Kind Regards from Italy

E.R.A.: 14th out of 14
K/9: 14th out of 14
BB/9: 14th out of 14

What the hell is to debate? They absolutely suck.

And then we look at these games where the hitters have struggled and found that once – one frickin’ time – the pitchers have out-dueled their opposition. Way to pick your teammates up, fellas!

It’s as if a patient has a punctured lung but the doctors are all worried about a bad ankle: let’s get our priorities straight. The priority is pitching:

I recall reading that there have been virtually no teams in MLB history with pitching staffs in the bottom 25 percentile who’ve made the playoffs, but there have been countless teams with hitting in the bottom 25 percentile who have.

Lastly, as I’ve noted before, hitters are much more likely to return to career averages than pitchers. Cabrera, Granderson, Polanco, et al are almost certain to start performing. Pitchers, on the other hand, have flame-out all the time. We cannot assume that Bonderman, Robertson, Rogers, Willis, or even Verlander are going to return to career means (which is especially worrisome because most of their career means aren’t too good to begin with!)

Subjectively:

a) They didn’t bring in Cabrera, Renteria, and Jones, sit Inge, and count heavily on Sheffield, all in order to come up with 4 runs or less in 53% of their games and get shut out 7 times.

b) I don’t think there was an expectation that Tigers pitching would hold opponents to 4 runs or less much more than they already have, which is 47% of the time. Aside from Verlander and Robertson, coming into the season it was all question marks.

Objectively:

a) Compiling that 1-25 record, the Tigers have averaged 1.73 runs per game.

Scores like 0-4, 1-4, 2-3, 3-4, 1-4, 2-3, 0-2, 0-4 say something when they’re all losses with virtually no corresponding wins. If quality starts are in short supply, they can’t be wasted like this. If those scores were 7-11, 8-11, 9-10, 8-11, 9-10, 7-9, 7-11, the you could say pitching was bleeding the Tigers dry. But those aren’t the scores from losses.

No one’s debating whether Tigers pitching is bad. But good pitching has very often gone wasted, while good hitting has rarely gone down the drain due to a pitching breakdown. Subjectively, the failure with the bats is more surprising and more of a disappointment. And much more of a bad return on investment so far.

Yeah, that stat pretty much verifies my point: if the Tigers don’t score a ton of runs, they lose. Their pitching picks up lackluster hitting precisely 4% of the time. Pathetic.

Less cited axiom: Consistent good hitting picks up mediocre pitching more than 50% of the time.

Sweet.

I sacrifice bunted the runner to second so you could hit a home run.

New Stat Forthcoming (tentatively titled “Run-Prevention Support”)
Tigers’ Hitting > Tigers’ Pitching
Red Wings = Evil Socialists Who Must Be Nuked

Well, first off, we’re looking backwards when assessing the hitters, so that’s where I looked when assessing the pitchers. If the pitchers’ weren’t so terrible (yes, that’s a totally appropriate word), then the Tigers would almost certainly be above .500.

But my bigger point is that the Tigers’ hitters are statistically more likely to turn the corner and be a top offensive team. But with pitchers? Well, they, on the other hand, might truly just suck. That’s just the nature of offensive and defensive statistical flow.

And if your pitching staff sucks, your team ain’t goin’ nowhere.

You express frustration at an erratic offense. Take heart, though, the pitching hasn’t been erratic: they’ve just sucked altogether.

And what about the Tigers’ last three good pitching performances? The hitters didn’t even need ‘em! They scored 12, 9, and 19 runs, respectively!

My point, of course, is not that the Tigers’ pitchers should pitch poorly when their offense is kicking butt, but merely to illustrate that the sword cuts both ways: the pitching has totally failed to pick up their hitting when it struggles, too.

(Again, I’m going to create a statistic for this!)

You’re right the rankings for our pitching staff are pretty awful, and the numbers tend to be “less volatile” over time than most batting statistics.

Given the substantial time we’ve put in at the bottom of the league in pitching stats, we will probably recover only modestly at best, and perhaps get to the middle of the pack. That said, if the pitching just IMPROVES to the point where they put up the perforrmances they are capable of (especially Bonderman and Verlander) then who cares what the overall ranking is, the question becomes “how are they pitching now?

Right now, it’s better than earlier in the year, with plenty of room for improvement.

In my opinion, some of the much more pertinent stats concern the Tigers’ pitching:

1) Tigers’ pitching ERA is second-worst in MLB (worst in all AL)
2) Tigers’ starting pitching ERA is the second-worst in MLB (5.40, worst in AL)
3) The have the worst K-rate in MLB
4) They have the second-highest BB-allowed rate in MLB (behind Texas)

These stats don’t tend to fluctuate too much, and, unlike hitters, pitchers stats can’t at all be relied on to return to their historical mean: some of these guys we were counting on might have truly lost something.

It’s an oft-cited axiom that “good pitching beats good hitting”. Well, we better hope to go up against some pretty lousy hitting in the future if we’re to do anything.

I actually do believe that pitching leads teams more than hitting – it has some sort of emotional effect and therefore is proportionally more significant (this is just my hazy belief). So my concern has never been Ordonez and Guillen and Sheffield: it’s been Verlander, Robertson, Bonderman, Willis, and Rogers. These guys have been, on their best days, merely decent. And not one of them is pitching better than they have historically.

(So, I’m sure you can guess, I’m definitely a singer in the “Fire Chuck Hernandez” choir.)

Please select from one of the following:

a) Inconsistent
b) Volatile
c) Mercurial
d) Hot and cold
e) Frustrating to watch on a daily basis

Personally, I have to go with e), but basically, this team is all over the map and pretty impossible to figure out.