Detroit Tigers rookies demonstrating what matters this season
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Do the math, and there’s this: They’re(Tigers) good enough … they’re not quite good enough … they’ll be in the race until the end.
That should feed the baseball soul to a point, in the third of three topsy-turvy seasons. But even if the Tigers don’t make the postseason – the odds of a playoff spot suggest they won’t, at 23.1% entering Tuesday (fourth-best in the AL Central, per Fangraphs) – and even on nights when they fumble and stumble and turn blowouts into semi-nailbiters, there are always reminders of what awaits.
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Clark, still just 21, is a student that way: eternally observant, studying his own mechanics, obviously, but studying other hitters, as well.
“You know, when I hear him talk about players that are in the big leagues – and players that he’s played against … he’s just very observant,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said Monday. “He’s a baseball rat through and through in terms of how he follows the game. He’s remarkably advanced in his baseball knowledge, his baseball intelligence and the way he watches the game, and he’s as dialed into the sport for his age as anybody I’ve ever seen.”
Kevin McGonigle, who hit age 22 on Tuesday, is similarly addicted to the search; when he stepped to the plate in the second inning – after striking out in the first – and jacked a cutter from Carmen Mlodzinski to the concourse in right center and nearly into the Allegheny – he’d clearly learned from his first at-bat (not to mention all the other at-bats this season).
The pair of rookies are relentless this way, and relentlessly inquisitive with each other. They’ve been like that since they came into the organization in the same draft class three years ago, back in July 2023.
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Yet it was his coaches, he said, who helped lock him back in. Just as it was the coaches who helped Clark get rid of his toe-tap during his loadup as the pitch arrives, getting him back to a leg kick.
Whatever works, as long as it’s always in the works – and for these two young Tigers, and their growing number of young teammates, lots has been working lately.
“I was just getting too antsy in the box,” McGonigle said.
“It felt really good and on time today,” Clark said.
They have these conversations with each other, of course.
“We push each other,” McGonigle said, “we feed off each other, as well. Watch a lot of video and, you know, kind of ask his approach if I’m going through a little struggle, or he asks my approach if he’s going through a little struggle. I think that’s good. I think that’s what the team has to do to get better.”
They are the faces of the future for the Tigers. And no matter what happens the rest of this season, that has to be a comforting thought.
Monday was just another reminder.