Max Scherzer had his best season to date in 2013. After it was over, my basic message about Scherzer was that he will continue to be good but he had simply reached his peak and his career year was already behind him. In a way, I was sort of right. In another way, I was totally wrong. You see, Max Scherzer didn’t get better this year but he also didn’t get worse. Max Scherzer is exactly the same pitcher he was last year to the point where it is actually a little bit weird.

Let’s run through the numbers a little bit:

Technically, he’s getting one extra out per game, averaging 6.2 innings in 2013 and 7 in 2014. Oh well, look at this! Just look at it!

What? Like serious, Max what the hell? Are you a robot?

At least his BABIP is way different, which means we’re probably going to see a big swing in ERA.

Oh.

Going into the season, we were planning on getting a little less from Scherzer in 2014 simply due to normal regression, but Max, ever the intellectual, completely avoided what was supposed to happen. If you know baseball well enough, you know that this is completely ridiculous. Even if he was exactly the same pitcher, you couldn’t have had identical results like this if you tried.

Max is very good and did a nice job staying on top of his game, but what you’re seeing him do this year is one in a million.

I think it’s probably safe to say that most people are upset about the state of the Tigers offense. We’re resigned to the bullpen woes, defensive struggles, and bad baserunning, but people counted on this offense to be better. Not so fast. Not so fast, at all.

The Tigers offense is not under achieving at all. They may go into slumps, but this is exactly how they were expected to perform. Allow me to demonstrate.

I grabbed all 13 players that have at least 50 plate appearances. We don’t care if Tyler Collins was bad in  a dozen trips and we don’t care about how Iglesias was supposed to hit. No one would criticize a team for playing poorly because guys got hurt. What we care about is how the players who are on the team have performed relative to our expectations about them specifically.

Certainly, Cabrera is hitting worse and we all seem to think that’s because he’s injured, but let’s look at those 13 players with their preseason Steamer projections. Steamer is a projection system that forecasts how a player should perform based on their history. Below is a table of relevant wOBA’s.

Some players are doing better, some are doing worse. But on the whole, they are hitting exactly as we thought they would.

I took it a step further and weighted this group’s projected wOBA by their projected PA to get a projected team wOBA of this particular set of players. It came out to .334. I did the same thing with their actual performance and it’s .335.

In other words, the Tigers are exactly the offensive club we thought they were.

You’re going to look at this list and see Cabrera and Avila (and Jackson) below their projections and you’re going to say these guys are under-performing. Sure, but you can’t just say that and ignore how much better JDM, VMart, Davis, and Suarez are hitting. That’s cheating! If Romine was hitting like an MVP this year and Cabrera wasn’t a scrub, you couldn’t rightfully say the team was under-performing because Cabrera wasn’t hitting because Romine was over-performing to the same degree.

I’ve said this all season long, the Tigers are an 89-91 win team. They upgraded a little but then got torched by injuries, so they’re probably an 87-88 win team right now. That’s who they are and who they’re playing like. If you think they should be better, that’s a failure of expectation. The preseason projections have been spot on offensively.

During last offseason, I recommended that the Tigers not sign Miguel Cabrera to an extension because the cost of doing so would never be higher. Then when the Tigers signed Cabrera to an 8 year extension worth $248 million plus another two years and $61 million in options (for a total commitment of up to 12 years, $353 million from the start of this year), I expanded on two points. First, keeping Cabrera long term might be smart, but signing him at the time they did was foolish. Second, I don’t care if the team wastes money as long as they are willing to throw more money at the team indefinitely.

This won’t be a long post, but it’s a more detailed point than I can make on Twitter. This season is the exact reason why the Tigers shouldn’t have extended Cabrera last Spring.

Cabrera was coming off a major injury and surgery to repair it. Cabrera was two years away from free agency. Cabrera was coming off a career year. Cabrera was 31. Cabrera was not willing to take a discount at this time.

These things are all true. I’m not arguing Cabrera’s talents and I’m certainly not arguing that his 2014 performance is the new normal, but his 2014 season is exactly why they should have waited. Cabrera is hitting 139 wRC+ and is going to post the lowest mark in wRC+ and WAR since 2008. He’s still recovering and it’s affecting him big time. He’s not having a bad year, he’s just having a bad year for a superstar.

That’s the thing. The Tigers had two more seasons of Cabrera at a heavy discount. The Tigers signed a terrific extension with Cabrera before the 2008 season and it wasn’t going to come due until after the 2015 season. The Tigers had one more year to extend him and then another crack at doing so in free agency. They chose to pay a big price two years early.

The only reason you pay a guy two years early is if he’s giving you a discount and you anticipate the price going up significantly in the future. Cabrera didn’t do that. He basically got full market value (or close to it) for a very long deal with only one team bidding on him. Ask yourselves, if Cabrera hadn’t signed that deal, would he get more this winter?

No way.

He’s having a down season due to injury, but that matters. He couldn’t reasonably ask for as much. The Tigers might have saved $20 million to $40 million on the total price tag. And there was virtually no downside to waiting. Know why? There was no way he was ever going to be better than he was last year. It’s almost not possible.

The Tigers agreed to pay him $30 million per year over the life of his deal. I think that’s a fine number, but they paid way too far into the future at that rate. 6/$180M made sense, but adding two extra guaranteed seasons and two options didn’t. And if they had waited a year, it would have gone down. And even if it didn’t, the price wasn’t going up.

Again, I don’t care if the Illitches have a little extra change in their pockets. That’s not what it’s about. It’s just a matter of making the right choice given the options. Keeping Cabrera is fine, but we’re looking at the exact reason why they should have waited a year. You extend young players, you wait for older guys coming off peak years to reach free agency.

It doesn’t affect the club this year, just food for thought. The Tigers could have kept him around for less had they been more patient.