Heading toward the 2026 season, the shortstop position remains the biggest long-term question mark on the Tigers’ roster. Sure, they’ll have plenty of work to do in regards to the starting rotation once, and assuming, Tarik Skubal leaves in free agency. But the position group is fairly well set up for the future with the exception of shortstop. Parker Meadows is starting to run out of leash in center field, but Max Clark isn’t far from being ready to take over out there. Kevin McGonigle can probably handle shortstop to an acceptable level assuming he hits as expected, but he’s much better suited to second base, or potentially a move to third after the Tigers experimented with that change during the Arizona Fall League.
Trey Sweeney was the hope to fill the gap until top shortstop prospect Bryce Rainer arrives on the scene, but the 20-year-old Rainer barely got to play in Single-A this season before a shoulder surgery ended his season. He’s most likely three or even four years away from the big leagues assuming things go well. In the meantime, the question is whether Sweeney can make enough adjustments to help bridge that position. After a really rough 2025 season, there’s a lot of work in front of him in order to fulfill that goal.
Sweeney appeared in 118 games and produced a disastrous 53 wRC+ in 2025. No more needs to be said. It was a brutal year, and because the Tigers needed Javier Báez in center field for long stretches in the first half, Sweeney was playing just about everyday.
He walked a little more than in his 2024 debut, bumping that rate up to 8 percent from 5.9 percent. But, while his chase rates weren’t any worse, he took more called strikes and whiffed a little more, leading to an increase in strikeout rate from 26.9 percent to 28.2 percent. None of these are hugely significant changes, but considering the amount of poor contact he makes, they were enough to turn him from a below average hitter to a truly bad one this season.
At this point, Sweeney has played in 154 games at the major league level. He’s basically wrapping up a rookie season that played out from the point the Tigers acquired him in the Jack Flaherty trade with the Dodgers at the 2024 trade deadline until the end of the 2025 season. Player development doesn’t end once a player reaches the major leagues, and giving up on players too quickly, particularly a 25-year-old, left-handed hitting shortstop who still has all three options is unwise. If there was a trade to be made that would change the equation, but Sweeney’s value in trade has never been lower than it is right now.
On the other hand, while one might be tempted to point to his career .260 BABIP and feel he’s been somewhat unlucky on balls in play, Sweeney’s batted ball data says he’s basically gotten what he deserves based on quality of contact.
Sweeney’s 46.1 percent ground ball rate tells much of the story. The rest is covered by his meager 13 percent line drive rate. To hit for average and power, he needs a lot more line drives and more fly balls as well. For a high strikeout hitter, this is a brutal combination.
This certainly wasn’t always his profile. At the Triple-A level in 2024 he put up an excellent 26.7 line drive rate. At the time, his issue in terms of contact was more that he didn’t hit nearly enough fly balls to tap into his power. For a hitter who is never going to be a low strikeout type, cashing in on the contact he does make for extra base hits and home runs is crucial. In 2024 his fly ball rate at Triple-A was a miserable 28.1 percent, and of those fly balls he popped up 16.9 percent of them.
None of this is helped by the fact that while Sweeney will make all the routine plays at shortstop, his below average range for the position and fringy arm limited him to an average at best projection at the position going forward. Certainly he can also handle second and third base, giving him plenty of runway to remain a major leaguer, but he’s caught between being a little light defensively for a shortstop, and not enough of a hitter to get regular time at second or third base, where his defense would look better. He was a plus 3 DRS at the shortstop position in 2024, but a negative 5 DRS in 2025. The truth is probably in between those marks, indicating that his struggles at the plate may have been getting to him a bit in the field as well.
Still, he’s not bad there, he has above average raw power, and he hits left-handed. This isn’t a guy you just kick to the curb quickly if things are working out. Even in more of a utility role, Sweeney would be a pretty useful contributor if he could get himself sorted out at the plate and get back to giving the Tigers average production against right-handed pitching.
Evaluators has always worried about Sweeney’s busy hands in his setup, as well as a stiff lower half that limits the six-foot-two shortstop on pitches at the bottom of the zone. For a left-handed pull hitter with power, the inability to get down and drive those pitches has an outsized ability to get to his power and negates his generally good command of the strike zone.
We don’t have much in the way of bat path data on him yet, but it’s pretty clear he struggles to keep his path shallow enough through the hitting zone to square up enough pitches. On pitches he should catch out front and crush, he’s often scooping through the zone rather than going from a shallow arc into the upswing at the front of his effective contact zone. His swing is also quite long, nearly as long as Javy Báez’s swing, which doesn’t help matters. Sweeney has to start a little early, and he’s often just not in a good position to match the plane of the pitch and drive the ball like he needs to.
Most of this has been a part of scouting reports on him going back to his days with the Yankees. The Dodgers traded for him prior to the 2024 season, and he showed some improvement at the plate with their help. That was part of the reason the Tigers were pretty happy to land him as the second part of the Flaherty trade, with power-hitting catching prospect Thayron Liranzo as the center piece. But rather than continue to make progress with his swing, the work he’s done hasn’t resolved the lack of hip mobility, nor the bat path concerns. This season, probably caught between these adjustments and trying to sort it out in season, Sweeney’s quality of contact collapsed for long stretches of the season.
So this is a pretty big offseason for Trey Sweeney’s career. His defensive utility and his quality plate discipline is going to get him plenty of leash, but his playing time will continue to fade into bench player territory if he can’t finally dial in the adjustments he’s been working on over the past two seasons and become a more consistent hitter who balances out the swing and miss in his game with more hard contact on a line and in the air.
The Tigers have Kevin McGonigle just about ready for the major leagues, and while similar defensive concerns surround their top prospect, he is as sure a thing to hit as the Tigers have seen in the farm system since the days of Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker. Bryce Rainer is the better defensive shortstop prospect, but he’s just getting started on his pro career and has years of development ahead of him. There is plenty of room for Sweeney to remain a viable utility player for the Tigers and take over that job from Zach McKinstry in the years ahead, but his offseason work in the cage has got to show real progress in 2026.
Once a player hits Triple-A, and then gets a full year of major league service time, optimism for fixing a long-term swing issue is naturally going to fade out. If things don’t click this season, he’ll be bouncing between Triple-A and bench roles in the major leagues, particularly if McGonigle shows himself to be at least as good a defender at the shortstop position.