Right on track.

15-11

This piece comes a day late, forgive me, but I had four or five posts yesterday and didn’t want to clog up the feed, so May 1st is part of April for one year only. It’s hard to be upset about anything after a 15-11 month which puts the team on pace for 93-94 wins and a third straight AL Central title, but there are always negative voices. Ignore them.

The Tigers offense is 8th in baseball with 104 wRC+ so far this year and have scored the 6th most runs of any team (127). They are 2nd in batting average (.279), 4th in OBP (.345), and 12th in slugging (.410), giving them the 6th best wOBA (.329) in the league. I don’t generally subscribe to the idea of clutch hitting with runners in scoring position, but if you’re interested, their OBP in those situations is .341, which is roughly what they’re doing across the board.

The defense, as you might suspect, hasn’t been great so far with the team posting a collective -12 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) good for 27th in baseball and a -9.6 UZR which ranks the same. Early defensive numbers should always be taken with a grain of salt given the small sample size and Austin Jackson probably won’t post negative numbers over the course of the season, but Cabrera is already at -4 DRS this season and I think that’s probably true. I don’t think he’s necessarily gotten worse, but he is missing more close plays that he did last year. Hopefully that evens out.

Individually, as one would expect given the collective numbers, lots of Tigers are performing well early. Cabrera is off to a great start .371/.446/.571, 175 wRC+, and 1.2 WAR. Remember too that most of these WAR numbers are suppressed due to poor defensive numbers. Hunter has been a standout hitting .365/.405/.490, good for 145 wRC+, and 0.8 WAR. Peralta is hitting like a top 10 shortstop, turning in a .293/.336/.404 line during the first month of play and Jackson is doing well after a torrid opening week, delivering a .284/.352/.397 April.

Prince Fielder is also punishing the ball in 166 wRC+ fashion thanks to 7 HR and a .302/.420/.583 slash line. Infante is doing well for himself too with a 100 wRC+, making him a top 10 second basemen so far.

Alex Avila has started slowly, posting a wRC+ of just 50 so far, but that is at least partially driven by a very low .213 BABIP which should regress upward and erase some of the problem. Victor Martinez has been someone a lot of people were worried about as he is hitting .212/.279/.263 so far but his .236 indicates that luck will change. He’s hit a lot of balls hard that haven’t found holes.

But even if that didn’t impress you, the pitching will. The Tigers pitchers lead baseball with a 7.0 WAR, which is 1.5 WAR ahead of 2nd place. They have a league best 2.71 FIP and are striking out 9.84 batters per 9. Lots of people are worried about the bullpen, but thanks to a lot of strikeouts, they’re 6th best in the league in FIP.

The top four starters are delivering. Sanchez (1.34 FIP, 2.0 WAR), Verlander (2.11 FIP, 1.6 WAR), Scherzer (1.69 FIP, 1.4 WAR), and Fister (3.17 FIP, 0.9 WAR) are all top 20 starters so far and Drew Smyly is performing at relief ace levels (1.64 FIP, 0.6 WAR).

The Tigers lost a couple extra inning games that could have gone either way, so their 15-11 record doesn’t even reflect the quality of play. If the Tigers keep this up, they’ll be playing October baseball once again.

The Moment: Brayan Pena absorbs a collision from Justin Smoak to finish off a 14 inning win in Seattle.