TORONTO – In a quiet, subdued Detroit Tigers clubhouse, something incredibly cool happened.
Tigers relief pitcher Drew Sommers walked over to John Peck and put his arm the young rookie shortstop. They stayed like that for several seconds, facing into the lockers, as Sommers did most of the talking.
Peck was coming off a tough game. He made errors on back-to-back plays which was incredibly uncharacteristic of him – both happened while Sommers was on the mound – in the Tigers’ 5-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays on Wednesday, Sept. 16.
“What did you tell him?” I asked Sommers.
“I told him, ‘we’ll get the next one,’” Sommers said.
If you ask me, that’s how teams are formed. Real teams. Not just a collection of players. That’s the glue that lasts over
time.
Mistakes happen in baseball – it’s a game of failure. Games get blown. Errors are committed. Happens all the time. The real important part? What do you do next? And what do you learn from it?
The Tigers commit three straight errors 😬 pic.twitter.com/GL3trQsRDx
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) September 16, 2026
It’s the same in life as it is in baseball.
And that’s why this stretch of games over the past couple of weeks has been so important for the Tigers' future. Both the good and the bad.
These young guys have learned how to deal with crushing defeats – like dropping three winnable games against Cleveland. All walkoffs, which couldn’t be more painful.
But they have gotten a taste of winning over the last week, ripping off six straight wins.
And then, in the finale against Toronto, they learned how the game speeds up – and the margin for error shrinks even more – when the crowds get louder and the moment gets bigger and the pressure is magnified against a team fighting for the postseason.
Learning how to win
First, let’s deal with the wins. And that brings me to another interesting conversation.
On Wednesday, I asked Tigers rookie Brett Callahan what it was like as the Tigers won six straight games.
His face brightened.
“It's been really cool,” he said. “My first couple weeks up, we didn't play very well, so I didn't really know what it what it felt like to win.”
Think about that. Callahan was called up to the big leagues and made his debut in the middle of August. The Tigers were in a funk and he had never experienced real success until the Tigers ripped off six straight the past week.
I guess I never thought about it: How a young player needs to feel what it’s like to win before he can understand it.
“Just coming back into the locker room and everyone's excited and ready to go,” Callahan said. “It just makes a huge difference. Like it's cool to have momentum right now as a team.”
And then, it disapeared in a blink.
So, that’s why I say, these games do matter.
The wins, but also the losses.
“There is nothing better than winning and winning at this level,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “I don't care if you're winning a series or winning a month or obviously winning a season is the best. But I think the most important thing these young guys can learn in some of these series wins is what it takes to going into it. It's not just showing up and doing your nine against their nine. There's a lot that goes in behind the scenes to be good.”
Hinch can show these youngsters video clips of big wins or mistakes and try to teach them both sides of the equation.
But until they actually do it? Until they feel the pressure? It’s just words.
“Then when they see that happen, and then you actually win, that reinforces the habits on what it takes to prepare to win at this level,” Hinch said. “I don't know what the general thought is for a young player when they come to the big leagues, but my guess is, they think it's a little bit easier or it's a little bit more generic than it is.”
But that’s not the case. Everything is harder. Everything is magnified.
“There's real work that goes into preparing you to play, and the margins are really small,” Hinch said. “[Callahan] was also in Cleveland, where the difference between losing that series and winning that series were three walkoffs. So, we can talk about it behind the scenes. We can show them a ton of video. We can tell them old stories. But when you experience it, it reinforces that learning curve that that every player has to go through when they get here.”
Learning what not to do
And yes, sometimes that learning curve bends right into a painful situation.
Which brings us to Wednesday afternoon's loss.
When the Tigers started to implode, after Peck committed two errors and rookie Kevin McGonigle had one as well, Hinch went to the mound to talk to his infield.
“When the game started to speed up a little bit, we needed to slow down, and we had a lot of young kids out there,” Hinch said.
But it was already too late.
This loss left the Tigers (72-80) in a precarious position. They head to Chicago to play a four-game series against the White Sox (77-75). The Tigers are five games behind the White Sox for the final wild-card spot in the American League with 10 games remaining and four teams to jump (Texas, Toronto and Baltimore, too).
Fangraphs gives the Tigers a 0.4% chance at a playoff berth as of Wednesday night.
Obviously, it’s clear: There is no room for error.
So what’s the big lesson out of this?
What can this young Tigers team learn from the exhilarating wins, not to mention the painful losses?
“Execution matters, obviously on the mound and making plays,” Hinch said. “We gave them extra outs today. ... We made them bring their closer in. So, the game could have been a lot closer had we executed plays. The tough lessons are just that you got to play cleaner to win at this level.”
And no matter how many times Hinch says it, no matter how many videos he shows them, these young players have to live it to truly understand it: How the game speeds up when the pressure starts to build.
And how the margin for error shrinks even smaller when the moment grows even bigger.
Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on X @seideljeff.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: I saw a cool scene after Detroit Tigers rookies blew the game
