Tag Archives: detroit

On baseball robots, probabilities, and getting fooled again

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What is this nonsense? Last week, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA declared it a one-hundred-percent certainty that the Detroit Tigers would appear in the 2025 MLB playoffs. Today, though, the ostensible gold standard in baseball-projection machines has engaged in a very unfortunate bit of retrenchment:

To be sure, I would not blame anybody for downgrading Detroit after Tarik Skubal surrendered a grand slam during a five-run seventh inning that ignominiously crowned a Tigers loss last night to a vagrant team playing in a minor-league park. Far from the August heater the team generated to fuel their run to the 2024 postseason, however, these Tigers have struggled in the second half with the likes of the Twins, Pirates, and A’s in a manner belying a true talent level perhaps somewhere below their overall winning percentage. And Javy Baez doing that bad thing again feels like a microcosm of team-wide regression trends in action:

But BP’s PECOTA conceded none of that reasonable skepticism. It said this final outcome was a guaranteed certainty; no hedge, error margin, or other reservation of any kind. Presumably, it knew that Skubal could have a bad night, Baez could turn back into a pumpkin, and Jack Flaherty could continue to melt down, but it said it was not concerned. Having crossed that triple-digit threshold of certitude, it probably did not love what it saw in Sacramento last night, but one envisioned PECOTA taking that on the chin with an unwavering forward stare into a known and unavoidable future.

In short, once you go to 100%, you simply cannot go back. Again a concession from me: I will grant force majeure: If the season suddenly and prematurely ended due to a public-health catastrophe, war, or series of natural or Manfred-made disasters, then PECOTA probably gets a pass. Short of that, though? If 100% means Fool me once, shame on you. But fool me twice, baseball robot? My promise to the ALDLAND readers is that I will not be fooled again.

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Previously
Death, Taxes, and the Detroit Tigers in the 2025 MLB playoffs?
More Likely Than Not: The 2025 Detroit Tigers are winning, and winning matters
Maximum Tork: How Spencer Torkelson is cranking up his hot start in 2025
Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

Death, Taxes, and the Detroit Tigers in the 2025 MLB Playoffs?

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You serious, Clark? Yes. As basically first reported by ALDLAND.com months ago, the Detroit Tigers have clinched a spot in the 2025 MLB playoffs. Look for yourself:

If that isn’t surprising to you, I am projecting with 100% certainty that’s so because you are an ALDLAND reader. Before the current season even started, we told you that Baseball Prospectus told you that Detroit had close to no shot– 19.9%!– at returning to the playoffs. At the same time, we also told you why that was very wrong. For their part, the Tigers immediately began proving us very right and Baseball Prospectus very wrong. And now, at last, Baseball Prospectus has thrown in the towel: Rob Manfred himself cannot stop this team.

Arrange your affairs accordingly. We’ll see you in October.

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Previously
More Likely Than Not: The 2025 Detroit Tigers are winning, and winning matters
Maximum Tork: How Spencer Torkelson is cranking up his hot start in 2025
Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

More Likely Than Not: The 2025 Detroit Tigers are winning, and winning matters

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Before the start of the 2025 MLB season, I noted the relatively dim projections of the Detroit Tigers’ chances to earn a postseason berth for the second consecutive season. And while I also noted a reason to be skeptical of those dour forecasts, I cannot say I thought things would turn so rosy so quickly.

Entering Opening Day, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA announced the Tigers’ playoff odds at below twenty-percent. FanGraphs’ ZiPS, while less hateful, still came in worse than a coin flip at under forty-four-percent. Then Detroit started playing the games. And then they started winning the games. In fact, they won nineteen games before May 1 for the first time in their 124-year history, and, the next day, they became the first AL team to reach twenty wins on the season.

Some bitter Cleveland fans pointed out that Detroit has notched all of those wins while playing a lot of teams with sub-.500 records. That may be true. I don’t know. I do know that, according to ESPN, the Tigers overall have faced the tenth-toughest opponent schedule to date, while the rest of the AL Central has been coasting on cupcakes:

Regardless, postseason eligibility depends on standings, and standings depend only on wins, and wins are wins, and the Tigers now have twenty wins in a month’s worth of games that even PECOTA and ZiPS can’t ignore. As a result, those playoff odds have skyrocketed. BP is up from 19.9% to 61.1%, and FanGraphs is up from 43.6% to 81.1%!

There inevitably will be fluctuations, but banked wins cannot be unwon, and if relative breakouts from the on-the-ropes gang of Javy Baez, Spencer Torkelson, and Casey Mize can last, so too can this team. At least for right now, this is the fun baseball place.

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Previously
Maximum Tork: How Spencer Torkelson is cranking up his hot start in 2025
Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

Maximum Tork: How Spencer Torkelson is cranking up his hot start in 2025

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Detroit Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson could come crashing down to Earth at any moment. For most people, the only surprising part of that statement would be the suggestion that the former top draft pick’s metaphorical elevation recently has been anywhere other than firmly entrenched beneath Comerica Park’s newly turf-covered keyhole path. But Torkelson has had himself a year in a week, or just about anyway. He clubbed eleven hits in nine games, including two home runs and four doubles, the latest of which walked off a ninth-inning comeback win against the White Sox on Sunday afternoon:

In 2024, Torkelson’s performance across ninety-two games for the Tigers was just above replacement value, contributing 0.1 fWAR. He’s already has bested that and more in a tenth of the time, pacing all Detroit batters (alongside Riley Greene) in 2025 with 0.6 fWAR.

How is the former confirmed bust doing this? To my amateur eye, the key thing looks like pull rate. He isn’t swinging faster or generating more hard contact than before, nor has he increased his launch angle; in fact, all of those things are ticking down in 2025. Instead of trying to spread his contact to all fields, though, Torkelson is absolutely cranking on everything on which he can get his bat to his pull (power) side. Not everybody can be Miguel Cabrera, obviously, and sometimes it can help to stop pretending otherwise.

Probably associated with that, Torkelson also appears to have made a conscious decision to alter his stance, moving back in the batters box and farther away from the plate while widening the angle of his feet. This, one assumes, allows him more time to see balls and turn on the meaty ones.

No, Torkelson is not going to maintain a .474 BABIP over the course of an entire season. But if he says good enough to justify his appearance in the lineup over the course of an entire season, that will be a win. And if he continues to deliver in some more key moments throughout the rest of the season, that’s icing on the cake and, even better, a real reason to rethink Torkelson’s career trajectory.

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Previously
Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

Before you accuse me, take a look at Jake Rogers

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As highlighted in our 2025 Opening Day post, PECOTA, the projection engine at Baseball Prospectus, sees the Detroit Tigers with a less than one-in-five chance of returning to the playoffs in 2025, the longest odds it projected for any team that also appeared in the 2024 postseason. That feels like a personal attack.

But how much weight should Tigers fans accord this relatively dim outlook? In a field of competing inexact-science offerings, PECOTA has earned a reputation as one of the least-inexact baseball projectors. It still makes mistakes, though. Would it be relevant to those Tigers’ fans’ answers to the immediately preceding question that PECOTA recently produced another extreme, negative projection about the team that turned out to be very wrong? If your answer to the now-immediately preceding question is “yes,” then read on.

Our preview of the Detroit Tigers’ 2024 season also included some PECOTA nuggets, one of which involved catcher Jake Rogers’ projected defensive contributions:

PECOTA sees Detroit’s likely starting backstop completely forgetting how to catch in 2024:

Rogers was a top-ten defensive catcher in 2023. (The BP website has different defensive numbers for Rogers and other catchers than those appearing in the book. I’ve inquired and it sounds like their stats team made some post-publication tweaks to their average benchmarks that may account for the variance.) Most of this projected thirteen-point drop comes in the form of a projected swing from being a top-ten framer to a bottom-thirty guy at that skill. Ironically, Rogers’ BP annual blurb mentions his “unseat[ing of] Eric Haase for the starting catching job” even as PECOTA projects him to frame as poorly as Haase did in 2023. (To fully square this circle, Haase’s 2024 framing projection is -3.2 runs.)

This is not the first time PECOTA has thought lowly of Rogers’ defense. In the 2023 BP annual, for example, it forecast him for -7 DRP, with a -6.5 on the framing component, both huge misses. Undaunted, the computer has doubled down for 2024.

Everyone in baseball will tell you that defensive metrics are especially difficult to define and measure and therefore probably should be regarded a little more cautiously than other performance metrics. That’s sensible and unobjectionable. What creates undue difficulty, in my opinion, is what seem like wild year-to-year oscillations in players’ defensive numbers. Of course players aren’t going to be exactly the same person every season, and many factors– injury, age, chance, drugs, etc.– can cause production value to vary outside a “normal” career development curve. Breakouts can happen quickly. Careers can end quickly. When we’re told a player’s defensive performance has yo-yoed erratically from season to season without ready explanation, though, it makes it very difficult to ascribe any meaning to defensive metrics, even on their own terms and within their own contexts. Maybe Rogers really is a definitively unremarkable catcher who just had his Brady Anderson framing season. Probably not, though.

Indeed not. Not only did 2024 Rogers retain his defensive prowess exhibited in 2023, he substantially improved upon it. And looking just at pitch-framing, the particular skill driving the projected drop in his overall defensive value, Rogers actually proved to be a top-three framer in all of baseball last year.

If that big whiff is enough of a reason for you to throw out the 2025 PECOTA projections in their entirety, I won’t stop you. So far as the actual team is concerned, though, there’s not going to be anything good left to project if they don’t start winning. The Tigers, still hunting their first win, are back in action tonight in Seattle after a Sunday of rest following a tough Dodgers’ sweep.

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Previously
Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

Is it Tiger Time? Tarik Skubal says so

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On the eve of his Opening Day start, the second of his career and just the fourth time a reigning Cy Young winner will make his season debut against the defending World Series champions, Tarik Skubal published an open letter in which he declared the beginning of “a new era of Tigers baseball.” After last year’s surprise sprint to the playoffs and win over the Houston Astros, this is exciting stuff. Skubal’s declaration addresses the current moment and looks forward, his letter also predicting this team’s “eventual greatness.”

What does the future hold for the Detroit Tigers? Skubal has more influence on that than most, so his pronouncement carries great weight. Other observers are a bit more cautious than him, though. FanGraphs (ZiPS) projects an 81-81 record and a 43.6% chance of making the playoffs. Baseball Prospectus (PECOTA) is much less optimistic, chiming in at 78.5-83.5, with just a 19.9% chance of making the playoffs.

There’s quite a bit of variance between those two systems’ projections, particularly with respect to the likelihood Detroit makes it back to the postseason again this year. Considering the path the Tigers took to get there last year, catching fire in mid-August and never looking back, it’s reasonable to wonder whether that was a fluke. With due respect to Alex Cobb, Gleyber Torres, Tommy Kahnle, Jack Flaherty (welcome back!), Bailey Horn (welcome back, sort of!), Andrew Chafin (welcome back again again!), Jose Urquidy, and Manuel Margot, you can be excused for thinking the Tigers underwhelmed in the building-on-success department. There’s also a ripe case of subtraction by addition in the outfield, which is where you’ll see Javier Baez, just coincidentally absent for Detroit’s amazing August-October run last year, returning and making his debut as a real live outfielder. (In case you were wondering, yes, Baez remains under contract through 2027.)

Last year’s team went 86-76. They were 78-84 in 2023. The combination of late overachievement; middling offseason moves plus absence of history of strong in-season moves from current ownership and management; Meadows-family injuries; emerging whispers of Riley Greene fragility; and the return of Baez have me projecting an 80-82 record.

No affiliate links here, but multiple sports books currently have Detroit’s win-total line at 83.5.

The Tigers’ season opens tonight on the road against the Los Angeles Dodgers on ESPN. After three games in LA, they head north for three games in Seattle before opening at home against the Chicago White Sox on the afternoon of Friday, April 4. If nothing else, keep an eye on Skubal: he’s increased his production value each season. Repeating that feat this season would mark a very special performance.

It seems as though the Detroit Red Wings like their new coach

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On Thursday, December 26, 2024, Detroit Red Wings General Manager Steve Yzerman announced that the team was firing head coach and Gru lookalike Derek Lalonde and replacing him with Todd McClellan, late of the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks and a former Red Wings assistant under Mike Babcock, effective immediately. And the effect was almost immediate.

At the time of the coaching change, the Wings were 13-17-4, having lost three games in a row and nine of the preceding twelve. McLellan’s first game behind the bench came the very next night, and it was a 5-2 home loss to Toronto.

The team has not lost since then, though. The active winning streak now stands at seven games, a stretch never matched during Lalonde’s tenure. In fact, it’s been thirteen years since Detroit last won seven consecutive times. They did it exactly that many times in January of 2012. (They actually had two winning streaks of exactly seven games that season, the earlier one spanning November and December of 2011.)

I caught a Red Wings game that season, a loss at Chicago, in which my chief complaint outside of the result appears to have been that the home fans didn’t do enough different cheers. I still haven’t been back to the United Center. I also attended the team’s preseason intrasquad scrimmage in Grand Rapids, where it seems I encountered Ken Holland in the concession line. I’ve been back to Grand Rapids since then, but I don’t have any other Ken Holland meetings to report. Detroit’s 2011-12 season ended with a first-round exit from the playoffs at the nasty hands of the Nashville Predators.

The last time Detroit won more than seven in a row, they won the Stanley Cup. They’ll have a chance to match that eight-game streak from January and February of 2008 when they lace them up against the Sharks tomorrow night.

Baseball Notes: Just a Perfect Day

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This column returns on a Thursday evening with two notes as lovely as forgetting your problems and drinking sangria in the park.

Scott Harris and the Young Tigers are Going Streaking:

The Detroit Tigers are off today, and, based on their recent performance, only the MLB schedule-maker can stop them from winning. On August 10, Detroit was 55-63, and, according to FanGraphs, their odds of earning a playoff berth stood at 0.5%. Since then, they’ve been the best team in baseball, going 25-10 to push their record to 80-73. They just completed a series sweep of the Kansas City Royals and, amazingly, now sit just a half game out of the American League’s last wild card spot. Those playoff odds accordingly have skyrocketed to 42.3%.

Without a game, I spent the evening listening to an interview (video below) with second-year GM Scott Harris. It’s from June 25, when the team was 36-41. It of course is exciting to hear about all of the front office’s plans and aspirations when, almost three months later, they seemingly are coming to their near-term fruition. It is pretty illuminating to hear Harris speak with confidence about those plans at a time when, at least from the outside, things were not looking too hopeful, though. I also enjoyed this interview because hosts Dan Dickerson and Jason Benetti were able to draw Harris, a self-described introvert, out into the public light in a way in which he has not previously shown himself. The public hasn’t seen or heard very much from Harris since he arrived in Detroit, and what I had observed prior to today wasn’t particularly compelling or illuminating. This, by contrast, was both insightful and enjoyable.

The MLB playoff hunt officially is on in Detroit. The team has nine games left to play, three each against the Orioles, Rays, and White Sox.

Shohei Ohtani, and only Shohei Ohtani:

Today certainly was not an off day for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not only did the team, in routing the Miami Marlins 20-4, clinch a playoff berth for the twelfth consecutive season, but Shohei Ohtani may have had the best single day a major-league hitter ever has had on the diamond. He went six-for-six– including three home runs and two doubles– and stole two bases.

In the process, Ohtani also became the first MLB player ever to hit fifty home runs and steal fifty bases in one season and actually stands at 51/51 with nine games remaining. We knew and hoped Ohtani would be special, but this is uncharted territory.

A perfect baseball day? I’d say so.

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Previously
Baseball Notes: New WAR Without an Act of Congress
Baseball Notes: Offensive Discrimination
Baseball Notes: Current Issues Roundup
Baseball Notes: Baseball’s growth spurt, visualized
Baseball Notes: The WAR on Robbie Ray
Baseball Notes: Save Tonight
Baseball Notes: Current Issues Roundup
Baseball Notes: The In-Game Half Lives of Professional Pitchers
Baseball Notes: Rule Interpretation Unintentionally Shifts Power to Outfielders?
Baseball Notes: Lineup Protection
Baseball Notes: The Crux of the Statistical Biscuit
Baseball Notes: Looking Out for Number One
Baseball Notes: Preview

Related
Ronald Acuna’s 40/70 season in context

Baseball Notes: New WAR Without an Act of Congress

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During the 2018-19 MLB offseason, Baseball Prospectus revamped the offensive component of its main player-performance metric, WARP. For some people, this resulted in a significant alteration in the way they thought about the then-more-recent performances of some of the game’s top players, chiefly Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout and the divisive MVP races of 2012-13 between those two.

Now it’s FanGraphs’ turn to update its player-performance metric, WAR (a/k/a “fWAR”). Their tweaks don’t appear to be as methodologically fundamental as what BP did to WARP, but they did result in some slight– less than a win per season at the extremes– adjustments to players’ career fWAR numbers dating back to 2016. Among those who some people now will think are better players than they thought they were a few days ago (i.e., those whose fWAR numbers increased the most) are a batch of current and (mostly) former Detroit Tigers:

  • J.D. Martinez: +2.9
  • Tucker Barnhart: +2.0
  • Gio Urshela: +1.3
  • Austin Romine: +1.1

Avisail Garcia, meanwhile, was docked 1.4 fWAR, and Leonys Martin dropped 1.1 fWAR.

The full list of players seeing a shift of at least one win in their 2016-23 fWAR totals is here.

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Previously
Baseball Notes: Offensive Discrimination
Baseball Notes: Current Issues Roundup
Baseball Notes: Baseball’s growth spurt, visualized
Baseball Notes: The WAR on Robbie Ray
Baseball Notes: Save Tonight
Baseball Notes: Current Issues Roundup
Baseball Notes: The In-Game Half Lives of Professional Pitchers
Baseball Notes: Rule Interpretation Unintentionally Shifts Power to Outfielders?
Baseball Notes: Lineup Protection
Baseball Notes: The Crux of the Statistical Biscuit
Baseball Notes: Looking Out for Number One
Baseball Notes: Preview

Related
Miguel Cabrera continues to shine in the DRC era
Miguel Cabrera further bolstered by sabermetric update
Trout vs. Cabrera, and Aging with DRC+ (via Baseball Prospectus)
Miguel Cabrera in the bWAR era

Everyone’s Going to be Worse: 2024 Detroit Tigers Season Preview Notes

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Many have published their previews of the 2024 Detroit Tigers season. What follows are my notes from those previews, primarily the corresponding Baseball Prospectus annual chapter and its PECOTA projections, along with my own annotations and recent news updates.

Everyone’s Going to be Worse

Only the really hopeless Athletics and White Sox scored fewer runs than the Tigers in 2023. The reason the Tigers’ offensive outlook today isn’t hopeless (as any good Detroit fan will tell you too many times) is because Spencer Torkelson had a really good second half last season, and that’s going to be his new baseline for his major-league career, which really will begin this year. His 121 wRC+ and a homer every 16.2 plate appearances– his second half– sounds a lot more like a good first baseman than a 95 wRC+ and a homer every 31.3 plate appearances– his first half. Torkelson is the case study that proves Tigers fans’ optimism for 2024 is grounded in reality: all good trends will be banked as established new normals, while any bad trends have reasonable explanations and therefore safely may and should be ignored.

The cold baseball computer isn’t buying the Midwestern thaw. PECOTA projects every Tigers hitter listed in the team’s BP annual chapter to be worse in 2024 than he was in 2023. Can that sentence really be true? I don’t know whether it can but it is. Sure, some of these guys are Not Ready For Primetime Players, minors types whose prospect statuses merit their mention but, at least for this year, understandably don’t project as majors talent. But it really is bad news for all of the alleged major-league talent.

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