Kahnle was one of those offseason moves that I liked from the Tigers. He was an established veteran who knew how to pitch. The guy was a changeup wizard when he played for the Yankees and he pitched in the World Series last year, so I figured he had a chance to be a legitimate back-end bullpen guy for Detroit. For a minute, things were going pretty swimmingly. This is where I have to give Detroit fans credit for being intelligent. In the first half of the season, Kahnle would float that change up across the plate,, and we would sit back and collectively wonder how this thing didn’t get crushed. Well, at some point, the rest of the league must’ve heard us because Kahnle was a disaster after June.

You look at the final numbers for Tommy Kahnle, and I can’t quite label him as awful, but that’s the only defense that I have for him. For most of the second half, he was a complete disaster, which is unfortunate because, for the first 80 games, he and Will Vest in the back end of the bullpen were really effective. It almost felt like the bullpen went as Kahnle went. Once he started to stumble, a lot of other dominoes fell.

There was no gradual, slow decline with Tommy Kahnle. There was The Good, which is what we saw in the first several months of the season. He posted a 1.77 ERA in his first 34 outings, and while the peripherals indicated that some regression was likely. I don’t think anybody could’ve expected what we saw. From July 2nd on, he posted a 7.90 ERA, and even though he started to stabilize a little bit in September, the damage was already done. He ended up taking the loss in the 15-inning classic that decided the ALDS. He was one of the last options out of the Tigers' bullpen that night, which just showed how far he had fallen off after a solid first half.

As it stands right now, I can’t really find myself being concerned about what the future looks like with Tommy Kahnle. It was a one-year signing that we thought would work, and for the most part, it didn’t. Do we see him in the big leagues ever again? Probably. Some tanking team will give him a minor league deal, and he’ll find his way back on a major league mound, but it won’t be in Detroit. I can’t put it all on one guy, but Kahnle is definitely indicative of a bigger issue in Detroit, which is the Lack of velocity that exists in this pen. You can only finesse your way to success for so long in this game, and it’s kind of felt like Kahnle has reached his ceiling. He’s had a fine career, but was a disappointment in Detroit.

FINAL GRADE: C-