DETROIT — Tarik Skubal is coming to town Friday. The left-hander who left his mark at Comerica Park will pitch in Dodger blue. The Detroit Tigers team he will face suddenly looks and feels quite different from the one he left less than one month ago.The Tigers have gone 9-13 since the day they traded Skubal. Wednesday morning in the Tigers clubhouse, there was only playful lamenting about Skubal’s return. For example, when Skubal got traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the high-end espresso machine he once bought for the Tigers clubhouse went with him.“He also took his fastball-changeup combo,” manager A.J. Hinch joked Wednesday. “He took it all.”As rookie Kevin McGonigle sat at his locker and talked about the prospect of facing Skubal — “way too soon, right?” he said — he sipped on one of his beloved C4 energy drinks.A Tigers team that now features eight rookies might no longer have the same love for gourmet coffee.“Maybe everyone’s gotta drink C4s now,” McGonigle said.Of course, the Tigers will concede nothing against Skubal. There will be banter and inside jokes that resurface. Skubal was a popular teammate. Now the Tigers will be on the other side of his competitive fire.“I’m sure he’ll be chirping, for sure,” infielder Colt Keith said with a slight grin. “I’m sure he’ll be laughing and doing whatever. Hopefully, we put five or six up on him. He won’t be laughing then.”The Tigers need Friday’s game. Need them all, really. They have lost 10 of their past 12, watching their playoff odds dwindle. They are clinging to postseason dreams but also watching as their roster transforms and the storylines shift.Once a team built to win, the Tigers seem to be reverting to the development arc of a few years ago.As that approach resurfaces sooner than anyone might prefer, consider the following vignettes a slice of the Tigers’ new reality.Jackson Jobe’s arsenal: A work in progressThe Tigers have a few candidates to succeed Skubal as the ace of the Detroit staff. Troy Melton, who went seven innings in a losing effort Wednesday, is one. Jackson Jobe, the right-hander who possesses ethereal stuff but is still learning how to use it, is the other.Tuesday against the Tampa Bay Rays, Jobe went 4 1/3 innings. He allowed one earned run, walked three and struck out four. He threw 86 pitches in an outing that was more laborious than it needed to be. The final line was pedestrian. The finer details of his outing were more interesting.Jobe, for one, has long struggled to produce the desired results with his four-seam fastball. The pitch can touch triple digits but got batted around for a .519 slugging percentage last year. This year, opponents are slugging .600 against the pitch.For all his dreamy weapons, Jobe has below-average extension coming down the mound, ranking in MLB’s bottom 21st percentile. That could be part of the reason for Jobe’s struggles with the four-seam. Another could be the fact the natural supination that helps him spin nasty sliders can also lead to his too often “cutting” his fastball rather than staying on top of the pitch. Some of this could also be a deeper referendum on his arsenal — perhaps hitters simply are too often able to sit fastball.Interesting, then, that Jobe has turned toward his sinker more often over his past two outings. Jobe threw 24 sinkers in his start last week against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the most of his career. Tuesday, he threw 20 sinkers, both powering the pitch against righties but also attempting to use it backdoor against lefties. The Rays had two hard-hit balls against Jobe’s sinker. He also used the pitch to net five called strikes and two whiffs.“It just keeps them on their toes even more, gives them a different look,” Jobe said.Perhaps more interestingly, Jobe made a slight grip change on his curveball in the bullpen before his latest start, shifting his spiked finger slightly upward on the seam. He threw the pitch, thought it was nasty and stuck with it.The result Tuesday was eye-popping. The average velocity on Jobe’s curveball was 85.1 mph, up four ticks from his previous season average. The pitch had more vertical movement and less horizontal movement. He got two whiffs and five called strikes, as well as one ball that left the bat at 105.1 mph.Jobe has long searched for a reliable breaking ball option to pair with a big slider he doesn’t often land for strikes. More confidence in the curveball could represent an important step.Jobe is only 24, and he has made only four starts since last year’s Tommy John surgery. He bears the weight of massive talent and sky-high expectations.There is a lot left to unlock.“Just figuring out what works,” Jobe said. “Continuing to try sinkers to lefties, trying a new curveball. The changeup’s been god-awful, so I’ll figure out something to do for that next outing … I was away from the game for a year, so just trying to get the feel back for some stuff and make some changes when I can. It makes it fun.”Since earning a promotion to the majors, outfielder Max Clark has an .867 OPS in his first 30 plate appearances against left-handed pitching. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)Max Clark can hit leftiesMax Clark hit his first home run at Comerica Park on Tuesday. Sent it soaring over the right-field wall to give the Tigers a lead. Clark popped a hanging sweeper from left-hander Ian Seymour.Given the Tigers’ propensity for pinch hitting, it’s a big deal the team has entrusted Clark with at-bats against lefties early in his career. The plan is for Clark to be a dynamic everyday player. He has plenty of confidence in his ability to hit left-on-left.Yet Clark acknowledges some of this hasn’t always been so easy.“I had been pretty reverse-split almost in Low A, High A and beginning of Double A,” Clark said. “I really dominated left-handed pitching, especially left-handed spin. I had a little bit of a setback in ’25 after I got hit in the face.”Clark was playing a backfield game at the tail end of spring training in 2025 when an up-and-in sinker caught him partially on the C-flap of his helmet but also hit his cheekbone. Clark was fine afterward, but he’d be lying if he said there wasn’t some psychological impact.“For a while, there I was really bailing out and running toward first base already,” Clark said. “Or really trying to see it deep. … I’d really try and see the sinker and make sure it wasn’t going to hit me in the face. I’d get a ton of groundballs, a ton of late foul balls.”Despite a .279 average against lefties deep into June, Clark at one point this season had only one extra-base hit against lefties in the minor leagues. He flipped that script dramatically in July and homered four times against lefties in the course of about a month.Since earning a promotion to the majors, Clark has an .867 OPS in his first 30 plate appearances against left-handed pitching.“Over the last year,” he said, “it’s gotten more comfortable again.”The emergence of Drew SommersPeople around the Tigers have whispered about their faith in Drew Sommers over the past two years. At points, that faith seemed curious.Sommers was an 11th-round draft pick by the Rays in 2022 out of Central Arizona College, where he once pitched in a juco World Series game opposite Jacob Misiorowski. The Tigers got him from Tampa Bay in winter 2025 in a small swap for right-hander Mason Englert.The Tigers called upon Sommers last season. He surrendered six earned runs in four appearances.Sommers, though, has slowly morphed into a beast, suddenly the most dominant and perhaps most trustworthy option in the Tigers’ otherwise troublesome bullpen.Sommers has four-seam and sinker options that average 95 mph. He throws a wicked slider that moves to his glove side at an average of 9.9 inches, well above league average. But at times, his strike-throwing and overall execution needed work.For Sommers, the solution was mental as much as it was physical.“When I first showed up, I was overthinking everything,” Sommers said. “Make sure I do this right. Make sure my foot gets planted right. Now I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s just go out there and throw a baseball.”As Sommers said, “My mindset is emptiness. Just have an empty mind. Hear what (Dillon Dingler) puts down and throw to the best of my ability.”Over his past 13 innings, Sommers has surrendered only one earned run, with three walks and a mesmerizing 22 strikeouts.“I’m really enjoying watching him emerge because he’s very reliable,” Hinch said. “Even in the games where he’s given up a few hits, he’s matured in how he’s processed that and gone back to work. That’s why I keep giving him the ball.”That’s development. And for better or worse, that could be the increased focus as the Tigers head into the homestretch.