From the category archives:

2008 Season

Oh those intentional base on balls

01.29.2009 13 comments

The Tigers struggled with walks in 2008. This is well documented and fairly obvious with the Tigers issuing more walks than every team other than Texas. It resulted in Chuck Hernandez losing his job and the Tigers bringing in a coach who built his reputation on pounding the strike zone. But a significant chunk of [...]

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Not pounding the zone

01.06.2009 1 comment

Way back in 2008 I started to run a series using pitch f/x data to look at strike throwing tendencies. Sadly this is the slowest moving “series” of posts ever. Nonetheless, it’s time for part 3 where we look at how teams do when they get strikes outside of the zone. For this exercise I’m [...]

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Hitting em where they ain’t

11.29.2008 4 comments

We recently took a look at the Tigers team defense through the eyes of David Pinto’s Probabilistic Model of Range. As Pinto wraps up this season’s numbers, he calculated the PMR behind each pitcher. Not much went right for Nate Robertson this year, and it is little surprise that his woes were reflected in the [...]

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Pounding the zone by count

11.16.2008 3 comments

In part 1 of the series I dumped some big tables in here that looked at the rate at which teams threw a)strikes and b)the ball in the strike zone. Today we’ll continue along the same path, but we’ll start to differentiate based on count.
Pitches In the Strike Zone by Count
In 2008 teams pitchers [...]

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The Tigers according to PMR

11.15.2008 61 comments

The Tigers defense was the cause of much consternation this season, and rightly so. Now that David Pinto has released his PMR defensive metrics, we can take a detailed look at each position.
If you’re not familiar with PMR, it is a system that looks at each ball hit into play and the probability that [...]

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Fun with the Bill James leaderboards

11.05.2008 4 comments

The Bill James Handbook is always one of the first baseball books to come out each year. It’s not a riveting narrative by any means and it consists largely of tables of numbers. But there are always some interesting pieces and there seems to be something new every year. Last year it [...]

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Defensive Projections

10.27.2008 1 comment

Chone Smith has compiled defensive projections for the 2009 season. He’s used 5 years of data (combination of Stats Zone Rating, Revised Zone Rating, and Total Zone), and weighted it such that the most current season receives the most weight. He also regresses the results and uses the Fans Scouting Report. The more [...]

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Strike Throwing – Part 1 – Lots of Tables

10.27.2008 12 comments

The Tigers walked a lot of people last year. Along the way they threw a lot of pitches, and many seemed to be ill advised. The performance cost Chuck Hernandez his job, jettisoned in favor of an instructor whose students have gone on to gain some renown as strike throwing machines. Armed with [...]

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News from the front office

10.14.2008 6 comments

While other teams are hanging on to World Series dreams, the Tigers are beginning to retool for next season. The last couple days have already seen a little action, but more on the front office side of things.
The Tigers today named Kevin Hooker as the Pacific Rim coordinator. Hooker comes from [...]

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Suggestions

10.12.2008 117 comments

I know things have been quiet around here lately, well at least from me. I’m working on gathering data and building databases for my offseason projects. I now have my pitch f/x database built and I’m starting to delve into that. Some things I plan to look at are:

Nate Robertson – what [...]

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Tigers have nice fall debut

10.07.2008 14 comments

The Arizona Fall League kicked off and the Tigers representatives represented the Tigers well (how’s that for a sentence?). Wil Rhymes, Casper Wells,and Jeff Larish hit 2-3-4 and each picked up a hit. Wells was the only homer of the game and he knocked in 2. On the pitching side, Rudy Darrow [...]

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2008 Offseason Preamble

10.05.2008 156 comments

With a disastrous season completed it is time to head into the offseason. Given the gravity of the collapse, you know with the high payroll and the last place-edness, there is probably a tendency to overreact and second-guess. While a deep dive analysis is definitely called for, there is also some inaccuracy being [...]

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