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.
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.
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.
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.
Now that Detroit Tigers general manager Al Avila has tipped his hand with respect to his rebuilding strategy, it’s nice to see him following up on his listed priorities of improving every single position on the team. Yesterday, catcher Austin Romine, formerly of the New York Yankees, signed a one-year contract with the Detroit Tigers, who have made their former utilityman‘s younger brother the first notable addition of this offseason’s rolling thunder rebuild revue. How does he relate to the guys already on Detroit’s roster?
After that fight, in which Gary Sanchez revealed his true nature, Romine denied that he escalated the situation, which he probably should hope is the truth. Regardless, Avila may want to consider rehiring the elder Romine sibling as an assistant bench coach, even if the new guy is saying all the right things for now:
Austin Romine said there are "no hard feelings" after epic Tigers-Yankees brawl in 2017 in which he went toe-to-toe with Miguel Cabrera. "
"It was just two guys out there protecting their teams."
Said he's excited to play with "one of the best hitters of our generation."
Jawing and brawling aside, where does Austin stand in relation to his new backstop colleagues? The assumption is that he will be the starter ahead of Greyson Greiner and Jake Rogers. The following table highlights some 2019 performance numbers those three posted.
Romine, who actually added value to his Yankees team last year, bests the incumbents across the board with the possible exception of age. The reasonable hope for him is that he can continue to hit at something within dirt-kicking distance of average while adding value on defense, which is what he did in 2018. The coming season is likely to be Romine’s first as a starter. He turned thirty-one last month, so his test in 2020 will be to sustain his offense and rebounding on defense while carrying a heavier load and learning a new staff. Seems easy enough.
In a deal that went down to the final moments of Thursday night’s waiver/postseason trade deadline, the Detroit Tigers have traded franchise starting pitcher Justin Verlander to the Houston Astros in exchange for three prospects. Early reports indicate that the Astros will be taking on a substantial portion– but not the entirety– of Verlander’s remaining contract.
Verlander has spent the entirety of his thirteen-year major-league career with the Tigers, who chose him with the second overall pick out of Old Dominion in the 2004 amateur draft. In 2006, Verlander’s first full season in the big leagues, he earned American League rookie of the year honors as the team advanced to the World Series just three years after losing 119 games in 2003. That season kicked off the latest golden era for this historic franchise (“the Verlander Era,” I think we now can safely call it), a run that realistically ended in 2016; practically ended with the death of former owner Mike Ilitch in February of this year; and officially ended tonight. Verlander was a six-time All Star with the Tigers, winning both the AL Cy Young and MVP awards in 2011 (and he was robbed of the former award last year) and winning memorable postseason duels with the Yankees and A’s, among others.
Verlander has been the consistent face, leader, and spokesman of this Tigers team, and he was the author of many of its greatest hits. (Speaking of hits, Verlander earned his first major-league RBI last night in Colorado during what proved to be his final appearance in a Detroit uniform.) With respect to Miguel Cabrera, who came to Detroit in 2008 after winning a championship with the Florida Marlins, no player has been more closely associated with this team over the past decade-plus than Verlander.
That 2006 season also marked my return as a fan to baseball and the Tigers, so it’s as difficult as can be for me to envision Verlander playing for another team, even if he’ll still be in orange and, undoubtedly, dominating in the postseason. I will be watching, though, thankful for everything he did to help the team I for whatever reason care about and hopeful that he finds what he wants in Houston.
We now awake to a very new morning on Woodward Avenue and hope that the Tigers’ management and ownership pursue the rebuilding process with the same tenacity and persistent demand for excellence Verlander modeled for everyone in his days wearing the old English D.
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Romine, who actually added value to his Yankees team last year, bests the incumbents across the board with the possible exception of age. The reasonable hope for him is that he can continue to hit at something within dirt-kicking distance of average while adding value on defense, which is what he did in 2018. The coming season is likely to be Romine’s first as a starter. He turned thirty-one last month, so his test in 2020 will be to sustain his offense and rebounding on defense while carrying a heavier load and learning a new staff. Seems easy enough.
ALDLAND 