How Was The Game? (June 7, 2014)
Youthful.
Tigers 8, Red Sox 6
After this game, the Tigers might be looking into a move to the AL East. Max Scherzer (13 GS, 85.1 IP, 3.38 ERA, 3.10 FIP, 1.9 fWAR) struck out nine and walked only one, but he was hit around a little bit over 6.2 innings and allowed four runs. It wasn’t his best outing, but the bats had him covered as they assaulted the Red Sox all evening. They got a pair in the 1st when Cabrera, Martinez, and Hunter had back-to-back-to-back hits and followed it with a run in the 2nd and a Castellanos bomb in the 3rd. Suarez chimed in with his first career hit and home run in the 4th, they added two more in the 6th, and another in the 7th. The bullpen held the line for 2.1 innings and the Tigers won their second in a row. Well, the bullpen didn’t allow the tying running, at least. Nathan gave up two runs, but you have to build that into your expectations. They’ll make a run at their second sweep of the Sox this year on Sunday night with the man, Anibal Sanchez (9 GS, 50.1 IP, 2.15 ERA, 2.14 FIP, 1.8 fWAR), taking the ball.
The Moment: Suarez homers for his first MLB hit.
How Was The Game? (June 6, 2014)
Entirely pleasant.
Tigers 6, Red Sox 2
If I were to tell you that the Tigers won on a Friday night against the Red Sox in a game started by Drew Smyly (9 GS, 54 ⅓ IP, 3.81 ERA, 4.28 FIP, 0.5 fWAR) in early June, you’d probably be ecstatic. The Tigers beat a great team with their worst pitcher! Well, let’s leave aside the context of this game and the seventeen games it followed and simply enjoy the performance. Smyly got off to a rough start, allowing two hard hits that lead to a run in the first, but got on track in a hurry, allowing just another run in six innings with four strikeouts and one walk to boot. The bats also contributed with a run in the third and fourth and two solo shots in the fifth (Kinsler/Hunter) and another in the 8th (VMart) to go with a sac fly. They also turned it over to the bullpen for the final three and didn’t surrender a run! A clear win! Add on runs! Hooray! They’ll look to take the series with Max Scherzer (12 GS, 78 ⅔ IP, 3.20 ERA, 3.12 FIP, 1.8 fWAR) on Saturday night.
The Moment: Bryan Holaday tripled!
Why We Should And Shouldn’t Worry About The Tigers
Eighteen long days ago, the Tigers were 27-12. They had just swept the Orioles and Red Sox in convincing fashion and were marching toward a division title that they were probably going to lock up in mid July. Things were going that well. The pitching staff was performing better than the near record-setting 2013 version and the bats were clicking on all cylinders. This was finally the year they were going to lead wire to wire and inflict very little regular season damage on our cardiovascular systems.
Eighteen long days ago.
Since then, the team has gone 4-13. Some of the losses have been shellackings. Some have been heartbreakers. It’s been a collective meltdown. The starters were bad. The bats started to vanish. The bullpen was more Phil Coke and less Mariano Rivera. After seventeen games in eighteen days, the Tigers are now holding a modest divisional lead rather than a dominating one. The Indians found their legs and came charging, hard. The Tigers are crumbling. The shine is off the apple and they’re one poorly placed step from falling off a freaking cliff…
Whoa. Pump the brakes. Get a hold of yourselves.
It’s 5:15pm on June 5th and the Tigers are 31-25. That’s a 89-90 win pace. That’s basically exactly how many wins I said they’d have. They have the 7th best offense in baseball (by wRC+) and are scoring 4.5 runs per game. That’s up to date information. They have the 8th best staff by fWAR and their rotation still ranks in the top five of both ERA- and FIP-.
At the lowest moment of the season, you can squint and say the Tigers are about the 8th best team in baseball. So let’s reevaluate things. At one point, just eighteen days ago, the Tigers were pretty much everyone’s consensus number one team. They were the best staff and one of the best couple of offenses. Even their defense wasn’t horrible. It hasn’t been good, but almost all of the non-Torii Hunter defense has been adequate as a unit.
FanGraphs projects the Tigers to win 90 games and think there’s a 78% chance they win the division. That’s lower than the 92% chance they had after they beat the Sox, but it’s still pretty darn good.
There’s a lesson here. You can’t let your opinions swing with the highs or the lows. We got really excited about the 27-12 team and started to forget that the team has real flaws. We can’t get too low about the 4-13 team and forget about the team’s strengths. You can’t base your analysis of a club on the best and worst parts of their seasons. I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel terrible and want to gauge out your eyes, but don’t all of a sudden think the team is terrible just because they’ve been terrible for three weeks.
If I just gave you their numbers to date, you’d think they were a good but not great team. The order in which those hits, runs, strikeouts, etc happened are irrelevant. Performance goes up and down. It just does. This isn’t fun, but it also isn’t reflective of who they will be. The darkness will break.
But I don’t want that to obscure the message that the team has flaws. The bullpen had average talent and is performing very poorly. Joba has been wonderful, Alburquerque has been solid. Reed looks fine for middle reliever and Krol looks capable of a middle relief role. But Coke and Nathan have been horrible and the team has struggled to settle on a 7th man. You can’t have two relievers, one of whom gets high leverage innings, throwing batting practice or your margin for error vanishes. If Nathan was pitching like Nathan, this might have been a 7-10 stretch and nobody panics.
The Tigers are also getting nothing from shortstop. This isn’t about having a weak hitting SS who is treading water, it’s the worst offense from SS in more than a decade. Suarez might help, but Suarez also might be hurt.
Castellanos hasn’t played up to his talent, but there are signs of life. Jackson has really slumped, but he does this all the time and rebounds. Torii Hunter is the offensive problem because he’s killing the Tigers on defense and doing nothing at the plate to redeem himself. He has a .286 OBP on the season and hits 2nd a lot of the time. If he hadn’t hit those three home runs in three days, it would look even worse. He’s at -0.7 fWAR right now. Left field was supposed to be the weak link.
The Tigers have a good rotation, but it is weaker than it was last year. Sanchez looks to be equally deadly while Porcello looks the part of equal or slightly better than his 2013 self. Scherzer isn’t quite that guy, but that’s only because 2013 was his career year. We knew that regression was coming. The Verlander dance is one we know and even if you’re bullish on him, you know he’s trending south. Smyly is a good pitcher with some value, but there’s no way he’s going to be Doug Fister. The strength of the team is still their strength, but it simply isn’t as strong.
You shouldn’t be diving into the abyss, but you also shouldn’t have been buying playoff tickets when they were 27-12. It’s human nature to do so, but we often need a reality check. The Tigers are flawed. The Kinsler trade was all kinds of awesome, but the rest of the offseason built a less team than the one we had a year ago. We forgot that too quickly and then we overcorrected when things started to turn.
The Tigers will be better, but they won’t win 110 games. This correction happened all at once, so it’s been a real bummer, but it was going to happen at some point. This is a good team, not a great team, and good teams will go through these kinds of funks. They don’t need a speech or a shot in the arm. They either need a couple of better players or we simply need to align our expectations.
It’s going to be a fun summer, just not as fun as it was eighteen long, brutal days ago.
How Was The Game? (June 5, 2014)
Welp.
Blue Jays 7, Tigers 3
On it’s own, losing to a hard-hitting Jays team on a Thursday afternoon wouldn’t upset you too much. Losing three straight to them? Losing a whole bunch over the last three weeks? That will start to wear you down a bit. Justin Verlander (13 GS, 86 IP, 4.19 ERA, 3.81 FIP, 1.6 fWAR) had some good moments but also allowed six runs in seven innings while walking as many as he struck out, four, and surrendering two home runs. Granted, there was an inexcusable error which opened the door during the first Jays’ rally, but the second rally felt like the killer. The bats got moving first, with two runs in the third inning, but the Tigers struggled to break through during the rest of the game, scoring just another single run, and careened toward a sweep. At some point, things will turn around, but so far, we’ve had no such luck. Drew Smyly (8 GS, 48.1 IP 4.10 ERA, 4.53 FIP, 0.3 fWAR) will get the assignment on Friday against the Red Sox.
The Moment: Kinsler triples in Nick in the third.
How Was The Game (June 4, 2014)
Blech…
Blue Jays 8, Tigers 2
It was another fine start for Rick Porcello (11 GS, 70.2 IP, 3.69 ERA, 3.98 FIP, 1.0 fWAR) who allowed a home run to the second batter of the game and didn’t get into any trouble again until he allowed a two run double in the 6th. He was getting easy outs all night in between and got four outs after the double to finish with 7 innings, 6 hits, 3 runs, 1 walk, and 3 strikeouts against a very strong Blue Jays lineup. He had some help from Cabrera and Kinsler who each launched solo shots, but the Tigers failed to capitalize on two bases loaded scoring chances and the Blue Jays added on against the pen with some magnitude.The Tigers will work to avoid the sweep on Thursday with Justin Verlander (12 GS, 79 IP, 3.99 ERA, 3.49 FIP, 1.7 fWAR) taking the ball.
The Moment: Cabrera swats a no doubt bomb in the first.
What To Do About Shortstop?
We knew it already, but the Tigers confirmed today that Iglesias is out for the year. Stephen Drew is playing for the Red Sox. Andrew Romine and Danny Worth have played very poorly. The Tigers are trying to win a championship and they have the worst offensive tandem at shortstop in at least a decade. Something needs to be done, although their current four game lead in the Central despite an awful stretch gives them time. They don’t need to do something tomorrow, but they need to do something before too long.
From the shortstop position this year, the Tigers have hit an impressively poor 32 wRC+ (.222 wOBA). That’s 12% behind 29th place. They’ve collectively offered -1.0 WAR. Worth has good defensive ratings, but an awful batting line in 46 PA. Gonzalez was awful across the board. Romine has been the best hitter of the bunch, but he’s still be terrible in the highest number of PA and his defense, which has potential, has not been good enough to be redeeming.
All together, it’s been a sorry unit. That’s not their fault. None of them are starting major league shortstops. I wouldn’t mind Romine or Worth as utility infielders because they have some useful skills. Both are worthwhile on the bases and in the field. Worth can pitch, apparently. But they aren’t good enough to start or split the starting job. We knew that when the season started and we know that one third of the way through. They’re in over their heads. That’s a fault of management, not a fault of the players. If the Tigers asked me to play center field and hit 7th, I would totally do it. I would be terrible, but I wouldn’t say no. And Romine and Worth are more than just a little better than I am. It’s not their job to retire for the good of the team, it’s Ausmus’ job not to play start them and it’s Dombrowski’s job to give him a different set of players.
We knew this was going to be a problem. When Iglesias went down, Dombrowski didn’t replace him. He went out and traded for two shortstops who weren’t close to starting shortstops. I’m not entirely sure why, but that’s what he did. Maybe it was designed as a stop gap or a bargaining strategy with Drew. Maybe it was supposed to hold them over while they waited for news on Iggy or for Suarez to prepare for battle. I can’t say.
But we know that it’s not tenable. You look at Romine’s .200 average and think, if he gets to .250, this could work. That’s not true for two reasons. One is that he doesn’t walk enough for that .250 average to equal a respectable OBP and, two, he doesn’t hit for any carrying power. You can hit .250 if you can slug .350 and play good defensive. I’m not sure Romine can do any of those things if you ask him to play most of the time. In a bench role, I think he could do fine. In a starting role? I don’t. He’s given us no reason to think otherwise.
What can be done?
Jimmy Rollins might do the trick but he can refuse any trade and has been vocal about not wanting to be moved. Ben Zobrist could be available, but the Rays don’t have to move him and the Tigers don’t have a lot to deal for a player who should be in high demand. Alexei Ramirez could go, but the White Sox aren’t far enough out of it. The Diamondbacks have lots of shortstops, so that might work. Asdrubal Cabrera is an obvious candidate, as long as the Indians don’t ask for too much.
None of those are both likely and sexy. Suarez, the Tigers only real in house option, might be knocking on the door. In fact, he might as well open the door and come right in. The Tigers have a black hole at short and the trade market is pretty limited. There are upgrades out there compared to the status quo, but I don’t know if many of them are better options than Suarez right now, especially when you factor in the transaction cost and the limited need in 2015.
Suarez can hit, but there’s a platoon issue. He can field, but he’s not a star. He’s an imperfect solution to bad situation. The team has many strengths, but the team isn’t invincible. We knew this was a cost-cutting and restructuring season. We thought we could fake our way through and make a pennant run anyway. That still may happen, but there are cracks in the foundation.
Zobrist is the name on the list that makes the most sense, but even he isn’t the superstar player he once was. He could play four months at short and then move to the OF next season. The Rays would be right to ask for a nice return, but it might be worth it. The Tigers have to do something at SS and probably something in the bullpen. The OF should get a boost from Dirks and the rotation will settle back in. You can make the playoffs with this roster, but the odds of finally going the distance don’t look great once you’re there.
There’s still time, but once the draft is over this week, there won’t be much more left.
How Was The Game? (June 3, 2014)
[expletive].
Blue Jays 5, Tigers 3
Anibal Sanchez (9 GS, 50.1 IP, 2.15 ERA, 2.14 FIP, 1.8 fWAR) is just the best. He doesn’t have the public relations staff that Verlander or Scherzer do, but man is he fantastic. He took on one of the best offenses in baseball and twirled a no-stress 7 IP, 2H, 0 R, 0 BB, 5 K ballgame. He allowed two baserunners and didn’t get one past second all night long in another truly impressive performance. Unfortunately, Hutchison was equal to the task and sent this one hurdling toward the bullpens nodded at zero. Joba did his job in the 8th, but Ausmus went to Nathan in the 9th despite a short inning for the former and Nathan did Nathan things. Walk, single, pop out, single, and walk. Ausmus went to the pen again and Krol got a sac fly, which set up a three run bomb against Alburquerque to make it 5-0. The Tigers gave it a go in the 9th, scoring three on a JD Martinez long ball but they could not tie it up. It’ll be Rick Porcello (10 GS, 63.2 IP, 3.82 ERA, 3.93 FIP, 0.9 fWAR) going Wednesday looking to even the series.
The Moment: Cabrera cuts the lead runner down at 3rd to quiet a potential rally.
Thoughts On Two Months of Nick Castellanos
There is no perfect point in the calendar to take stock of things and pretty much every time period you can think of is technically arbitrary. There isn’t a magic moment at which point stats become meaningful or scouting data becomes meaningful. It’s all meaningful and more of it is always better than less. But after two months of baseball, I’d like to provide some thoughts on the Tigers most interesting 2014 player. I don’t mean interesting as in “he is the most interesting player,” but rather “his 2014 season is the most important for how we think about him as a player.” This is, of course, Nick Castellanos.
I won’t bore you with the granular details, but Castellanos looked good, then he slumped, then he started to look okay again at the plate. He’s had good and bad moments in the field. His baserunning has been an adventure. All told, at this moment, he’s got a 74 wRC+ (which isn’t good), a -1.5 BsR (which is very bad), and a -2 UZR and -7 DRS (which aren’t very good at all). That’s -0.2 fWAR in 181 PA.
If you took his first two months and played them over and over, you wouldn’t want to keep doing that for very long. On balance, he hasn’t been a great player, but we don’t really care about that for Nick because he’s 22 and getting his first taste of big league action. He will not earn ROY honors based on his first two months, but luckily the Tigers played well anyway and we have five and a half more years to actually get some value out of him.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first. He’s not a good baserunner, or at least, he’s slow and hasn’t shown good enough instincts to compensate. We never expected him to be a good runner, so this is totally cool!
The defensive numbers are interesting and instructive. He graded out well very early but has since slid back to below average almost entirely for what the numbers consider poor range. He’s league average or better as far as making the plays he gets to, and well below average at getting to the ball. But it’s only been 400 innings, so it’s perfectly fine to be skeptical of the precise values a little bit.
I’ve watched or listened to almost every inning he’s played this season and here are my observations. I think he has the skill to be a perfectly competent third baseman. The range isn’t great, but his hands are good, the arm is strong, and he has decent instincts. He’s done a nice job coming in on the ball and I’ve liked what I’ve seen when he throws the ball. I’ve heard from others that they feel good about his change to stay at third. My guess is that he’s going to be a -5 to 0 3B for the next few years, but that’s totally okay. He doesn’t have to be a plus defender to be a good player, he just has to be able to play the position, which I think he can. I suspect his DRS (which is the metric that likes him least) will even out as he gets more chances, and especially once he gets to cheat toward the line when Iglesias gets healthy.
So this brings us to his bat. If you look at the raw numbers, it hasn’t been great. He has a wOBA under .300, he’s not walking, and he’s not hitting for enough power. But again, you shouldn’t expect a guy to hit his projection during the first two months on the job. Growing pains are fine. If he’s this guy forever, that would be bad, but that’s probably not going to happen.
He has a contact problem, with a contact rate of 69.5% when he swings. To give you an idea, league average is 79.4% and Castellanos ranks 12th worst among qualifiers. Unless you hit for tons of power, that contact rate is too low. But we’ve seen signs from Nick that he’s figuring it out. He went an entire month without a walk from late April to late May and then walked a bunch of times in late May. Some of this is learning what you can and can’t hit. My guess is that he’s always been so talented that almost no one could throw a pitch he couldn’t square up. That happens in the bigs and he simply needs to adjust to it.
From what I’ve heard, he’s a very smart hitter who constantly adjusts, so this shouldn’t be a problem long term. When Nick does make contact, I’ve been really impressed with how much barrel he gets on the baseball and how well he sprays line drives around the diamond. There’s a lot to like there, for me. Better pitch recognition and decision making should make a world of difference for a guy with such natural ability to hit.
If he becomes a league average hitter (.320 wOBA/100 wRC+ or so), he’s a perfectly useful player. But if he can, and I think he will, make good use of that hit tool, he could be a .350 wOBA type guy and could be a 3 win player without really stretching it. If he can really figure out the contact, I wouldn’t be shocked if he found his way into the .370 wOBA range, which is something like a 4 win player given the rest of his profile.
He hasn’t been a star on arrival, but I haven’t seen anything that’s worried me. He’s not going to have to move off the position and he’s shown plenty of ability to hit with the need to make important refinements in his approach. I think it’s reasonable to see him as a slightly above average player going forward. 2-3 wins seems safe with 3-4 quite likely.
Personally, I’m actually a little more bullish than that. I still think he’s going to be a star because, in my mind, his problem isn’t making contact, it’s knowing when not to swing. I think that’s more likely to improve with age than an actually difficulty hitting the ball well. He’s sharp and I think he’ll get there. I think good player to borderline all-star is what I’d project, but given what we’ve seen from him, I’m not worried about any sort of flame out. He isn’t drowning now and it’s only going to get better.
The Tigers And High Leverage Power
I’ll give you my biases up front. I don’t really believe in “clutch” as a skill. It’s not that I don’t think high pressure situations are more difficult, it’s that 1) the opponent feels pressure in high pressure situations and 2) if you get better in clutch situations, why can’t you perform that well in non-clutch situations? It is possible to get a “clutch hit,” but clutch hits just describe how important the moment is, not anything about the skill of player, in my view.
But let’s take a peak at a table of statistics entering player on June 3. This is the performance of the Tigers in low, medium, and high leverage situations and the league averages in the same. If you don’t know about leverage, it’s based on how much the game currently hangs in the balance with 0 to 0.7 being low, 0.7 to 1.5 being medium, and 1.5+ being high leverage. It’s a pretty useful proxy for clutchness of the situation:
| BB% | K% | wOBA | SLG | |
| Tigers Low | 5.8 | 18.9 | 0.323 | 0.420 |
| Tigers Medium | 8.4 | 16.1 | 0.326 | 0.419 |
| Tigers High | 9.9 | 18.6 | 0.348 | 0.469 |
| MLB Low | 7.8 | 20.7 | 0.313 | 0.391 |
| MLB Medium | 7.9 | 19.9 | 0.314 | 0.394 |
| MLB High | 9.9 | 20.7 | 0.309 | 0.384 |
Well what do we have here? Notice that most teams and players tend to walk a little more in high leverage situations, but perform a little worse overall while also hitting for a touch less power. The Tigers, for some reason, don’t walk in low leverage situations. They make up for it by getting more hits and have pretty equal wOBA in Low and Medium leverage.
But look at the slugging percentage column. The Tigers out slug the league across the board, but their Low/Medium slugging ratio is typical. Their High Leverage slugging is off the charts. What gives?
The Tigers hardly out BABIP the field in High Leverage situations, but the ISO is obviously much larger. If you peak into home runs, the league hits a home run once every 43 PA in high leverage situations. The Tigers hit one in every 29 PA. We’re talking about a very small sample (6 HR in 172 PA) for the Tigers, but that gap soaks up most of the difference. The Tigers and the league hit doubles are roughly the same rate.
So this doesn’t seem like a super sustainable thing. Instead of flying out a couple of times, the Tigers launched a home run in a high leverage spot which did wonders for their splits. It’s a little weird how little they walk in low leverage spots and weird how much power they have in high leverage spots. It probably doesn’t mean much going forward, but it clues you in to what has happened to date. It’s way more important to look at their collective success across the board than in any one type of situation. The Tigers hit pretty well even when the game isn’t on the line.
How Was The Game? (June 1, 2014)
Quiet.
Mariners 4, Tigers 0
After a grueling stretch, the Tigers concluded their seven game trip with lackluster attack behind Max Scherzer (12 GS, 78.2 IP, 3.20 ERA, 3.12 FIP, 1.8 fWAR) who performed ably in 6.2 innings. Max allowed four runs, but didn’t issue any free passes and struck out 7. He looked strong at times but mixed in enough mistake pitches to surrender a collection of runs. It wouldn’t matter much how good or bad Scherzer was as the bats were very quiet against Elias throughout the ballgame. The club registered just three hits and a walk across nine innings and coasted to series defeat. The Tigers will enjoy the day off tomorrow and start back up at home against the Blue Jays with Anibal Sanchez (8 GS, 43.1 IP, 2.49 ERA, 2.21 FIP, 1.5 fWAR) taking the ball Tuesday.
The Moment: Scherzer punishes Saunders with a four pitch strikeout.
New English D 