are back in Toledo, to Colt Keith and Justyn-Henry Malloy, who are trying to survive in Detroit, to Kerry Carpenter, who's on the shelf.

The Tigers consider Matt Vierling and Wenceel Pérez success stories this season, but neither one has changed the team's long-term outlook. Harris could have at least brightened the short-term view by bolstering the lineup last winter. Instead, the Tigers are 24th in the majors in OPS and fading quickly in the playoff race.

"Sometimes," said Harris, "those shortcuts don’t end droughts. They extend and deepen those droughts. Sometimes steady progress with young players setting the stage for big leaps on the horizon is actually the fastest way to get to October and continue getting to October every year after that."

In addition to prioritizing young hitters, Harris said the Tigers will continue to place a premium on starting pitching and outfield defense moving forward. The rising value of athleticism in today's game informed their decisions to trade for Vierling two winters ago and draft high school outfielder Max Clark third overall last summer.

"We changed the profiles we were chasing in the draft last year to adapt to the environment that we are facing every night," Harris said. "Playing in this park (Comerica) and in this division, you should expect to play a lot of close games. How do you win close games? With dependable pitching and really good outfield defense. Those have been two priorities for us."

On the topic of outfield defense, Harris he considers it "leverage for our pitching."

"If we can take a gapper and turn it into an out consistently across six months, the run value advantage of that is huge," he said. "Not only in the sense that we are going to allow fewer runs, it's fewer stress pitches for our pitchers, we’re going to get off the field quicker, and we are going to create the big run value swings that lead to wins. It’s going to be a big part of how we build this team moving forward."

Hired hitters, maybe not so much.