The Detroit Tigers’ 2025 season will have one of the earliest starts in franchise history — and probably a late start, as well.

According to the schedule released by MLB on Thursday, the Tigers are set to open 2025 with a road interleague series against Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers in Los Angeles on March 27. That’s a day earlier than the franchise’s previous earliest start, March 28 (this season and 2019). No times have been released for Opening Day.

The Tigers’ early West Coast trip will continue with a three-game set against the Seattle Mariners on March 31-April 2 before the team arrives in Detroit for the home opener against the Chicago White Sox on April 4. MLB is banking on good weather for the Tigers’ home opener, with April 4 a Friday and the series against the White Sox having no off days built in for inclement weather.

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The early start to 2025 will result in an early finish, as well, at the Tigers will wrap up the season on the road in Boston on Sept. 28. The Tigers’ home finale is set for Sept 21 against the Atlanta Braves.

Other schedule notes:

∎ The Tigers will end the first half of the season at home with a visit from the Mariners on July 11-13, with the All-Star Game set for July 15 in Atlanta.

∎ There are just nine games against American League Central foes set for the season’s final month, with the Tigers hosting the White Sox on Sept. 5-7 and the Cleveland Guardians on Sept. 16-18 and then visiting the Guardians on Sept. 23-25.

∎ The Tigers will break in a new West Coast city in August as they visit the Athletics, who will play the 2025 season in Sacramento, California, ahead of their planned move to Las Vegas for the 2028 season. The Tigers and A’s will face off at Sutter Health Park, which seats approximately 14,000, from Aug. 25-27.

∎ As part of MLB’s balanced schedule, the Tigers play every team, AL and NL, for at least one series. The National League teams coming to Comerica Park: San Diego (April 21-23), San Francisco (May 26-28), Cincinnati (Jun 13-15), Pittsburgh (June 17-19), Arizona (July 28-30), N.Y. Mets (Sept. 1-3) and Atlanta (Sept. 19-21).

This story will be updated.

Contact Ryan Ford at rford@freepress.com. Follow him on X (which used to be Twitter, y’know?) @theford. Read more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.  

The award-winning documentary “Gradually, Then Suddenly: The Bankruptcy of Detroit” is finally available for streaming.

The thorough, insightful look at the Motor City’s Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing in 2013 uses an innovative combination of animation, interviews and reenactments to capture the whole story.

“Gradually, Then Suddenly” won the 2021 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. In 2022, it was a highlight of the Freep Film Festival.  

Among those involved in the making of the film were directors Sam Katz and James McGovern; producer and screenwriter Nathan Bomey, a former Free Press reporter now covering business for Axios and the author of “Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back); and producer Chastity Pratt (another former Free Press reporter and the current Washington Post national education editor).

The score was composed by Daniel Slatkin, son of former Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Leonard Slatkin.

The documentary will have its streaming premiere Thursday, to coincide with the bankruptcy filing’s 11th anniversary. You can find it on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Tubi and a variety of other streaming platforms.

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.