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!This is something that I actually started tracking a few days ago, but Placido Polanco is off to quite the start this year [...]

It appears that Jim Leyland has settled on a lineup that he might use some of the time depending on the handedness of pitchers. One thing he did settle on though is that for the time being Pudge Rodriguez will lead off against left handers and Curtis Granderson will lead off against right handers.
The [...]

Just cleaning out some leftover data from the pitch-by-pitch analysis from the last couple weeks. These are a couple things I calculated along the way, that never made it into a post. These data are from 2006.
Tiger data
While delving into Curtis Granderson’s strikeouts, I calculated many of the same stats for the rest [...]

Don’t know if you’ve been following the news out of Lakeland, but it appears that Curtis Granderson struck out a lot last year. It also appears that a goal of the organization is that he strike out less this year. Essentially he just needs to make better contact. And changes in his [...]

Following up on yesterday’s look at 2 strike hitting, now we’ll look at what individual Tigers did in on the brink of striking out.
The following table lists the Tigers hitters performance in all situations after the plate appearance reaches 2 strikes

Jim Leyland has 2 priorities this season. First he wants to improve baserunning. On that front it seems like he was reading Detroit Tiger Tales’ analysis. His other initiative is improving the Tigers batters approach when they are presented with a two strike count. The Tigers strike out a lot, which [...]

On Friday we took a look at the worst Tigers offensive seasons. Today we’ll take a look at some of the best.
I’ll use a similar methodology to the suckage index only this we’ll call the awesomeness index. What I did was look for the top OPS+ seasons where the player had a minimum [...]

Have you ever wondered who had the worst offensive season of all time in a Tiger uniform? Well, I hadn’t either until this morning. I came across (via Knuckle Curve) a post at the Blue Jays blog Batters Box that looked at the worst pitching seasons in the organization’s history. This peaked my [...]

Certainly there is more to plate discipline than first pitch swinging. We’ve seen that the Tigers aggressiveness in that regard actually pays dividends. We also know that the Tigers strike out more than any other team in the American League and walk less than only the Cubs and Mariners. One hazard of [...]

In the comments to the first first pitch swinging post Nate asked about the differences in the time of game reasoning that the value in wearing down a reliever is minimal. It was easy enough to break it down by starter versus reliever.
The Tigers swung at the first pitch slightly more against relievers going after [...]

While I dispelled some of my issues with the Tigers and first pitch swinging, I still had some questions. I think many Tiger fans can remember what seemed like all those times there were runners on base only to see Magglio Ordonez (or any host of other Tiger hitters) take a swing at the [...]

There were a couple ways to describe the Tigers approach at the plate in 2006. The optimist might say they were aggressive, the pessimist might say they were hack-tastic. I guess one measure of this might be their propensity for swinging at the first pitch.
Now with the first pitch, 4 things can happen. [...]