With the 2024 season now blessedly just days away, it’s time to look at a player who is perhaps being taken for granted this spring.
Kerry Carpenter followed Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene to the major leagues late in 2022, and so far has surpassed them both with a very nice full season debut in 2023.
Carpenter’s dangerous bat remains his calling card, but it’s the secondary parts of his game that offer room for improvement this season.
By now, Carpenter’s story is well known. A 19th rounder back in 2019, the corner outfielder came out of nowhere with a monstrous 2022 campaign in the upper minors after re-making his swing with Aaron Judge’s swing coach, Richard Schenck.
He debuted with six home runs in a 31 game look at major league pitching that summer and then hit 20 in 2023 despite missing a quarter of the season with a shoulder injury suffered at the end of April.
The Tigers hung in there for a few weeks without him, but as Riley Greene and Eduardo Rodriguez joined him on the injured list in late May, the club went into a tailspin, losing nine straight to open the month of June and putting themselves out of the running for the division early.
Perhaps some solace and hope for 2024 can be found in the fact that the Tigers were five games over .500 from that point on.
Hence the urgency to get out to a better start this year and give their young talent time to settle in and hopefully propel them to a playoff berth.
The Tigers need their best hitters to carry them early on for that to become a reality, but this is still a relatively unproven heart of the order.
