The Detroit Tigers went into 2025 with more optimism than in recent years. The whole “rebuild turned contender” narrative raised expectations of incremental improvement from many position players – and many of those expectations were not met.
Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free Press recently evaluated every position player from the Tigers' 40-man roster, assigning letter grades to each one based on their performance in 2025, and let's just say that very few of them are making the honor roll. Even average performances – which might’ve earned “B” grades two years ago – now looked like regression in context.