Tigers' awful baserunning stat speaks to a larger issue in Detroit

Not much has gone well for the Detroit Tigers this season. There have been crushing injuries, poor performances and regressions, and some serious frustration directed at AJ Hinch, who's desperately pressing buttons but can't seem to get anything right.

The Tigers are in danger of having things spiral out of control. Given the short-handed nature of the present roster, the margin for error is tiny. Playing solid, fundamentally sound baseball is essential in order to tread water until the cavalry returns.

Unfortunately, they haven't been doing that. A particular sore spot has been Detroit's performance on the basepaths, where, as of May 20, the team led the majors with 22 outs on the bases.

Interestingly, they haven't been terrible at taking the extra base. But they also haven't been super aggressive when stealing, with only 20 stolen bases, which ranks 27th in baseball. The performance overall shows they are giving up precious runs that they cannot afford to lose.

Tigers cannot continue to give outs away on the bases if they want to turn their season around

When you can't hit and you can't pitch, there are two areas you have to make sure that you are fundamentally sound — defensively and on the basepaths. Giving away outs in either facet is damning for any team, but for a club that's currently lacking talent, it is absolutely egregious.

For example, Zach McKinstry getting picked off of second base in the bottom of the eighth with the Tigers up 1-0 is unforgivable. Making it even worse is that he had a similar blunder when he reached on an error against the Mets and then promptly got picked off at first just a week before.

In both instances, the Tigers failed to capitalize on situations when they really needed to, and in both cases, they were leading at the time of the base running error, but still took home losses.

Detroit can bemoan its poor injury luck and hope for slumping players to turn it around all they want. They can pretend that everything will be okay when Tarik Skubal and company come off the IL. But the fact of the matter remains: they won't win games if they shoot themselves in the foot, and if the losses keep piling up, the hole they need to dig out of will be insurmountable. The most frustrating thing is that this is 100% within the Tigers' control.

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