I feel like I’m setting myself up and preparing for a storm that hasn’t happened yet. Baseball is beautifully paradoxical in the sense that you can become more knowledgeable every day while simultaneously not knowing anything. We can prognosticate and predict all we want, but at the end of the day, no one can predict this game. I love advanced numbers and analytics as much as anybody, but this is a game still played by human beings, and human beings go through physical and mental struggles. We’ve seen guys change their swings 1 million times over. Sometimes, clubhouses are completely fractured one year and then totally together the next year. You just never know.
I say all this because, in my heart of hearts, I think the tigers are going to have an awesome squad in 2026. I’m not trying to fearmonger. But if something happens where they don’t win the World Series or don’t make a deep run through October, I don’t want this organization to get the wrong message. I don’t want them to come away from this year saying they went for it, failed, and therefore shouldn’t go for it again. There’s more excitement now for this season than we’ve seen for any Tigers team in over a decade. The returning core is obviously a big reason, but the bigger reason is that they’ve shown a commitment to spending.
It feels like the Tigers have bought into themselves again, and I hope that that vibe never changes. No one in this fan base has ever asked the Tigers to spend like the Dodgers, but it is entirely acceptable to believe they should spend enough to put together a championship-caliber product. I hope that they’ve done that this year. Even if they haven’t, they should keep going back to the well.