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Rays of Offense, Clouds in Detroit?

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Our quizzically titled series examining the comparative stature of the 2023 Detroit Tigers continues today with a quick look at the offense. The above-referenced prompt for this focal selection is the sort of remarkable occurrence that follows a remarkable team record; in this case, the Tampa Bay Rays’ 25-6 mark to start the season. (That sixth loss, which came on Sunday to the Chicago White Sox, itself is noteworthy to Detroit fans, who surely have been recalling the 1984 Tigers’ record-setting 35-5 opening pace.) Detroit’s sub-middling 12-17 record portends lower offensive rankings for their players, and that’s exactly what we find.

As with the overall player-performance leaderboard, the results here are fairly grim. While the Rays’ roster includes six of the top twenty-five batters according to weighted runs created plus (wRC+), the Tigers don’t even have a single hitter in the current top one hundred hitters by that metric.* If you read last month’s article, you probably will guess, correctly, it’s Matt Vierling leading the way. His 112 wRC+ is good enough for 106th place on the list. Eric Haase (108 wRC+, 114th) and Kerry Carpenter (104 wRC+, 127th) are the only other Tigers who have hit at an above-average level so far in 2023, and it’s a big dropoff after Carpenter, with Riley Greene checking in at 205th place with his 78 wRC+.

Viewed as a whole, the Tigers actually are not the worst team by wRC+, with the Colorado Rockies and Kansas City Royals managing to get lower than Detroit’s 80 wRC+ team mark. Mitigating whatever silver lining of marginal upside that status might thus far provide, however, is the fact that the Tigers have scored the fewest runs of any MLB team, albeit in fewer games played than any other team.

We clearly are scraping the barrel here, so I’m going to stop now. At this moment, the Tigers are just underway against the visiting New York Mets and their new starter, Justin Verlander. Detroit is hoping for a repeat of yesterday’s modest drubbing of the Mets’ Max Scherzer, and early returns– a 2-0 lead thanks to back-to-back homers from Greene and Javier Baez– look promising.

* MLB Network, which created the Rays graphic reproduced at top, failed to disclose therein that these rankings only hold using a lower-than-expected threshold for minimum plate appearances. For comparison, limiting the list to qualified batters places just three Rays in the top twenty-five. I was able to replicate MLBN’s results by dropping the minimum plate appearances to seventy.

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Previously
Do the 2023 Detroit Tigers have the worst MLB players?

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Do the 2023 Detroit Tigers have the worst MLB players?

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It is early in the 2023 MLB season. Very early. Less-than-two-weeks-in early. Not-even-ten-games-played early. Additionally, I take no pleasure in writing what you’re reading, because it is not good news, and because it now is nearly almost-astonishingly early in the 2023 MLB season.

On the other hand, if the thing I was writing was good news, I might not qualify it or hesitate to write about it or share it with the many manys of readers of this website. If the 2023 Detroit Tigers were so extremely separating themselves from the MLB pack in such a singular– but also good– fashion, you would be reading about it here, and you would want to be reading about it here. This is that, but the bad version.

By way of substantive introduction, Detroit does not have the worst record in baseball. They’re very close to having the worst record, and the reason they don’t have the worst record is at least partially circumstantial. The Tigers are tied with the Oakland A’s for the fewest wins (two apiece), but the A’s have played– and lost– one more game than has Detroit. Oakland seems to have better players than Detroit, though, at least if you grant any credence to FanGraphs wins above replacement as a reasonable general indicator of player performance. According to that metric, Kyle Muller, Ryan Noda, and Zach Jackson each have contributed more to the A’s than any player has contributed to the Tigers.

Considering the fact that, by fWAR, the Tigers’ best player so far in 2023 has been Matt Vierling, and further considering that Vierling is by that same measure the 258th-best player in baseball this season, it isn’t that surprising that another team might have multiple players who have been better than the Tigers’ best player. Nor probably is it surprising that more teams than just Oakland would, so far, have multiple players better than the Tigers’ best player. Maybe it’s mildly surprising that every other team in baseball has multiple players who rank higher than the Tigers’ best player on the fWAR leaderboard, but you probably figured that’s where this was going to end up.

Vierling, in case you never heard of him before two weeks ago, was a fifth-round pick out of Notre Dame by the Philadelphia Phillies, for which he debuted in 2021. In thirty-four games that season, he hit .346/.364/.479 and played first base and outfield. In 117 games in 2022, he hit .297/.351/.648 and played all over the field. On January 7, 2023, the Phillies sent him to Detroit along with Nick Maton and Donny Sands in exchange for Gregory Soto and Kody Clemens. Vierling played especially well in the Tigers’ two wins this season, both of which came on the road against the defending-champion Houston Astros. In those two games, he had six hits, including a home run and a double, a walk, and three RBI. In the rest of the games, he has a total of two hits (both singles) and one walk.

The Tigers are back on the road tonight in Toronto and Vierling is back in the starting lineup, hitting third. The A’s are in Baltimore with Muller scheduled as the starting pitcher and Noda hitting second.

2022 Detroit Tigers Midseason Pitching Report

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It’s ugly out there. This was supposed to be the arrival year for the next great Detroit Tigers pitching staff. Instead, Tucker Barnhart, Kody Clemens, and Harold Castro each have pitched more innings than Spencer Turnbull, who still is recovering from Tommy John surgery, and, combined, those three position players have pitched nearly as many innings (7.0) as has Matt Manning (8.0), who hasn’t pitched since mid-April due to various injuries. Casey Mize also couldn’t make it out of April, throwing just ten innings before injuries knocked him out and eventually required him to take the Tommy John medicine. Alex Faedo survived all the way to July before discovering he’d inherited one of Matt Kemp‘s hips. Elvin Rodriguez, who came to the Tigers organization as the player to be named later in the Justin Upton trade, has made five scattered starts, because why not? (His rotation-worst 13.19 ERA is why not.) The two veteran workhorses signed in the offseason, Eduardo Rodriguez and Michael Pineda, have not been good in the rare moments they’ve been on the field, and while Pineda recently returned (to serve live batting practice), the team literally doesn’t know where Rodriquez is and apparently hasn’t for some time. Tarik Skubal stood amidst the carnage and looked ready to thrive, but he fell apart sometime in mid-June and has not yet commenced the reassembly process. (Skubal’s pitching as I write, so maybe this will serve as a reverse jinx.)

This leaves Beau Brieske as the first-half star of the Detroit rotation, just as everyone predicted. He shouldered more innings than every Tigers starter other than Skubal and, since June 1, he leads those starters in ERA (3.35), FIP (3.64), and fWAR (0.8). All of this of course made today’s injury announcement even more predictable. The twenty-seventh-round draft pick out of CSU-Pueblo will be out until at least August with a sore throwing arm. Considering the 91.2 innings he’s pitched for Detroit and Toledo in about three months nearly match the 106.2 innings he threw in a full season of minor-league ball in 2021 (and far exceed the 20.1 professional innings tossed in 2019), he probably was due for some soreness.

On the other side, Tigers fans have been fawning over the bullpen’s first-half performance. Only the Astros’ and Yankees’ bullpens posted lower ERAs in the first half. That’s neat, especially for a Detroit franchise with a recent history of notable struggles in that department. Maybe don’t look much further than that, though, because there’s good reason to expect the relief corps to collapse down the stretch as well. As a consequence of the severe rotation problems, the Detroit bullpen was highly taxed, and that fatigue, which very possibly will be further exacerbated in the next two weeks by trade departures, should start to manifest itself in terms of in-game results. Independent of that, an expected return to ordinary home-run/fly-ball fluctuations– the gap between the bullpen’s 3.31 FIP and 4.06 xFIP suggests a good deal of good luck in this regard– also would bring this group back to Earth.

Manager A.J. Hinch has the unenviable task of patching together enough functioning arms to cover the roughly 630 innings remaining in this season. His navigation of that obstacle course alone may make this second half worth watching.

MLB.TV.PSA

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Readers of this website know that this author is among the last people on Earth who would go out of his way to promote an MLBAM business decision, but here you are, reading a post by me notifying you that MLB.tv is on sale today for a loosely speaking fair-ish price.

Of course, this occasion mostly serves as a reminder of MLB’s callous media-distribution practices. Six years ago, the league settled an antitrust lawsuit attacking things like its telecast blackout policy and centralized MLB.tv product by agreeing to make pricing and offering concessions to fans. Specifically, the seasonal price of the full MLB.tv package at that time would drop from $129.99 to $109.99, and the league would create a new, single-team package at a seasonal price of $84.99. These prices were to remain fixed for five years (i.e., through the 2020 season), subject to annual increases only up to the higher of three percent or the rate of inflation.

Now, that settlement agreement has expired, and MLB is seizing the opportunity to undo its effects. Most obviously, across-the-board pricing is up, doubly insulting as the league simultaneously excludes games from the full MLB.tv package for the benefit of its new partnerships with NBC and Apple.

Perhaps even more underhanded, however, is the soft killing of the single-team MLB.tv package. When first offered, the single-team option was priced at seventy-seven-percent of the full package price, then a twenty-five-dollar difference. MLB now has aggressively closed that gap. At today’s sale pricing, for example, the cost of the single-team option has jumped to eighty-six-percent of the full package price, just a ten-dollar difference. Stated otherwise, someone considering a single-team package can receive a thirty-fold increase in programming for just ten additional dollars. “Even you dummies know that’s a good deal,” fans hear Rob Manfred saying in their heads, even as they wonder why it doesn’t quite feel like a deal. The move to neutralize the single-team package feels like a purely spiteful move designed to achieve the functional undoing of one of the settlement agreement’s most visible achievements without any meaningful cost savings to MLB.

As I have been writing here for years, the message should be a simple one: “Rather than changing the game he wants people to watch . . . Manfred ought to change the way people can watch the game, obviously by making it easier for them to do so.” For how much longer can Manfred continue to squeeze baseball’s fans– including, as a recent example, Padres fans required to purchase yet another streaming service to watch this morning’s Peacock-exclusive game against the Atlanta Braves beginning at 8:35 am San Diego time– remains to be seen.

Miguel Cabrera’s 3,000th Hit Put Him in Exclusive Company (via FanGraphs)

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Miguel Cabrera had to wait a couple of extra days to make history, thanks to a hitless afternoon capped by a controversial managerial decision and then a rainout. Nonetheless, on Saturday afternoon he collected his 3,000th career hit with a single off the Rockies’ Antonio Senzatela. In doing so, he joined some elite company as not only the 33rd player to reach 3,000 hits, but also the seventh to do so as a member of the 500-homer club and the third to reach both of those round numbers with a career batting average of .300 or better. The other two? Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. You may have heard of them, and even if you don’t put much stock in batting average, you have to admit that’s about as cool as company gets.

What’s more, Cabrera actually owns the highest batting average and on-base percentage of the seven players who have both milestones, with a wRC+ that trails only Mays and Aaron[.]

For all of his struggles over the past half-decade, Cabrera would still have to go 0-for-352 to drop his batting average to .299. Even with those struggles and his lack of defensive value (he’s 102 runs below average in terms of Defensive Runs Saved, including 11 below in just 847.1 innings at first base since 2018), he ranks 11th in JAWS among first basemen (68.8/44.8/56.8), in no danger of slipping below Palmeiro (13th at 71.9/38.9/55.4) or Murray (16th at 68.7/39.2/53.9). And while he may be the last to reach 3,000 hits for some time given the dearth of candidates (Dan Szymborski put Jose Altuve, who has 1,783 hits, at 34% and Freddie Freeman, who has 1,723 hits, at 28% last September), he’s hardly the least.
…
Cabrera joined Ty Cobb and Al Kaline as the other players to reach 3,000 hits as Tigers. As ESPN’s Marly Rivera pointed out, he’s the first Venezuelan to reach 3,000 hits and the seventh Latino, after Roberto Clemente, Rod Carew, Palmeiro, Rodriguez, Adrián Beltré, and Pujols. … Read More

(via FanGraphs)

No Joy in Mudville, No CBA Deal in Jupiter, and No Opening Day on March 31 (via FanGraphs)

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So much for commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated desire to avoid a “disastrous outcome,” and so much for the urgency of the owners’ “defensive” lockout, which was supposed to jumpstart negotiations towards a new collective bargaining agreement — albeit in a most curious manner, with 43 days of radio silence and just one formal proposal to the players over a 71-day span. On Tuesday evening, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season — a total of 91 games, constituting five to seven for each team — after the players union and the owners failed to meet his artificially-imposed deadline for a new CBA in time to preserve the season’s scheduled opening on March 31.

“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” said Manfred on Tuesday. Citing the two sides meeting in Jupiter, Florida for nine straight days, he added, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”

If indeed those games are lost, they would be the first regular season games missed due to a work stoppage since the 1994-95 players’ strike, and the first due to a lockout by the owners….

It’s worth reiterating that any attempt to reduce the number of games below 162 and thus salaries, service time (including eligibility for free agency), and bonuses would be subject to collective bargaining as well, opening a can of worms that could affect both sides’ positions on other issues….Read More

(via FanGraphs)

Miguel Cabrera’s Monster Milestone (via FanGraphs)

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On Sunday afternoon against the Blue Jays, Miguel Cabrera became the newest member of an elite baseball club by hitting his 500th regular-season home run, making him just the 28th player to reach that mark in MLB history; he joins Albert Pujols as the only active players on the list. (He’s also the first-ever Tiger and first ever Venezuelan-born player to get there). Cabrera is also chasing entry into the equally exclusive 3,000 hits club, but he would need roughly a hit per game for the rest of the season to do that, making 2022 more likely, so let’s focus on 500 and his road there. … Read More

(via FanGraphs)

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Related
Miguel Cabrera in the bWAR era
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)
Man vs. Machine
Real talk: The media is completely blowing it on the Miguel Cabrera triple crown story

Cherry picking the 2021 Detroit Tigers All-Stars

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The annual National Cherry Festival resumes this weekend in Traverse City and runs until the start of the 2021 MLB All-Star break begins after the following weekend. Let’s use that time to look at how the Detroit Tigers have been performing over an intraseason period selected solely to make them appear better than they have been if you do something foolish like take then entire season into account.

On May 7, the Tigers lost to the Minnesota Twins 7-3, dropping their record to 9-24, and leaving them as the only MLB team without a double-digit win total. Miguel Cabrera was running a career-worst .127/.225/.238 line, and the team had just one above-average hitter in Jeimer Candelario (115 wRC+, with his BABIP still hovering around .400).

On May 8, though, the Tigers reversed the scoreboard and beat the Twins 7-3. That started a 25-21 run, a .543 winning percentage that– holding all else constant– would bump Detroit up to third place in the AL Central (or first place in the NL East).* Sure they actually remain locked in a virtual tie for last place in the division, but let’s stick with this May 8 thing a little while longer.

Since May 8, Detroit quadrupled its tally of above-average hitters. Robbie Grossman and Eric Haase (both 107 wRC+) have come on strong and clutch. And Jonathan Schoop and breakout star Akil Baddoo are on fire. Their respective 167 wRC+ and 159 wRC+ marks would make each of them top-ten hitters if extended over the full season to date. (On the other hand, Candelario dropped 100 points of BABIP and flipped his wRC+ from 115 to 85.)

As he so often does, Miguel Cabrera deserves special mention. He’s pulled up his offensive rate numbers a good deal and continues to accumulate historic-level career achievements. He continues to close in on 3,000 hits (2,915), and at 493 homers, he now is tied with Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff on the all-time list.

Continue reading →

Detroit Tigers 2021 Season Preview

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The day is here. A full season of baseball, we have many reasons to hope, lays before us. The Detroit Tigers’ opening contest, a home divisional matchup with Cleveland, begins at 1:10 this afternoon. It will be, we must begin by noting, the first opening day without Al Kaline as a part of the Tigers organization since 1954.

The leading public projection systems don’t particularly care for what they see in the Tigers roster this year (PECOTA: sixty-six wins; FanGraphs: seventy-one wins), but even seventy wins would feel like a good accomplishment for a team that hasn’t bested that mark since 2016.

With championship contention out of the question, the focus turns to individual accomplishments. In that regard, most of the spotlight rightly belongs to Miguel Cabrera. A full, healthy season puts in play for him in 2021 two major offensive milestones: 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. Cabrera’s place in Cooperstown already is assured, but these are lifetime-achievement benchmarks it’s difficult to imagine absent from his resume. Cabrera enters the season second on both the active hits (2,866) and home runs (487) leaderboards, trailing only Albert Pujols in both categories. Most observers are targeting August and September for Cabrera to hit these historic points. In the meantime, it will be fun to watch him pass other big names– Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Barry Bonds– on his way there.

The rest of the Tigers roster has perhaps more modest goals for this season. The PECOTA projection system sees a few interesting individual achievements of varying significance for a handful of players. Will Opening-Day starter Matthew Boyd finish the season with an ERA under 4.00 for the first time ever? Will Buck Farmer post his first career save? Will Jeimer Candelario go all year without being caught stealing for the first time since 2017? Will Cabrera hit his first triple since 2016?

Detroit fans definitely like Farmer’s odds. As fun as it would be to see Cabrera leg out another triple, I think I’m rooting for Farmer, if only because that might help my nickname for him– Deer Hunter– finally gain some traction.

The Candelario item highlights a broader strategic shift toward what seems like it will be a more aggressive style of play coming from new manager A.J. Hinch. After leading the Houston Astros from the bottom all the way to the top and then losing his job and serving a one-year suspension for his role in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal, Hinch found a new home with the team for which he played an unmemorable season of third-string catcher nearly a decade ago. Although there is and will remain a cloud over it, Hinch’s managerial championship pedigree and association with some of the game’s brightest minds (a little too bright, perhaps) in Houston, together with his playing experience that includes time behind the dish in Detroit and his relative youth (he’ll turn forty-seven next month), all suggest he could be the best version of what the Tigers thought they’d found in Brad Ausmus back in 2014.

While Hinch appears to be a steady hand at the helm, this ship will sail only as far as ownership allows. As some of the team’s top pitching prospects begin to ripen, the task of finding run support for that budding rotation remains at the feet of Chris Ilitch. When the iron is hot, will he spend like his father did to add key free agents and push the team back into the top tier of contention? Or will he continue to churn the roster, keeping the team mired in a hunt for nothing more than intransigent mediocrity? I really like the Julio Teheran signing this offseason, but it’s moves of a different kind– think Prince Fielder or even Justin Upton, like Teheran, also a former Atlanta Brave– that soon will be needed. Is the young owner truly motivated to win? We’ll know before long.

For now, we have at our own feet that pure and exciting thing for which there is no need to wait: the Detroit Tigers are playing baseball today.

RKB: The Candy Man Can, But for How Long?

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How in the world is Jeimer Candelario the Detroit Tigers’ best hitter in 2020? Like so much this year, it isn’t a reality anyone would have predicted a year ago, but the hard facts are undeniable: Candelario leads all qualified Tigers batters in AVG/OBP/SLG (.313/.371/.519), wOBA (.379), and wRC+ (140). Candelario is a career 93 wRC+ hitter, and he posted a 72 wRC+ last season. How did he swing from thirty points below average at the plate in 2019 to forty points above average in 2020?

To be sure, this is not a J.D. Martinez fly-ball revolution situation. In fact, last week, FanGraphs highlighted Candelario as a batter with one of the largest year-over-year decreases in fly-ball rate. What he is doing, though, is making better, harder contact than he has in the past, with significant increases in barrel and hard-hit rates. Changes like that are very encouraging, even if he’s bucking trends and finding success on the ground instead of through the air.

There is one other hitting category in which Candelario leads the Tigers this season: batting average on balls in play. He’s currently running an insane .407 BABIP, making it a near-certainty that his offensive production rates drop off before too long. Even if real changes in his approach mean he can establish an expected BABIP higher than his current career level (.297), a .407 BABIP simply is not going to last no matter who Candelario is or has become. Since 1998, the highest single-season BABIP is Yoan Moncada’s .406 in 2019, one of only three total times during that span that anyone finished a season with a BABIP above .400. Perhaps that’s why Baseball Prospectus sees Candelario as a merely average hitter in 2020 (101 DRC+), rather than someone actually hitting like Mike Piazza, Larry Walker, Jason Giambi, or David Ortiz (all career 140 wRC+ batters). The highest career BABIP among that group of sluggers? Walker’s .332.

To this point in this short, strange season, Candelario’s production has been real. He really hit those forty-one hits, nine doubles, three triples, and four home runs, and he really drove in nineteen runs for the Tigers and drew eleven walks. No one is trying to take any of that away from him, and detected improvements in the quality of the contact he’s making with the bat provide a reasonable basis to believe he will continue to hit better than he has in prior seasons. A reasonable basis to believe he will not continue to hit quite as well as he has thus far in 2020 going forward also exists, however.

Thinking back to the end of the 2019 season, the idea of Candelario making a jump just to “merely average hitter” in 2020 would have felt like a major achievement. Even at a more modest outlook, that as his new floor would go a long way toward making Candelario a lasting part of Detroit’s rebuilt roster.

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Previously
RKB: Shifting the D to See Whether Analytics Drives the Motor City’s Baseball Team – 9/3
RKB: A Second Look at MLB Pitcher Casey Mize – 8/30
RKB: 2020 is the Season: Turn, Turn, Turnbull – 8/18
RKB: 2020 Detroit Tigers Season Preview – UPDATED PECOTA Ed.
RKB: 2020 Detroit Tigers Season Preview – Spring Training Ed.
RKB: 2020 Detroit Tigers Season Preview – Payroll Ed.