Tag Archives: tarik skubal

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

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.

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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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.

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.

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RKB: A Second Look at MLB Pitcher Casey Mize

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The week of August 16 was as exciting a stretch of days as fans of the Detroit Tigers have had in a couple years. After sleepwalking through an aimless rebuilding process with lows as low as those of Houston’s famous tank job but without the Astros’ supercharged turnaround to competitive status, concern was growing that the organization might be starting to feel a little too comfortable in the increasingly populated sub-mediocre wilderness. Yet, to fans’ surprise and pleasure, General Manager Al Avila treated everyone to a one-two-three punch of debuts, allowing everyone an up-close look of the future of Detroit baseball. On Monday, Isaac Paredes, whom the Tigers received from the Chicago Cubs along with Jeimer Candelario in the trade for Alex Avila and Justin Wilson, started at third base following Candelario’s move to first after the injury to C.J. Cron. On Tuesday, left-handed pitcher Tarik Skubal, the Tigers’ ninth-round pick out of Seattle University in the 2018 draft, got the start. And on Wednesday, right-handed pitcher Casey Mize, the first overall pick in that same 2018 draft, had his turn.  Continue reading →

RKB: 2020 is the Season: Turn, Turn, Turnbull

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Thoughts on Detroit Tigers prospect Spencer Turnbull - Minor ...

I can’t believe I burned that headline on what’s going to be such a modest batch of information, but I can believe that Spencer Turnbull has found his way to the top of the Detroit Tigers rotation this year. I don’t think any serious baseball fan still thinks about pitcher wins and losses anymore, but Turnbull obviously was much better than his 3-17 “record” in 2019. 

The exciting news is that he’s been even better than expected so far in 2020. With a 2.78 ERA/2.85 FIP, he’s the best Detroit pitcher by fWAR (0.7) and bWAR (0.6).

MLive Tigers beat reporter Evan Woodbery noted this morning that Turnbull’s likely to regress as the season proceeds, and he’s right: there are some signs pointing in that direction. Woodbery points to SIERA, an ERA estimator, which sees Turnbull as about two runs worse than his current ERA. To that I would add Turnbull’s .283 batting average on balls in play, which is about fifty points lower than his 2019 BABIP and seems likely to increase. His DRA, 3.56, also pegs him as a little worse than his ERA and FIP suggest, though still clearly the best among the current rotation.

There also are signs these good results might stick, though. Here’s a FanGraphs/RotoGraphs report from yesterday, which highlights Turnbull alongside Trevor Bauer as two pitchers who have produced significantly increased movement on one of their featured pitches. For Turnbull, it’s his slider, which has been his main out pitch:

Last year Turnbull’s main strikeout pitch was his slider which had a 15.3 SwStr%. That isn’t the greatest number to have as your main swing and miss pitch. He already has a really good four-seam fastball so pairing it with a true swing and miss pitch was the key to Turnbull having a better 2020 season. So far this season Turnbull’s slider has a 26.5 SwStr%. It also has a higher O-Swing%, better wOBA against, and better ISO against. But again, small sample size so we have to look deeper to make sure this is indeed legit.

To start, Turnbull increased his sliders RPMs. It has gone from 2,438 RPMs in 2019 to 2,533 RPMs this season thus resulting in more movement. His slider movement went from having an overall movement of 3.3 inches to 3.9. He did this mainly by increasing its horizontal movement. Something he seems to be working on in the past three years. Its movement in inches starting in 2018 went from 2.29 to 3.07 and now to 3.51. 

The increases in spin rate and movement on his slider show that Turnbull still is developing, refining, and improving his arsenal, and they constitute evidence that he may be ready to outdo the performance levels his past baselines suggest.

One other thing I’ve been wanting to document this year is the way Turnbull mixes speeds. The graph below plots the velocity of every pitch he threw in his first start of the 2020 regular season. In five complete innings, he only allowed three hits (just ten total balls in play) and recorded eight strikeouts, and it was clear that he had the Cincinnati batters off balance all day. This yo-yo velocity chart is a big part of the reason why.

Of course, Turnbull’s stay atop the Detroit rotation might not last long. Focusing on the positives in that regard, ostensible number one Matthew Boyd could recall the location of home plate at any moment. Even more exciting possibilities are the arrivals this week of highly anticipated pitching prospects Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize. Skubal is scheduled to make his first major-league start tonight, followed by Mize’s debut tomorrow night. Could we be witnessing the emergence of a 2013-era rotation in the Motor City? That’s an extremely high bar, but there’s no reason not to permit yourself a little bit of excitement during these rebuilding times.

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Previously
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.
RKB: 2020 Detroit Tigers Season Preview – PECOTA Ed.
RKB: How does new Detroit Tiger Austin Romine relate to his teammates?

Related
Breakout prospect Tarik Skubal earns his first shot at the majors – Bless You Boys
The Call-Up: Tarik Skubal – Baseball Prospectus
The Call-Up: Isaac Paredes – Baseball Prospectus
Meet Isaac Paredes, the 21-year-old who is patient, punctual and experienced beyond his years – MLive