As I write this, the Tigers are one game away from their first World Series trip in six years and just their third in the last 43. With another superb outing from Justin Verlander last night, the Tigers have a 3-0 series lead on the struggling Yankees and send Max Scherzer to the hill tonight to try and punch their ticket to the Fall Classic.

But things haven’t always seemed so sunny in Detroit. For much of the summer, there was serious malaise hanging over Tigers fans everywhere. Maybe even downright panic? You couldn’t take to Twitter with the #tigers hashtag without seeing hundreds of people complaining about the team and preparing for next year.

Then a funny thing happened. The Tigers ended up here. Let’s see how that transpired.

The first thing to know is a cliché piled on top of an axiom. It’s a long season. Over a 162 game season, there is variation in how well a team plays that almost always balances out in the end. Basically, the Tigers played their “bad” baseball from late April to June and their good baseball from July to the present while the White Sox did the opposite. At the end of the season, the Tigers had been a better team, but for most of the season, it seemed like that wasn’t the case because of the order in which things happened.

That’s a pretty philosophical argument for the average sports fan, but it’s true. That being said, we should also consider our preseason expectations. Every single expert prediction put the Tigers atop the AL Central. All of them. That uniformity was based on a team that won the division by 15 games in 2011 and added Prince Fielder and a full season of Doug Fister to a team that only lost Victor Martinez. In addition, the White Sox shipped a couple of pieces out of town and appeared like they were headed for a rebuilding year (I picked the Sox to finish dead last).

All that makes us think this division should have been a runaway. Yet baseball happened. The White Sox played over their heads thanks to bounce back years from Adam Dunn and Alex Rios and a career year from AJ Pierzynski. Then there was Jake Peavy staying healthy and Chris Sale having a breakout year, while somehow avoiding Tommy John surgery despite a throwing motion that makes my elbow hurt just by watching.

I contend that we didn’t miss on the Tigers projection; we missed on the White Sox. On The Guy Show in March I predicted a Tigers division title with about 92 wins. They won the division with 88 wins. That’s 96% of the wins I thought they’d have. The most I heard anyone predict was ESPN’s Mark Simon, who said 98. I think it’s fair to say, the overall win total was only slightly below what we thought would happen. It was the White Sox we missed on, not the Tigers.

I think the other reason we saw so much fan angst in the D is because a lot of fans don’t watch much baseball other than Tigers games. People were often frustrated by things the team did, even though they were actually performing a lot better than most teams in baseball.

Let’s explore this a little further. Take a guess, where would you rank the Tigers pitching staff as a whole this season? Just base it on performance, not potential.

Using Fangraph’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR), the Tigers had the best pitching in baseball with 24.8 WAR. Here’s how the rest of the top five looks:

2. Rangers, 23.9 WAR

3. Rays, 23.2 WAR

4. Nationals 21.4 WAR

5. Reds 21.0 WAR

Now WAR is just shorthand for total contribution, so if you aren’t yet convinced, we can break it down a little further, but those WAR numbers line up with the eye test. The Tigers were 4^th in strikeouts per 9 (K/9) with 8.29 and 6^th in walks per 9 (BB/9) with 2.76. They were 4^th in FIP and 5^th in xFIP, and trailed only the Rays among AL teams. FIP stands for Fielding Independent Pitching, so it factors out defense, which is out of the pitchers control. xFIP normalizes that number for ballpark factors and expected homerun rates (which tend to fluctuate widely). Basically, this paints a picture of the Tigers as one of the top teams in the league on the mound.

Switching to the batter’s box, the Tigers also stack up nicely. Sorting by wRC+, the Tigers come in 4^th in baseball at 105. The top five looks like this:

1. Yankees 113

2. Angels 112

3. Cards 107

4. Tigers 105

5. Rangers 105

If you’re wondering, wRC+ is a metric that compares a team’s offensive output to the rest of the league in runs (100 is average) and controlling for park factors. If we look at wOBA, which is OPS on steroids, the Tigers come in 7^th, but that doesn’t control for park factors, so teams like the Rockies are ahead of them. wOBA essentially breaks each action down to its actual run value, so unlike OBP, not every hit is the same and unlike SLG, a double is not twice as valuable as a single. For a complete explanation, see this.

If you’re still weary of some of these sabermetric tools, let’s look at a more conventional measure. The Tigers were 3^rd in baseball in OBP and first in the league in OBP with men in scoring position. I bet you didn’t know that. Seems like they got on base and had timely hits.

The Tigers were a top pitching staff and a top offense in 2012. They only did one thing poorly, played defense.

By Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), only three teams had a worse UZR than the Tigers’ mark of -28.1 in 2012. In simple terms, that amounts to about three wins worse than average on defense. Another metric, DRS, puts them at -31, which is good for 6^th worst. This passes the eye test as well, the Tigers played poor defense in 2012.

So with that recap of the pitching, offense, and defense of the 2012 Tigers, we get the image of a pretty good team. Yet not everyone felt great about them for most of the year. I think that’s because the White Sox over-performed and most fans aren’t really aware of how other teams play. They look at a team that is inconsistent and think, “Man, other teams aren’t like this.” Actually, they are.

The Tigers had a good season and they are built for success in October. The starting pitching is clicking and the Tigers’ key weakness, defense, is performing really well. Mostly because Jhonny Peralta decided to become an all-world shortstop last week.

Things look pretty good right now, even if they didn’t in June. The Tigers are one win from the Fall Classic and five from a championship. The 2011 club lost the ALCS 4-2 to the Rangers. The 2012 club has already guaranteed a better finish.

I wrote a column for The Eastern Echo in April saying, “THIS COULD BE THE YEAR,” and I’ve said it again and again on Twitter (@NeilWeinberg44). I believe it. This is a good team built to win in the postseason with elite starting pitching and a strong lineup with an elite core.

So I apologize if this post was rather long, but I thought it best for us to get caught up and answer the question of how we went from the ledge of a tall building to the brink of ecstasy.

Tune in tonight and put the champagne on ice. Five more wins.