The Tigers keep finding first base options, and Beau Ankeney deserves a spot in that conversation.
For a while now, that position has felt open-ended in Detroit. The source material points back to Miguel Cabrera in 2017 as the last time it truly felt settled at first, and says it has not felt since 2023 like Spencer Torkelson had a real shot to be the guy the Tigers drafted 1-1.
Scott Harris has clearly kept the pipeline stocked, too, adding another first base name in the most recent draft when he took Will Adams, described there as the “prettiest high school swing.” But tucked a little deeper in the system is Ankeney, a player whose summer was good enough to force a second look.
Ankeney is 23, a 6-foot-4 first baseman, and the Tigers took him in the 14th round of the 2025 draft out of Loyola Marymount University. His college line jumps off the page: 22 homers and a .358 average in his final season. The source suggests he may have slipped because of positional value and the school he came from, not because the bat was lacking.
That bat started showing up quickly once he reached pro ball. Ankeney opened with Single-A Lakeland and took some time to get going, which is hardly unusual for a player making the jump.
Then June hit, and so did the production. He put together a .314/.366/.640 line with seven home runs that month, and the power kept coming after that.
The real surge came when he was promoted to High-A West Michigan at the end of July. There, he stepped into the spot recently vacated by Garrett Pennington and actually got even hotter. Ankeney turned in his best month as a pro, hitting .290/.398/.681 with eight home runs.
That stretch came with a small dip in batting average, but the on-base and power numbers made the trade-off easy to live with. By season’s end, Ankeney had launched 24 homers after entering June with just four. That total tied Izaac Pacheco for second in the Tigers’ minor league system in 2026.
The big-picture takeaway is straightforward: first base probably isn’t a crisis for the Tigers, but they have real depth there. Ankeney is not being billed as a headliner, and he’s not one of the system’s most recognized names. Still, after the kind of summer he put together, he’s the sort of player who should start showing up on more prospect lists going into 2027.
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