A's designate former Tiger for assignment as hot start to 2024 season ends

Hot streaks are funny and fickle things in baseball. Hitters are always making tweaks, and there are so many variables between batters and pitchers that make hitting as difficult as it is, but sometimes things just click. For the Tigers, for example, Matt Vierling has been riding a hot streak; he's hitting .400 over his last seven games (through Thursday), with .920 slugging, four home runs, and 10 RBI. Spencer Torkelson is most decidedly not — he's hit .115 over the same span with one home run as his only RBI despite some promising signs of life last week.

A former Tiger who was experiencing a particularly frustrating blaze of glory with the Athletics, of all teams, is Tyler Nevin, who was hitting .316 at the end of April and extended a nine-game hitting streak into the first game of May. He was only a Tiger for one season and appeared in 41 games in the majors last year, but he hit a sad .200 with a .622 OPS in Detroit, making his ascent with the A's deeply infuriating.

However, after that streak to end April, Nevin lost whatever magic he'd found and went 1-43 from May 2 to May 26, and the A's DFA'ed him on May 28.

Athletics DFA former Tiger Tyler Nevin after going 3-for-47 in May

Nevin ended up on the A's after being DFA'ed by the Orioles, who picked him up for the second time in his career in exchange for cash to the Tigers in the offseason. Even without the nine-game streak, he looked pretty good throughout the rest of April, hitting .273 before he caught fire on April 23. His last hit for the A's came on May 11 before he went hitless in eight more games and his batting average dropped al the way down to .220.

Being DFA'ed isn't an unfamiliar process for Nevin, who's had to go through it four times now. This time was particularly brutal — the A's let him go a day before his 27th birthday. It's likely that he'll end up going back into the A's system rather than getting tossed to another organization, and he might even have the opportunity to get back to the majors. He was always able to bat pretty exceptionally in Triple-A for the Orioles and Tigers in 2022 and 2023, but he might just have to get used to the Quadruple-A status that he seemed destined for in Detroit.