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 those walks came at the hands of Jim Leyland.

The Tigers led the American League in intentional walks with 63. The next closest team had 45 which means Detroit issued 42% more walks than the next most free pass happy team. It also means that instead of ranking 13th in the AL in walks, they rank 11th in unintentional walks. Still poor, but not as ridiculously awful.

Let’s take a look at Leyland’s intentional walk profile for 2008:

• Justin Verlander led the way with 8 IBB’s. Bobby Seay and Nate Robertson each had 7 and Fernando Rodney had 5. Probably a bad sign when your closer has 5 intentional walks.
• Over half the walks came from the 7th inning on. Two were issued in the first inning. That can’t be a good sign.
• Justin Morneau picked up 5 intentional walks, that probably was actually a good move. 
• Opposing catchers received 11 intentional walks with AJ Pierzynski leading the way. 
• 21 of the walks came when the Tigers were already trailing by 3 or more runs.
• 20 of the walks resulted in the bases being loaded.

Many of these seem to be indicators of trouble and would seem to be ill advised. The blog Fire Jim Bowden took at look at all the IBB’s issued in 2008 and classified them as to whether or the walks were “maybe smart” or “definitely not smart.” The criteria for these classifications is laid out in The Book. What he found was that Jim Leyland ranked second in all of baseball in “definitely not smart” IBBs.

While a statistical and logical basis is a wonderful thing to have, sometimes managers play their hunches and intuition. Maybe things will work out? Earlier in the year I looked at how poorly things were turning out after IBBs were issued. The Bill James Handbook tracked the results and they broke down like this:

• Good: The inning resulted in a double play and/or the team escaped without further runs being scored (37)
• Not Good: Runs scored and a double play wasn’t turned (26)
• Bomb: Multiple runs scored (13)

Both Leyland’s 37 good and 26 not good were tops. Clearly there was a volume thing in play here. And I can’t tell you how many of the 17 “definitely not smart” IBBs produced the following results, I’d venture a guess that hunches didn’t out weigh the logic. And the resulting ratio isn’t particularly impressive.

Charlie Manuel by comparison issued 64 intentional walks, but had a 46:18 good to not good ratio. But Leyland’s ratio wasn’t horrible either. Eric Wedge only issued 28 IBBs and only 6 of those were classified as good.  Ron Washington and Dave Trembley ended up on the wrong side of the ratio as well. Coincidentally the Orioles and Rangers were also languishing at the bottom in total walks allowed. I’ll go out on a limb and say that taking a pitching staff that has a hard time throwing strikes, and then putting extra runners on base probably isn’t a good idea.

Fortunately Leyland doesn’t have a history of issuing a lot of IBBs. In 2006 he only allowed 35 so in some way he was probably just responding to the struggles of his staff in ‘08. But the Tigers could improve their walks allowed in 09 simply by the manager allowing fewer “free” free passes.

Table of contents for Strike Throwing with Pitch f/x

1. Strike Throwing – Part 1 – Lots of Tables

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 not looking at those generous calls off the corners, but for those strikes when hitters go fishing.

The first table we turn to is the fish rate, or the percent of pitches outside of the strike zone that hitters swung at. This is presented by count. As for the pretty shading, red are lower numbers and green are higher numbers.

2008 Fish Rate: Percent of pitches outside the zone swung at

In what is somewhat of a surprise, it isn’t the 0-2 or 1-2 counts that get the most fishing. That occurs with a full count or a 2-2 count. My guess is that the pitchers are so intent on wasting a pitch, that it isn’t even tempting enough to swing at. The result is a truly wasted pitch. Maybe it sets something up, maybe it doesn’t (that would actually make for an interesting study – set-up pitches).

From the Tigers perspective, it is a little odd that they would get a relatively high chase rate on 0-2 but a really low one on 1-2.  As for the other staff I’m most interested in, the Twins had hitters fishing on pretty much every count. My inclination is that the Twins staff has control that is so good, that even when they miss, they aren’t missing by much.

Moving on, the next chart shows the rate at which fished pitches are put in play, as opposed to just resulting in strikes.

Rate of "fished" pitches put into play

On the whole, there isn’t a whole lot of variation by count. You can effectively throw out the 3-0 rate because only 3.3% of pitches outside of the zone on that count get swung at. The 0-2 whole sees the least success which isn’t surprising. The pitch probably has the least chance of being close to the plate, so if hitters are swinging their chances aren’t that great. And in the case of a 3-1 count it would seem that hitters may be looking for a pitch in a specific spot and would be willing to swing even if it wasn’t a strike if it was in their happy zone. Either that or they get so amped up for a fastball they swing no matter where it’s at.

Taking a Tigers centric focus, hitters didn’t seem to have a hard time putting the ball in play even when it was out of the zone. I don’t really no what to make of this.

Finally, it’s all well and good to get hitters to chase pitches. It would seem to work in the pitchers favor if they don’t have to throw the ball over the plate. But what do the results show? The table below is bases per fished pitch in play, of BPFPIP. I’m sure that acronym will catch on.

Bases per fished ball in play

The Dodgers, Cubs, and Blue Jays appeared to have the most success in limiting the oppositions success when they went out of the strike zone. What I don’t know is if that is a repeatable skill. But what does appear to be true is that getting hitters to fish is beneficial on the whole. The correlation between fish rate and balls per fished… is -.49 meaning that there is a relationship and that as fishing goes up, success goes down.

Now these numbers aren’t park adjusted at all and this is a fairly crude (okay really crude) analysis so take it with a grain of salt. Also the numbers aren’t the least bit surprising, but in my defense I didn’t know that before I started the analysis and it would seem a waste to throw it away.

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 PMR numbers as well.

The table below is a combination of Pinto’s PMR work and batted ball data from Fangraphs.

2008 PMR by Pitcher

Nate Robertson had the 7th lowest rate of balls in play converted to outs in Major League baseball. Now Robertson wasn’t particularly unlucky – at least in regard to his fielders letting him down. His defense only made 2 fewer plays than expected behind Robertson. Robertson also posted one of the lowest expected DER’s in baseball as well.

What is unexpected is why that rate is so low. Looking at his batted ball stats, they aren’t remarkable in any way. His line drive rate isn’t high, his infield fly rate isn’t low. His ground ball and fly ball rates are consistent. Yet his expected DER is a recipe for disaster. Is it that Robertson was especially unlucky in that a disproportionate number of balls were hit to locations where nobody could get to them (save the “over-the-fence” jokes, those aren’t in these stats).

Meanwhile, Armando Galarraga was on the opposite end of the spectrum. He had a high expected DER, plus his defense helped him out to the tune of 16 plays. Kenny Rogers gave up a fairly high line drive rate, so his struggles aren’t at all surprising. Justin Verlander was hurt by his defense to the tune of 4 plays, but hardly was that the main source of his struggles.

But back to Robertson, I don’t know what to make of the data. Sometimes it feels like a cop-out to chalk things up to luck, and I saw Robertson struggle – especially in the second half. His peripherals did slip with Nate fanning a few less hitters and walking a few more, but those shifts paled in comparison to the .343 batting average on balls in play. If he was giving up line drives all over the park, it would be easier for me to chalk things up to a lack of stuff. That wasn’t the case. It truly does seem like the opposition managed to “hit-em-where-they-weren’t” with remarkable consistency last year.

Table of contents for Strike Throwing with Pitch f/x

1. Strike Throwing – Part 1 – Lots of Tables

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 through the ball in the strike zone (as defined by pitch f/x) at the following rates:

• 0-0: 48.0%
• 1-1: 45.0%
• 2-2: 43.0%
• 0-1: 40.0%
• 0-2: 27.1%
• 1-2: 34.6%
• 1-0: 49.8%
• 2-0: 51.6%
• 3-0: 49.9%
• 2-1: 51.2%
• 3-1: 55.9%
• 3-2: 53.8%

The table below displays how each team’s pitchers did in each count(click on the table to make it bigger):

Percent of pitches thrown in the strike zone by count

My beloved Tigers are below the average across the board. Meanwhile the strike throwing Twins are considerably above average in terms of pounding the strike zone regardless of the count.

Let me pause for a moment to explain the coloring here. Redder colors denote higher values, greener colors lower values, and yellow in the middle. The deeper the color, the farther away from the mid point. (Excel 2007 can do this automatically under conditional formatting. I never had explored this int he 2007 version and I love it).

With the gradient explanation out of the way we can look for some trends.

• The Yankees and Mets tend to keep the ball out of the strike zone more often than not
• Cleveland pounded the strike zone unless they were behind in the count, and then it seemed as if they didn’t want to give in.
• The Angels were the opposite in that they threw it in the zone unless they were ahead in the count.
• The Red Sox pounded the zone when ahead, and stayed away when they were behind, but were fairly neutral with neutral counts.
• The A’s which have had a history of good pitching, didn’t really throw it in the zone too much in 2008

Pitches Thrown by Count

Of course knowing what happens in a particular count is only part of the battle. It’s probably worth looking at how often each team was throwing in a given count (and while we haven’t gotten to the “what happens when the pitch is thrown part” it probably has a bigger impact on performance I’d guess).

Below is the percent of pitches thrown by each team in a given count, with the same lovely shading.

Percent of pitches thrown in each count

Some stuff I notice here:

• The Twins have the highest percentage of 0-0 pitches, meaning that they are throwing fewer pitches in other counts and having the most short at-bats.
• Despite not throwing a lot of pitches in the zone, the Yankees seemed to work ahead more than behind.
• Baltimore, Oakland, Texas, Washington, Pittsburgh and Detroit threw a lot of pitches from behind in the count.  That’s really not surprising.

Conclusions

None yet to speak of, except that if you’re behind in the count your pitching staff probably won’t fare well – but that is kind of a “duh” conclusion. I’m just presenting data at this point. Up next I’ll continue to dive into this and look at which staffs do the best job of getting hitters to go fishing by count.

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 the ball should be converted into an out. That probability is based on a number of characteristics including the handedness of the batter and pitcher, the type of hit, the direction of hit, and how hard the ball was hit. It is based on data from BIS which also provides the data behind the +/- system and revised zone rating.

The table below shows how the Tigers fared at each position, as well as the primary players at each position. It shows the number of balls in play (this is constant at the team level), the actual outs and predicted outs, the plays made above or below expected and then a conversion to runs. The last 2 columns scale the plays and runs to 4000 balls in play which is approximately 150 games or the normal workload of a full time player.

2008 Tigers PMR

The Tigers took significant steps back at several positions and the results was being 27.8 runs below expected – which is nearly 3 wins. Compared to last year when the Tigers were 15.8 runs better than expected, it’s a swing of 4.5 wins to the negative.

The Tigers saw declines at every position except for left field, where Matt Joyce fared very well in his part time play. He more than compensated for Marcus Thames who in the past had been an averag-ish fielder. The declines at first, second, and short weren’t terribly significant. Polanco was nearly as good as last year, and Cabrera wasn’t appreciably worse than the Casey/Thames/Guillen combination at first.

One of the biggest losses occurred at third base where there aren’t many who can adequately replace Brandon Inge’s glove, despite the fact the system rated Carlos Guillen very well. Magglio Ordonez was near average in 07 but poor in 08 in right field.

The biggest hit defensively though, and it accounted for two-thirds of the decline in team defense by this measure, was in centerfield. The Tigers were +23 runs in 07 and -9.3 in 2008. I really have no idea what happened to Curtis Granderson but he was 3 wins worse defensively. And I don’t think it was a problem with the metric because throughout the season he seemed to be getting to fewer balls. He has several years of data where he was excellent and one where he was poor. I’m inclined to think that he’s still a good fielder who had a bad year.

So about this Inge/Guillen thing

Now the Tigers have already announced they are going to try and upgrade their defense by installing Inge at third base and shifting Guillen to left field. What’s misguided is that they are attacking two positions where they were actually decent last year. While Inge will still provide the upgrade at third with the glove, the benefit may be negated as Guillen learns a new position and replaces a pretty competent fielding Joyce. Plus you weaken third base offensively and I don’t understand how this move helps.

Below are links to the PMR data from Baseball Musings and the run conversion info from Beyond the Boxscore.

• 1B: PMR
• 2B: PMR / RAA
• 3B: PMR / RAAA
• SS: PMR / RAA
• LF: PMR
• CF: PMR / RAA
• RF: PMR / RAA

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 was the Young Talent Inventory. This year it is a bullpen analysis. They sit alongside managerial stats, baserunning stats, and the Fielding Bible awards. But one of my favorite sections is the leaderboard.

I’m not going to copy a bunch of leaderboards for you here. That might be kind of tedious and boring for everyone, and it would definitely be a copyright violation. But I will point out some Tiger related items that are either interesting, or surprising, or noteworthy.

• Despite coming back from a horrific shoulder injury, and ending the season early, Joel Zumaya still let the AL with 18 pitches thrown over 100MPH. Brandon League was next closest with 4. Fernando Rodney even managed 2 over the century mark.
• Speaking of fastballs, Justin Verlander’s 93.6 average was 6th in the AL and Kenny Rogers’ 85.2 MPH heater was slower only than Tim Wakefield’s.
• Armando Galarraga threw a slider 38% of the time which was the highest rate in the AL.
• Despite Verlander’s struggles, his .377 slugging percentage against was good enough for 8th best.
• Rogers and Nate Robertson both ranked in the top 5 in GIDP/9. Just think how bad things would have been if they hadn’t had so many twin killings.
• Edgar Renteria was 4th in SS pivot percentage. Renteria also had the 2nd highest batting average against left handed pitching with the 7th highest batting average at home. If only the Tigers faced lefties at home more often…
• Curtis Granderson continued his maturation by taking the 8th highest percentage of pitches and seeing the 5th most pitches per plate appearance.
• Placido Polanco struck out less per plate appearance than anyone else in the AL, but it didn’t help him in run production where he had the 8th lowest RBI percentage (5.96)

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 data available the less regression, and when data is scarce the scouting report carries more weight.

Cherry-picking out the Tigers (the numbers represent runs/150 games):

Outfield

• Granderson: 13
• Ordonez: -4
• Joyce: (Corner) 7, (Center) -1
• Thames: -5
• Guillen: -3
• Raburn (Corner) 4, (Center) -4

Infield

• Inge: (3B) 10
• Renteria: (SS) -6
• Polanco: (2B) 9
• Cabrera: (1B) -1
• Santiago: (SS) -1, (2B) 1
• Guillen: (3B) 0, (1B) 5

Now there’s a good chance Renteria isn’t back next year, so some shortstop free agents:

• Orlando Cabrera: 1
• Eckstein: -3
• Everett: 19

Adam  Everett could be in a pretty steep defensive decline and even being +2 wins with his glove, his bat is so bad it probably can’t overcome it.  It’s not a great group that is out there, and one more year of Renteria if he can come cheaply might not be a bad bet.

Table of contents for Strike Throwing with Pitch f/x

1. Strike Throwing – Part 1 – Lots of Tables

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 a season’s worth of pitch f/x data I’m ready to start delving into this whole strike throwing thing. We’ll start today with some general league wide information.

For those unfamiliar with pitch f/x I’ll have some additional links to more information at the end of this article. The short explanation is a couple of cameras measure the direction and speed a ball is moving shortly in front of the mound. From this the pitch’s path is calculated to within an inch of where it crosses the front of home plate. And it draws the trajectory in the MLB.com Gameday application. On to the data…

Starting at the most simple level, let’s look at the respective rates at which teams threw balls and strikes. The table below shows the breakdown for all 30 teams. (These data are from pitch f/x, which doesn’t capture every single pitch, but should be sufficient).

No surprise that the Tigers rank near the worst in the league in terms or throwing balls. But what is surprising is the difference between the Tigers and the best. The best as you may notice are the Twins, but that gap is 4%. When you have 125 pitches that is a difference of 5 pitches a game being balls instead of strikes or in play. Now it only takes 4 pitches to walk a batter, but those pitches are most likely not all going to one batter. And the difference between the Tigers and the Twins in terms of walks was 238 this year. Put otherwise, the Tigers walked 58% more hitters than the Twins.

You may have also noticed from the table that the Twins lead in another category besides fewest balls thrown. They were first by a substantial margin in terms of their pitches being put in play. It speaks to the organizational philosophy about early strikes and getting the opponent to put the ball in play. For this we’ll move onto the next table which simply looks at how often the ball is thrown in the strike zone.

InZone is simply whether or not the ball crossed the front home plate in within the strike zone. The strike zone is of course 3 dimensional so the ball could clip the zone later, but this is what we have to work with. The Tigers are in the bottom third when it comes to putting the ball over the plate. The Twins are first which explains the lack of walks and the high number of balls put in play.

One other column I added was a buffer zone. I added 1.5 inches to each of the 4 sides of the strike zone. I wanted to see how how often pitches were either in the zone or “close” to the zone. The types of pitches that might entice someone to swing because it’s too close to take. The Twins have a lead here too, but the rankings don’t really change to much across the board so it doesn’t seem that teams vary too much in their ability to throw pitches near the strike zone.

The last table we’ll turn to is the product of some work Dan Fox did with pitch f/x data and is called Fish-Eye. Fox did this to look at batter plate discipline, but I turned it around to see if certain staffs could render hitters less disciplined. The column headings are defined as:

* Square: This is the new metric, defined as the percentage of pitches in the strike zone swung at and made contact with. A high value here (relative to the average of over 86.3 percent) indicates that when the batter offers at a strike he usually makes contact. On the contrary, a lower value indicates hitters who, for reasons such as a long swing, are more apt to swing through strikes.
* Fish: Defined as the percentage of pitches out of the strike zone that the hitter swung at. A higher percentage here indicates that the hitter may have trouble recognizing pitches since he is offering at pitches that would likely be called balls. Average values here are between 29 and 30 percent.
* Bad Ball: Defined as the percentage of pitches out of the strike zone that were swung at where contact was made. This includes foul balls, although there is an argument to be made that a foul ball is not the intended outcome, and so should be discounted in some way. A higher value in this category indicates that, when swinging at bad pitches, the hitter is at least able to get the bat on the ball. Average values lie around 68 percent.
* Eye: Defined as the percentage of pitches in the strike zone on non-three and zero counts that were taken for strikes. A smaller value in this metric indicates a player who recognizes strikes and aggressively offers at them. I excluded 3-0 counts, since a hitter is much more likely to let a strike go by in this situation, and we don’t want to penalize them for that behavior. (I didn’t exclude these counts). Average values here are in the range of 35 percent.

I’ve also added Contact which is the percentage of time a hitter swings and makes some sort of contact.

Earlier we saw that the Twins got a high number of balls in play on their pitches but weren’t hurt too much because of it. Part of the reason is that there weren’t free passes putting guys on. But perhaps another reason is that they have a lot of hitters chasing pitches that are off the plate and not perhaps not making solid contact. It’s a recipe for success. The Twins throw more pitches in the strike zone than anyone, and they get hitters to chase more pitches off the plate than all but one other team.

But oh yeah, this is a Tigers blog. Forgive me if I look longingly at the Twins and with great hope given that the Tigers new pitching coach was heavily involved in development of the guys who did the work – Rick Knapp. As for the Tigers on these measures, they were pretty vanilla and close to the means. The exception was in Bad Ball where hitters made consistent contact with balls out of the strike zone. I don’t know if this is good or bad – yet.

Next steps are to look at the Tigers as individuals, and to look at location and results by count.

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 the Phillies where he had responsibility for Australia the last 6 years and Taiwan, Korea and Japan for the last two.

They also cut ties with Victor Trasoff-Jilg who was the minor league medical coordinator. That appears to be the only minor league staff move though as all the managers and coaches were invited to return. In the same article Jon Paul Morosi notes that the Tigers will interview 4 candidates for the pitching coach position this week. No names were revealed.

Finally, it looks like Al Avila will be back as assistant GM. The Mariners asked permission to interview Avila for their GM vacancy, and were denied. It wouldn’t surprise me if Dombrowski held the GM reigns for only another year or two before handing that job to Avila. Of course after this past season, his grip on the position probably isn’t as solid as it once was.

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 the hell happened to him
• Justin Verlander – what the hell happened to him
• Plate discipline for the hitters
• Pitch selection by catcher

Do you have other things you’d like me to look at with this data?  For those who aren’t familiar with pitch f/x, itis the system that displays pitch trajectories in the MLB Gameday application.  So we can examine pitch movement, velocity, location, selection, etc.  I can’t make guarantees about turning around every suggestion, but if it’s something that a)I think is interesting, b)I can do it, then there’s a good chance it will get done.

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 pitched a perfect inning with 2 K’s and Casey Fien allowed 2 hits with 4 K’s in 2 innings of work.

Things are off to a decent start for the Tigers Hawaiian contingent. Andrew Hess has made 3 outings in relief has fanned 8 with only 1 walk in 8 innings with only one walk allowed. James Skelton is posting his customary high OBP at .500 in his first 6 games. Kyle Peter has struggled somewhat posting just a .579 OPS while still looking for his first extra base hit.

Alex Avila - cr Roger DeWitt

Things are also busy in Tigertown. Mark Anderson of Tigstown.com was on hand to take in some of the Instructional League action and filed daily reports. It’s premium content, but today he looked at the catchers and first baseman and the report on Alex Avila was glowing.

The good news is the daily reports don’t appear to be premium content, so you can read some of it for yourself. And if you want to see for yourself, our friend Roger DeWitt has captured quite a few images of the action.

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 bandied about. With that in mind, some thoughts as we head into what will likely be a tumultuous winter.

Dave Dombrowski did not abandon his philosophy

I’ve heard this one frequently. The common thread is that Dombrowski abandoned his pitching first philosophy in favor of “buiding a slow pitch softball team.” Dombrowski has always believed in stock piling young pitching and using it as the building blocks of a team. Whether that entails using the pitchers on his own team, or trading it to fill needs, he’s always used young pitching.

The Renteria trade was made in large part for defense, not to build a slow pitch slugging softball team. The benefit of Renteria was that he was to be a 2 way player. The problem was that while Renteria was a defensive upgrade, it was a small upgrade (Guillen was -12 in 1074 innings at short in ‘07, Renteria was -9 in 1173 innings in ‘08 according to Fielding Bible +/-) and his offense was beyond absent the first half of the season. The trade failed, there’s no question, but it wasn’t a change of philosophy.

As for Cabrera, defense was never a part of the issue. It was entirely an offensive move. But it was also an opportunity that doesn’t come along that often. Players like Cabrera don’t grow on trees and to add an elite player at age 25 is largely unheard of. It is the kind of big splash move that Dombrowski has been known for throughout his career.

As for the rest of the staff, they were far worse than could have reasonably been expected. While Willis struggled last year and was trending down, to get nothing from him was unexpected to everyone. Robertson was never a top of the rotation starter, but was the epitome of a solid back of the rotation guy. To compete, along with Kenny Rogers, for worst starter in the league wasn’t part of any reasonable plan. And then there was Verlander adding a run and a half to his ERA. That your entire starting rotation would be injured or significantly underperforming wasn’t part of any plan or strategy and more than could have been mitigated.

The window isn’t closed

I should adjust that and say “the window isn’t closed if Ilitch doesn’t want it to be.” The boss could go all Huizenga and say “cut-cut-cut” but I don’t see that happening. This team was positioned to go for it in both 2008 and 2009. Because 08 was crap doesn’t mean you need to abandon 09 as well. The offense should be good again next year, and it isn’t unreasonable to think that the pitching staff will see some return to non-crapitude next year.

In terms of trading, they’d be selling low on most of the players that fans want to see traded. They could probably get a nice return for Armando Galarraga, Curtis Granderson, and Miguel Cabrera, but who really wants to see them shopped?

Don’t overreact

Everybody wants speed, defense, and starters, and bullpen arms. Some better defense would be nice, but don’t sacrifice offense completely. The Tigers are ready to make that move at third with the Inge pronouncement. It means they can’t afford to do it at both catcher and shortstop.

The bullpen was awful, but 5 years and $75 million to fix it will be money poorly spent. As for starters, is it worth a second round draft pick to sign a Derek Lowe type starter? (it might be if the Tigers can get the draft pick compensation for Renteria)

I’m not saying do nothing. Clearly this team has holes at multiple positions and another starter and a 2-3 new bullpen arms are clearly needed. But I still think, and perhaps this is naive, but good teams can have bad seasons. This team wasn’t as good as we thought going in, and it isn’t as bad as we think right now. I’ll borrow this conclusion from Nate Silver’s piece in Baseball Prospectus ($) and quote sparingly because it is premium content.

Bad years happen to good clubs. The key for the Tigers will simply be not to panic, nor to try and save face with guys like Renteria and Willis whose projections don’t really warrant it. The Tigers need to budget somewhere between $15-$20 million for perhaps three pitchers next year, but with the contracts of Renteria, Todd Jones, Kenny Rogers, and Ivan Rodriguez all coming off the books, they can easily afford to do so without increasing payroll.
…
This has been a frustrating season in Detroit, but hardly a disastrous one in terms of the club’s long-term fortunes. There have been several pleasant surprises this year in Galarraga, Joyce, and Brandon Inge’s smooth transition back to the catcher position*. From top to bottom, the Tigers still rank somewhere in the top ten in the major leagues in terms of their overall talent pool, and they should be on track to return to contention with some relatively common-sense fixes.

*The Inge part was written on August 14th before Inge completely collapsed down the stretch offensively and started allowing a PB per game.

Manager Jim Leyland was on Mitch Albom’s show and the Free Press has the transcript in 3 parts. The links to all follow, but here are some highlights and my comments.

If I was looking at the two major culprits and without pointing fingers and necessarily individuals, the two major culprits were the pitching and the defense there’s no question about that, it’s a no brainer for me. We didn’t catch the ball very good, we had mediocre pitching with a mediocre defense and that’s a brutal combination, and that’s basically what happened to us in my opinion.

Mediocre is being generous, but I think that is a matter of semantics. He gets it was bad.

Well, I don’t think it will be correct to discuss what Dave and I talked about. I’m sure Dave knows that I’m very disappointed, which I am. I make no bones about that because I want to manage this team. If you’re saying if I have any defense for this year, no I don’t, but I think the overall picture I think it’s pretty fair on my part. But I’m a big boy and I think Dave has tough decisions to make and for whatever reason he chose to go this direction and I respect that. I’m not afraid of anything. I think if I do a good job next year I think I’ll be extended. If I don’t I’ll be fired. If I would have been on the last year of my contract this year I would have been fired instead of the coaches because those guys were the scapegoats for people not doing their jobs, it’s that simple. There is no secret to this stuff. I’m not going to lie to anybody or beat around the bush. Chuck Hernandez and Jeff Jones were basically fired because the pitching was terrible.

This was in response to a question of why Leyland’s contract isn’t being extended. I actually don’t see the need for an extension. I hear it all the time about the lame duck coach/manager, but this isn’t some young manager. It’s a guy that’s been around forever and who the player’s respected the crap out of not that long ago. I can’t imagine players buying into him more with or without an extension. Plus keep in mind, Leyland was offered a longer contract after 2007 but didn’t want to extend it that far and go on a more year to year basis.

I think if you put us all on the dartboard, you know, you can put several people on a dart board and if you threw a dart you would probably hit the right guy with the dart because we were all guilty.

and

I would extend tomorrow — I would extend in June — I would extend in July — I would extend in August — I want to manage the Tigers. I can’t make it anymore simple than that to everybody and I think I deserve to manage the Tigers, but if you’re not wanted, you’re not wanted. I don’t want to be anywhere I’m not wanted.

I’m sensing tension between Leyland and Dombrowski, and not the good kind like between Sam and Diane.

Some guys I really believe can’t handle making the money. I don’t think they can live up to expectations of it. It all sounds good when the agent is talking and they want the contract and they get the money, but truthfully, I believe that there are some players that can’t handle that. They almost go into a little bit of a shell, you know – like ‘Oh my god, so much is expected of me.’ They’re better players probably when they’re not making quite as much.

He was later asked if the Tigers have anybody like that to which he responded “I think so.” Don’t really know how to fix this. It gets to be a point where players have reached the service time marks to get their paydays. Of course you can let them walk, but how do you know who can and can’t handle it prior to giving them the contract. And he has to be talking about Robertson and Inge (and maybe Willis) right?

I think the one thing and this is going to sound crazy, but the one thing that I might do different, looking back at it now and I’m not sure it would have made a difference — but the one thing I might have done different — I would have not started him opening day. I definitely think that he felt he had to be the horse. When Bonderman went down he felt he had to be an even bigger horse. I just don’t he think he was ready for that yet and in defense of him, he’s not supposed to be ready that yet. I mean he’s still a young kid, he’s a young pitcher and maybe I put a little undo pressure on him by naming him opening day and people talking about, well, he’ll have to step it up now.

This is in response to a question about Verlander’s struggles against the Central. Leyland went down this tangent. Leyland also had him start the first game of the World Series as a rookie which didn’t turn out that well. Maybe he’s not a big game pitcher, or maybe it is a part of the maturation process.
Leyland: ‘The two major culprits were the pitching and the defense’ | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press
Leyland: ‘I think I deserve to manage the Tigers, but if you’re not wanted, you’re not wanted’ | Freep.com | Detroit Free PressLeyland: ‘Maybe naming him the opening day pitcher was a mistake’ | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press

Dave Dombrowski held court with reporters today and he revealed a glimpse into this winter’s agenda.

The main points:

• Edgar Renteria’s option will not be picked up
• The Tigers are looking outside the organization to fill the closer role
• The Tigers don’t expect to be a major player in the free agent market
• Detroit does not expect to cut payroll significantly
• Dombrowski likes Cale Iorg thinking he’s going to be an All Star very soon.

My thoughts:

• Declining the Renteria option was pretty much a no brainer. The Tigers can try and sign him for less and offer him arbitration.  If he declines and is signed somewhere else the Tigers get two draft picks.  If he accepts it probably is a decent stopgap.  Renteria is a decent bet to bounce back somewhat and not be a void in the lineup.  While there is a desire to upgrade the defense at short, with Inge and mystery catcher in the fold the Tigers can’t afford to go with a total defensive specialist at short.  They have that at third already now.  Renteria sounds like he’d like to be back.
• Dombrowski’s comments about Iorg were quite enthusiastic.  It could be he’s trying to up the trade value, or diminish the Tigers needs, but the remarks came on the same day that Iorg made the BA Top 20 list for the FSL. (Rick Porcello was number 1).  It makes one think the Tigers aren’t looking for a long term fix for 2009.
• Rodney got a lukewarm treatment from Dombrowski saying that he’d be the leading candidate on the current club, but he wanted more consistency.  But with the Tigers not making a splash that probably means no K-Rod or Fuentes which is fine.  The new closer will likely be an established set-up man who can be had for a cheaper price.  It might not satisfy the fan base, but is probably the best and only way to go given the payroll constraints and ridiculous sum that closers get.

In the end Dombrowski is looking for answers like the rest of us…

“Most years, when we go into spring training, I have a good feel for where we’ll finish,” he said.

“I’m so far off on this,” he said, shaking his head, his voice trailing off.

PREGAME: It seemed to take for ever for this season to get here, and even longer for it to end. Instead of a preview, I’ll just point you to Baseball Prospectus where they have a nice write up already in place, what with this being the only game on the docket and all.

God Speed Freddy Garcia.