Detroit Tigers: Ryan Carpenter had a rough big league start

With the 2018 season coming to a close, we are providing year-end grades to each Detroit Tigers player who donned the Old English D in 2018.

The Detroit Tigers completed the first year of what looks to be a multi-year rebuilding process. While the team was hard to watch at times, there is still plenty to evaluate from this season as we look ahead to the next few years.

As with any team, there were a lot of excellent performances, surprise performances, and of course disappointing performances. Here at Motor City Bengals, we are going to be evaluating each player who suited up for the Detroit Tigers this season. We will analyze how they performed, what their future holds in the Motor City, and we will provide them a grade.

Note: the grade will be relative to what was expected of them. So a player who performed well above expectations may earn a B or an A, even if their actual season numbers are not that elite. If you disagree, feel free to drop us a comment. We would love to have discussions about these!

A handful of Tigers pitchers have already been evaluated, including Sandy Baez (here), Victor Alcantara (here), Matt Hall (here), and Chad Bell (here). We continue grading the pitchers with Ryan Carpenter our next player in the season grades.

Ryan Carpenter

Carpenter saw just six games of action for the Olde English D. He started in five of those games and it was a rough stint, to say the least. He posted a 7.25 ERA in 22.1 innings of work. The Tigers brought him on a deal last winter on a major league deal.

The lefty looked rough at times through his starts and eventually found himself being optioned to Triple-A Toledo.

Grade: C

Carpenter’s season with the Tigers wasn’t pretty. However, our own Andy Patton wrote about a month ago that Carpenter has a curveball that is seldom used. If the Tigers brought him back and had him use his curveball more its possible that he sees better success.

He was brought in as a free-agent signee. With the Tigers rebuilding his signing was a low-risk-high-reward deal and at the end of the day Carpenter didn’t perform great, but there were certainly other players who performed worse.

Check back here daily for more player grades! And if you’d like to discuss any grades, please leave us a comment on our Facebook or Twitter page.