DETROIT — Friday night, Jonathan Schoop was not stationed at his locker. He never emerged from the showers, and he was not on the field watching fireworks like some of his teammates. But Schoop’s Nikes rested at the foot of his locker, a telltale sign he was still in the building.
Schoop, it turns out, was in manager A.J. Hinch’s office along with Scott Harris, the Tigers’ president of baseball operations. And there, Friday night, Schoop learned his tenure with the Tigers was coming to an end. The team designated him for assignment, and assuming he clears waivers, will eat close to $3.5 million of his salary.
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“There are days where this job is harder than others,” Hinch said Saturday morning. “Obviously it’s a been a rough year for Jonathan, it’s been a rough stretch in the last year. But you never love having that conversation.”
Schoop was a Tiger since 2020, and the course of his career in Detroit ran the gamut of highs and lows.
Only two summers ago, as trade rumors swirled, Schoop sat on the bricks behind home plate on a sun-soaked morning and talked of how he wanted to be part of the future in Detroit, of how the Tigers’ build reminded him of coming up with a young Orioles core in the 2010s. Nelson Cruz mentored him, and he wanted to be Nelson Cruz for the next generation of Tigers.
“Of course you want to be part of it,” Schoop said then. “You want to be part of it because you see how it’s growing.”
About three weeks later, Schoop was positioned between Hinch and Al Avila in the dugout at Cleveland’s Progressive Field. The Tigers had just announced a contract extension that promised Schoop $7.5 million in 2022 and a player option for 2023. The deal at the time was seen as one of the first signs the Tigers were getting serious about competing in 2022.
“This is one of the best days of my life,” Schoop said then. “I can’t show it because I’m not that emotional of a guy. But inside I feel really happy.”
Now, less than two years later, the Tigers have navigated through the wreckage of a disappointing 2022 and a chaotic 2023. Schoop’s numbers nosedived — he hit .217 with a 63 wRC+ in 879 plate appearances since the day he signed the extension. And given the course of events, it’s all a little strange to ponder. What went wrong?
Jonathan Schoop was worth -0.2 fWAR in 2023 after registering 1.5 fWAR in 2022. (Ron Chenoy / USA Today)The 2021 season, in retrospect, was one of the best of Schoop’s career. He hit .278 with 22 home runs. But it was hardly an outlier. Schoop was an All-Star with the Orioles in 2017. He has five seasons of 20-plus home runs and five seasons with a wRC+ above 100. At second base, he has been a Gold Glove finalist multiple times.
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Veteran as he may seem, Schoop is still more than three months shy of his 32nd birthday. Yet his numbers over the past two years declined so precipitously you can imagine someone years from now picking up a Schoop baseball card, flipping it over, looking at the numbers and asking, again: What happened?
In Schoop’s case, there is no one-size-fits-all explanation. He is a reminder of how fickle this game can be, of how unpredictable player performance remains even in an era of advanced stats. Projection systems before the season liked Schoop as a bounceback candidate after a disappointing ’22, one where Schoop’s 56 wRC+ was among the worst in baseball.
Even as his 2022 struggles wore on, Schoop’s spirits had rarely seemed dampened.
“That was a tough one for me, to be honest,” teammate Riley Greene said of the move. “He’s a great dude, to start. He cares about his teammates. Probably one of the best teammates I’ve played with so far. It sucks, it does, but it’s part of the business, and I hate to see a guy like him go, just because he meant so much to this team.”
In 2023, Schoop played a diminished role. The elimination of the shift hampered his defensive strengths at second base. Playing second and third in a platoon role, Schoop had only 151 plate appearances. His wRC+ this season is 56, and he has not hit a home run since Sept. 23, 2022.
“Performance-wise, he was not at his best,” Hinch said. “Attitude-wise, teammate, as a person and as a player, you couldn’t ask for a lot more out of him. He was given a tough situation he had never been in before as a bench player, platoon player, moved a position, and he handled it like a true pro.”
Some of the weaknesses in Schoop’s game could have made him susceptible to a steep aging curve. He has long been known as a free-swinger, never posting a walk rate above 5.5 percent. Schoop worked in the offseason to shed weight from his large frame, and he indeed showed up to spring training looking like a different person. But even with an improved physique, he still looked slower in the field, and his hands remained a step behind at the plate.
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The root of Schoop’s offensive decline could be as simple as his inability to catch up to fastballs. He hit .343 against fastballs in 2021. But his performance declined significantly from there. Schoop hit .185 and had a run value of -18 against fastballs last season. This year, opponents began throwing him more four-seamers than ever. He hit .188 against four-seam fastballs but had little power. He then struggled more than ever in adjusting to offspeed.
Even as he worked to improve his plate discipline — his 8.6 percent walk rate is actually a career high, and his 32.3 percent chase rate is a career low — the power tool that once made Schoop an above-average hitter was no longer there.
“He had a hard time with the consistency part of it despite a little bit of growth in walk rate and zone control,” Hinch said. “Overall, he’s the type of player who needs a lot of at-bats in order to get the good and the bad. We didn’t have those at-bats, and the less at-bats we gave him, the more sporadic his performance became.”
Over the past couple of months, Schoop’s effervescent joy, his easygoing Curaçao vibe, seemed to diminish, too. He kept to himself more or spent more time isolated in the back corner of the Tigers’ clubhouse with friend Miguel Cabrera. His internal battles started to show externally, behind the scenes and on the field, where he made multiple boneheaded defensive mistakes.
The situation became untenable, and all that led to what happened Friday night. A long meeting in the manager’s office, and a difficult but necessary goodbye.
“The conversation was emotional because (of) the time that we had spent together,” Hinch said. “I got to tell a few stories about Jonathan and thank him for his time, and he thanked us for the opportunity. He wished it would have worked out better.
“There’s no way to end those conversations. It just goes into the night.”
(Top photo: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
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