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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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RKB: 2020 Detroit Tigers Season Preview – PECOTA Ed.

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The rise of mechanized automation was supposed to ease our human lives. Instead, it has led to increased unemployment and longer, more laborious hours for those fortunate enough remain on the job. We at ALDLAND are here to swim against that current by compelling our metal creations to improve our earthly experiences. Rest assured, demanding readers: plenty of hand-crafted, free-range baseball coverage is on its way to these digital pages. But why wait for a man-made preview post when the computers can do the work for us?

With brevity as our computing watchword, here‘s the projection for the 2020 Detroit Tigers from Baseball Prospectus: a 69-93 record and a zero-point-zero-zero-percent chance of making the playoffs. BP’s PECOTA system sees only one other team, Seattle, with no shot whatsoever at the postseason, and only five, Seattle, Kansas City, Baltimore, and San Francisco, posting fewer wins.

On an individual basis, PECOTA expects eight Tiger players to add at least one win above the contribution expected of a replacement-level player (2019 WARP in parenthesis):

  • Matthew Boyd: 2 WARP (3.7)
  • Jonathan Schoop: 2 WARP (0.3)
  • Niko Goodrum: 1.7 WARP (1.6)
  • C.J. Cron: 1.6 WARP (1.3)
  • Miguel Cabrera: 1.4 WARP (0.3)
  • Christin Stewart: 1.2 WARP (-1.3)
  • JaCoby Jones: 1.1 WARP (0.0)
  • Joe Jimenez: 1 WARP (0.9)

Last year, only four Tigers– Boyd, Goodrum, Nicholas Castellanos, and Buck Farmer–contributed at least 1.0 WARP to the team.

On the whole, this is a very Professor-Farnsworth-good-news moment for Detroit fans. No one really anticipated seeing Tiger baseball in October 2020, but the fact that the robots think the team will win almost two-dozen more games than last season– that’s almost four extra wins every month– and feature twice as many productive-ish players is reason enough to be encouraged, at least relatively speaking.

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Previously
RKB: How does new Detroit Tiger Austin Romine relate to his teammates?
RKB: An unprecedented offseason move?
RKB: Detroit’s long, municipal nightmare is over, as Al Avila has solved the Tigers’ bullpen woes
RKB: Brief 2019 Recapitulation