ALDLAND celebrated tax day this year by taking a dive into the numbers behind the Detroit Tigers’ offensive production. Since last season, I had developed the feeling that this should-be offensive power was having trouble scoring late in games, hamstringing their ability to mount comebacks and generally secure a win in the later innings, and I wanted to investigate to see whether that really was the case.
The evidence I gathered in April appeared to support my hypothesis. The 2013 season was just twelve games old, though, and it was difficult to ascribe too much meaning to data gathered from such a small sample set. As of today, however, Detroit has played one hundred games in the 2013 campaign, so I decided to update the numbers:
The middle of July is one of the slowest times in sports, but the MLB came through by banning Ryan Braun for the remainder of the season for violating its drug policy and provided us with more than enough fodder for a podcast. Listen as Marcus and I discuss the Braun story and related subplots, as well as our thoughts and advice on workout gear and a recap of Lefty’s big win in Scotland.
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A very special edition of the ALDLAND podcast this week as blog founder AD joins us to talk NBA free agency and the MLB all-star game. Marcus and I revisit some of our MLB picks from the start of the season and AD makes his own.
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The short answer is yes, the Detroit Tigers are baseball’s unluckiest team this year.
Baseball Prospectus has a semi-interactive feature called “Adjusted Standings,” which looks just like an ordinary baseball standings grid, but it has a few extra columns. I don’t pretend to understand the number crunching that’s going on behind the scenes to determine the precise contents of those extra columns, but I do understand the gist of the concept, which is to assess the relationship between a team’s outcomes and the quality of its play. Teams that play the game well usually win games. Sometimes teams play poorly but still win. Sometimes teams play well but lose. If such an incongruity persisted over the course of many games, we reasonably could say that the reason was due to good luck or bad luck.
In the Tigers’ case, that chart shows that, for three different ways of measuring teams’ luck (look at columns D1, D2, and D3), no team has had worse luck than the Tigers this year. Continue reading →
This year’s Detroit Tigers are far from perfect, but they’re off to a good start on the strength of their starting pitching and the bats of Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Jhonny Peralta, Torii Hunter, Omar Infante, (increasingly) Victor Martinez, and (once again) Austin Jackson.
The weak link– the bullpen– has been both very obvious and very weak. Hoping for some addition by subtraction, the club sent onetime-closer Jose Valverde down to the minors, and a more focused “closer-by-committee” approach has emerged, centering around Joaquin Benoit and Drew Smyly, with an emphasis on not misusing Phil Coke.
One of the criticisms of manager Jim Leyland is that he likes to have go-to players to fill defined roles, and nowhere is this more applicable than in his handling of relief pitching. In short, Leyland wants to have one guy be his guy when it comes to closing out games in the ninth inning. His unwillingness to deviate from that approach has had exceedingly frustrating consequences when The Closer is someone less effective than the likes of a Craig Kimbrel or, say, a 2011-vintage Valverde. (This is especially true because the Tigers have trouble scoring late in games. If the bullpen blows a lead late, this team is unlikely to mount a comeback.) Even though fans would like to see Leyland be a bit more nimble with the way he utilizes his personnel, some of his attitude surely has rubbed off on them. The fans want to have someone who can be The Closer too.
My opinion is that, if the Phillies are willing to part with Papelbon without demanding much beyond the absorption of his contract, the Tigers should get him. If his steady hand can turn these cardiac kitties into some cool cats come playoff time, it’ll be worth it.
That said, it probably is worth taking a look at how Papelbon would stack up with his new teammates if he were to catch a ride to Motor City this season. Continue reading →
Earlier today, the Detroit Free Press tipped the new Sports Illustrated cover, pictured above, reporting that “it’s . . . thought to be the first time a pair of Tigers have been on the cover of SI since Al Kaline and Denny McLain made it in September 1968.” (Such thorough and confident reporting by the Freep is in line with their recent work on even more important issues.) For anyone who collected baseball cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the headline is immediately evocative of an earlier pair of mashers. The caption dubs Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder “Baseball’s 21st-Century Version of Mantle and Maris,” explaining to the Free Press in greater detail:
Ruth and Gehrig. Mays and McCovey. Ortiz and Ramirez. To the list of great hitting duos in baseball history we can now add one more: Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera of the Tigers. Both were established stars long before coming to Detroit but since joining forces prior to last season, Fielder and Cabrera have become baseball’s best 1-2 punch, which makes it only fitting that the sluggers appear together on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated.
When the top team in the National League and all of baseball traveled to Motown for a three-game series against one of the American League’s best, I promised ALDLAND would be on site as the Tigers closed out April in the D. The following is my report from the weekend.
As briefly mentioned at the end of the last post, ALDLAND will have a presence in Detroit this weekend, where the Tigers will host the Atlanta Braves for three games, beginning tonight.
After twenty games, the Tigers can’t seem to get themselves above .500, and the early ride has been bumpy.
RT @STATS_MLB #Tigers are batting .198 with 16 total runs in their last seven games.
Yesterday afternoon’s game was particularly rough. After allowing just one earned run, starter Justin Verlander left the game with a lead on the scoreboard and a sore throwing-hand thumb. Rookie reliever Bruce Rondon, making his first major-league appearance, promptly gave up that lead, and then the ball. Phil Coke entered and, through a series of walks of varying intentionalities, put Detroit behind. Darin Downs relieved Coke and immediately gave up a grand slam. The supposedly hard-hitting Tigers, who have a way of not scoring late, plated no runs from the fifth inning on through the tenth, when they lost.
As anyone reading Upton Abbey knows, the Braves are red-hot. The consensus best team in baseball, Atlanta is off to a 15-6 start, and they’re hitting home runs like crazy. I haven’t taken a close look at their runs/inning distribution, but it sure seems like they can hit for power both early and late. Keep reading…
ALDLAND celebrated tax day this year by taking a dive into the numbers behind the Detroit Tigers’ offensive production. Since last season, I had developed the feeling that this should-be offensive power was having trouble scoring late in games, hamstringing their ability to mount comebacks and generally secure a win in the later innings, and I wanted to investigate to see whether that really was the case.
ALDLAND 
