Welcome to the Rookie Roundup, a weekly look-in on baseball’s best and most interesting first-year players. Last week, we broke down the National League Rookie of the Year race between top contenders Jackson Merrill and Paul Skenes. Today, we’ll look at how a late-season resurgence by Parker Meadows has given the Detroit Tigers some postseason life.
It took a little over a month for Parker Meadows to go from Opening Day center fielder for the Detroit Tigers to a minor league demotion. It’s taken the same amount of time for him to save his season—and perhaps his team’s—from the brink.
Meadows, a 24-year-old outfielder who received a $2.5 million signing bonus after the Tigers drafted him in the second round in 2018, spent half a decade working his way up Detroit’s organizational ladder before making his debut a little over a year ago. He held his own, earning a starting spot to open this season.
Things soured quickly, though, with Meadows hitting .096 through the team’s first 35 games while posting a 37.6% strikeout rate. For a club that came into the season with playoff aspirations, that wasn’t going to cut it, and Meadows was sent back to the minors on May 7 to work through his issues at the plate.
Meadows earned a brief three-game call-up in early July that was cut short by a hamstring injury. After recovering, he returned to the big league club on Aug. 3. At the time, the Tigers’ playoff hopes had all but evaporated. The team was 52–59, tied for the fourth-worst record in the American League. Detroit was 16 games behind the first-place Cleveland Guardians and 9.5 games out of the third wild-card spot, with FanGraphs giving the team a 0.3% chance at making the postseason.
Thanks in large part to Meadows’s resurgence, the tides have started to turn. Since his call-up, the brother of former Tigers outfielder Austin Meadows is batting .309/.343/.521 with two homers and five stolen bases in 24 games. Detroit is 17–7 in those games, climbing to within five games of the Kansas City Royals for the AL’s final playoff spot.
As such, FanGraphs now has Detroit’s playoff odds at … 7.2%. That might not seem like much, but it’s a massive improvement compared to a month ago. And though several Tigers share credit for the uptick, Meadows’s ability to put his abysmal start behind him and make the necessary adjustments to thrive in the batter’s box has breathed life into the team’s final month—and has him poised to retain a spot in Detroit’s young core as the franchise eyes a more fruitful 2025 campaign.
"His knowledge of the strike zone is really good," manager A.J. Hinch said last month, per Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free Press. "And when he's patient enough not having to only hit early the count, when he can execute a game plan with the array of pitches that are being thrown at him, that's a good sign. ... Slight mechanical adjustment he made in the minor leagues combined with a very efficient approach. We're seeing the results."
Perhaps Meadows’s best tool is his speed. His average sprint speed of 29.1 feet per second ranks him in the 93rd percentile among all players. Yet at the start of the season, his approach at the plate did not let him utilize that skill.
Though a small sample size at just 85 plate appearances, Meadows put a staggering 75% of balls in play in the air, with just 2.5% registering as line drives. Since the start of August, his line drive rate has surged to 27.6%. As a result, his BABIP during that stretch is .365. Before his demotion, it was a glaring .128.
In addition to making better contact, he’s also simply making more of it. That strikeout rate that crept near 40% before his demotion is a promising 18.2% since his return.
Can Meadows keep this up and help Detroit creep further into the playoff picture? Even if the answer to the former is yes, the latter proposition remains remote. The Tigers face the Baltimore Orioles six times down the stretch, and the only games against an opponent ahead of them in the standings are a three-game set in Kansas City from Sept. 16–18. Winning those games will be paramount, but much of what needs to happen for Detroit to surpass both the Royals and the Boston Red Sox is out of the Tigers’ control.
But as fun as it is to dream, crashing the party this October shouldn’t be the goal. The Tigers possess an impressive core of young players—a group including Tarik Skubal, Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Colt Keith, Casey Mize, Reese Olson, Matt Vierling and Spencer Torkelson—that portend better days ahead, perhaps as soon as 2025. Meadows is now back to being a part of that picture. Regardless of how much ground Detroit makes up over the next month, his progress is reason enough to keep tabs on the Tigers’ finish.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as American League Rookie Roundup: Parker Meadows Spurring Tigers’ Late Push.
