We finish our yearly awards with the Detroit Tigers prospect who had the biggest breakout season in 2023.
Minor league baseball is a lot of fun to cover. Generally speaking, it’s a more intimate experience. The cities are smaller, the crowds are smaller, and the players and staff are more accessible and accommodating. The Detroit Tigers have managed to fill their organization with a lot of hard-working and talented players, coaches, and support staff over the last few years, and it’s truly enjoyable to watch them chase their dreams.
But once you get embedded in minor-league culture, it can be easy to forget why this whole ecosystem exists in the first place. There are secondary and tertiary benefits to minor league baseball, of course. But its main goal is to produce quality Major League Baseball players.
For decades the Detroit Tigers organization wasn’t very good at realizing that primary goal. But things are beginning to change. We’ve seen some of that talent bubble up to the big leagues in the last two seasons. And there’s more coming soon.
So today we collaborate with friends and colleagues, Brandon Day of Bless You Boys and Scott Bentley of Locked On Tigers, to present you with the biggest breakout players from 2023
We didn’t set any particular guidelines for what constitutes a breakout. But it seems there are three kinds of breakouts: players with great physical talent who start realizing their potential; organizational types who take a developmental leap; and players who come from nowhere. And our list has all three.
We’ll start with a quick acknowledgment of a few players who didn’t make our list, but still showed impressive progress in 2023. We discussed Blake Holub at length in our best reliever piece, but his developmental leap deserves mention here, too.
Chris Meyers destroyed Midwest League pitching before becoming a key piece of Erie’s title run. And he did it while playing excellent defense at first base and moonlighting in left field.
Lael Lockhart Jr. wasn’t in a particularly great place in May. The Dodgers had just released him after he posted an 11.40 ERA over 8 innings of work as a middle reliever. But he didn’t quit, and instead came to Erie, where he made some adjustments and pitched spectacularly for the next four months.
Honorable Mention 1 – Trei Cruz
Trei Cruz’s nabbed one vote in our poll, thanks in part to a modest bump in power production, but mostly because he proved to be an above-average center fielder. For the first two months of the season it looked like Cruz might win this award outright. He was batting .270 with 7 home runs and an OPS creeping near .900 as the calendar hit June.
He slumped afterward, but even though he finished the year batting .218 he still maintained a solid .335 on-base percentage. And he stepped up in the playoffs, going 6-for-20 with three doubles and a triple. That ability to get on base, find gaps, and play defense up the middle gives him a chance to see the majors.
Honorable Mention 2 – Keider Montero
Keider Montero landed on our best starting pitcher list, but he also earned a few votes here. The Detroit Tigers always seemed fairly high on Montero. They pushed him to High-A as a 20-year-old and made him their opening day starter that year. But he struggled in West Michigan in both 2021 and 2022 and returned there again to begin 2023.
Montero quickly pitched his way to Erie this year, and then on to Toledo, where he threw at least five innings in all eight of his outings. He showed improvement with his fastball, his breaking balls, and his changeup. And he led the entire organization with 160 strikeouts in 127.1 innings. His ultimate role is still up in the air, but Keider Montero is now a high-probability big leaguer.
Third Place – Troy Melton
Troy Melton’s first breakout came in college. After three seasons at San Diego State he owned a 5.49 ERA, albeit in just over 98 innings. But he altered his mechanics before the 2022 season and posted a 2.07 ERA in 65.1 innings. That was enough for the Detroit Tigers to use their 4th-round pick on Melton. but he pitched just twice in pro ball after the draft, so it was hard to know what to expect in 2023.
Melton pitched his way out of Lakeland after seven starts, and then he was even better over 16 outings in West Michigan. The end result was a 2.74 ERA with 94 strikeouts in 92 innings. That ERA was the lowest in the organization among pitchers with at least ten starts, and Melton’s stuff seemed to get better each month. In under a calendar year he went from a question mark to possibly the second best pitching prospect in the organization.
Second Place – Sawyer Gipson-Long
Sawyer Gipson-Long wasn’t part of Detroit’s plans at this time last year. He was the last player acquired by Al Avila, and the Tigers left him unprotected heading into the Rule 5 Draft. No other team took Gipson-Long either, because he looked like a potential middle reliever at best. He had a nice slider, but his low-90s fastball and changeup were fringe-average offerings.
So Sawyer Gipson-Long went out and made himself better. He reworked his fastball and his change, and he added a cutter in the middle of the season. Home runs remained a bit of an issue, but he posted a 3.74 ERA in 65 Double-A innings. Then he struck out 50 batters in 34.2 innings with Triple-A Toledo. And then he put together four terrific starts at the MLB level. And now Gipson-Long looks like a decent bet to begin the 2024 season in Detroit’s rotation. It was exactly the sort of development story teams need to have sustained success in the big leagues.
Sawyer Gipson-Long put on a show back on August 18 with 12 strikeouts and only one hit allowed. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/ArR0sxLYoE
— Toledo Mud Hens (@MudHens) September 1, 2023
First Place – Justice Bigbie
Last December we took reader questions for a mailbag article. One request was to name another player who might have a Kerry Carpenter-like breakout in 2023. We had to preface our response by saying fans shouldn’t expect that sort of thing again any time soon. You just don’t see 19th-round picks come from nowhere to dominate minor-league pitching.
We didn’t pick Justice Bigbie for a breakout, because no one picked Justice Bigbie for a breakout. He spent the 2022 season in the low minors, batting .269 with three home runs in 100 games. Bigbie wasn’t on a single prospect list anywhere.
And then in 2023 Justice Bigbie hit everything. He batted .333 with power in High-A, then hit .362 with more power in Double-A. Then he hit .275 in 15 games in Triple-A Toledo. And after going 4-for-5 last night, he’s now batting .313 through 13 Arizona Fall League games. Baseball doesn’t care as much about batting average as it used to. But you still have to hit to reach the big leagues, and Justice Bigbie hits.
It’s a unique batted-ball profile that produces a lot of hard contact to the opposite field, and to stick in the bigs as a corner outfielder Bigbie will have to pull the ball in the air more. But for now our only concern is celebrating a spectacular season that no one saw coming.
Justice Bigbie does it again! His 2nd home run of the night is a 2-run blast that ties the game for the @erie_seawolves in the 9th. @Greg_Gania with the call. pic.twitter.com/TK7OyZe615
— Tigers ML Report (@tigersMLreport) August 24, 2023
Congratulations to Justice Bigbie, and everyone else on this list. And stay tuned for our upcoming series looking at the best individual tools in the Detroit Tigers system.
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Rogelio Castillo