Billfer likes long walks in Comerica Park. Check out the About page for more about me and the site.
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From the category archives:
It seems as if calculating wins above replacement, or WAR, has become the cool thing to do this offseason. We’ve delved into WAR here in the past when evaluating contracts. Now Fangraphs has made WAR available to the masses. Detroit Tiger Tales has already taken a look at the 08 Tigers numbers. And now a [...]
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The Tigers are in a stretch of games where runs are likely to be at a premium. Between the A’s, the Indians, and the White Sox, they are facing 3 of the stingiest teams in terms of allowing runs. At the same time they aren’t exactly powerful offenses either so the Tigers figure [...]
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Hitting philosophy
Hitting coach Lloyd McClendon said runs scored, followed by on-base percentage, are the most important statistics.
“Batting average is the most overrated statistic in baseball,” McClendon said. “Pete Rose told me, ‘When you are scoring runs, you are doing the job.’
I don’t have a lot to comment on here, but I thought the quote was [...]
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It is quoted after nearly every game, with only the loss column frequently changing. Currently it is 1-25, with IT being the Tigers record in games in which they score 4 runs or less. Some people point to it as a sign of the pitching staff’s futility while others question why the offense is [...]
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In today’s Detroit News Tigers beat writer Tom Gage writes about RISP. RISP of course is runners in scoring position and Gage goes on to explain part of the Tigers woes by looking at their performance in RISP situations. Along the way he creates a new metric and applies some faulty logic.
Gage notes [...]
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Following last night’s game a frustrated Jim Leyland suggested that he “might shake up the lineup a little bit” for Sunday’s game. He did just that with Sheffield getting the day off and Miguel Cabrera assuming the third spot in the order. But more changes are a-coming starting on Monday. Changes so [...]
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Early in the season during the time of the great losing, there were numerous complaints about the Tigers approach at the plate. They were going up their swinging early and swinging often. I didn’t totally buy into the theory because the pitches per plate appearance were in line with league norms. But [...]
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With this afternoon’s loss to the Blue Jays the Tigers record in day games now stands at a remarkable 0-10. A quick check of the splits reveals that the Tigers have been outscored 57 to 18 in day games. Yes, the offense has mustered less than 2 runs a game before the sun sets.
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Wrapping up some outstanding items from what very well could be one of the most significant trades in franchise history…
Replenishment
Peter Gammons astutely pointed out that the Tigers were able to make this trade because of Ilitch’s and Dombrowski’s refusal to adhere to the asinine draft slotting system. Not only did a willingness to pay [...]
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Jim Leyland was quoted yesterday talking about how this deal and the players they acquired were like a presents under the tree. Well, now that we can open up the presents, it’s time to play with them. The common refrain is that the Tigers should play Miguel Cabrera at third base and move [...]
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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 [...]
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Dan Fox at Baseball Prospectus recently did a post where he used the enhanced gameday (aka pitch/fx) data to categorize hitters by eye. He broke hitters down into the following groups and subsequently created some pretty slick graphs.
Square: This is the new metric, defined as the percentage of pitches in the strike zone swung [...]
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