Jim Leyland has come out on several occasions and said that Jeremy Bonderman is one of the keys to any success the Tigers might enjoy in 2008. Bonderman’s second half swoon, which I attribute largely to his elbow pain that he finally fessed up to, clouded what was starting out to be a phenomenal season. An ERA of 8.50 over his last 9 starts, combined with the arm troubles meant that Bonderman finished with the highest ERA and lowest innings total since his rookie season. Like with Dontrelle Willis, we’ll delve into the pitch f/x data and see what we can find out about the veteran 25 year old pitcher.

On Friday Lynn Henning wrote a detailed look at Dontrelle Willis with a heavy emphasis on scouting. I found the article fascinating from the stand point of getting a better understanding of Willis’s repertoire as well as the thought processes that went along with approving the deal for the lefty. He was after all coming off a pretty rough year. I also viewed it as a chance to dust off that pitch f/x database I’ve had sitting dormant and explore whether or not the reports meshed with what the system had reported.

If you’re new here and like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Need more info on what subscribing entails? Here’s a primer. Thanks for visiting!For the last few seasons, sabermetrician Tom Tango has conducted a defensive survey called The Fans Scouting Report. I’ve mentioned it in [...]

A look back at the year that was 2007 here at the Detroit Tigers Weblog…
January

The Tigers inked Timo Perez and Bobby Seay. Seay would turn out to be pretty good while who could have fathomed the consternation Timo would cause.

I began writing more than most cared to know about first pitch swinging and other [...]

I just wanted to take a moment to wish everybody a happy and healthy holiday season. May you be safe in your travels.
For Tigers fans I think we’ve already received some pretty nice presents. Here’s hoping that Miguel Cabrera’s stocking gets stuffed with a nice fat contract extension in the not-too-distant future.
I also [...]

I didn’t really expect to be writing another post about Chad Durbin. Sure, I was going to include a link at some point that he had signed with the Phillies, but that was just going to be a bullet point. But while reading Bless You Boys this morning, it was brought to my [...]

We know Dontrelle Willis has the big leg kick and the bigger smile, but let’s take a graphical and statistical look at the Tigers newest starter.
The pitch selection
Using Josh Kalk’s pitch f/x tool we can look at the mix of pitches that Willis throws and the success he has with each pitch in his repertoire. [...]

A couple years back myself, Brian Borawski, and Ryan Sosin decided to try and unite the group of Tigers bloggers. We came up with an acronym and a logo and then we decided to vote on some year end awards. This is the 3rd year of DIBS awards. This year’s winners are [...]

Over the last month or so, David Pinto has released the majority of his studies using his probabilistic model of range (PMR). Today we’ll delve into the Tigers defense using this advanced metric.
I’ve explained PMR in the past, but a refresher is probably worthwhile. The PMR model uses data play by play data [...]

It’s award season and they are coming out fast and furious. Over at SB Nation they have been releasing the results of their blog ballots. Each baseball blog at SB Nation received 2 ballots, and with Bless You Boys being a solo operation, Ian was kind enough to let me vote his [...]

Ivan Rodriguez and Placido Polanco were honored today as MLB announced the Gold Glove winners. For Pudge it was his 13th while it was Polanco’s first. But were they the most deserving Tigers? Rob Neyer took a look at the inherent biases or trends in the voting. A couple of these [...]

I love looking at spray charts of batted balls and seeing where hitters have success. I’m funny like that. Fortunately Dan Fox, proprietor of his own blog and writer for Baseball Prospectus has released an application that shows ball in play distributions for the last 4 years and he just released the updated [...]