From the category archives:

Offense

The Coda

12.09.2007 36 comments

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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Where should Cabrera play?

12.06.2007 131 comments

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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Playing in the spray

10.26.2007 1 comment

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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Fish Eye on the Tigers

09.14.2007 6 comments

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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Comerica Hitters Park

06.11.2007 4 comments

The Tigers offense has been getting all kinds of well deserved pub. They’re averaging 6 runs a game. Little did we know that their pitcher’s paradise has played as a hitters haven so far in 2007.
Ever since Comerica Park opened in 2000 it has been cited as a pitcher’s park. [...]

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Contacting Polanco

04.30.2007 5 comments

This is something that I actually started tracking a few days ago, but Placido Polanco is off to quite the start this year making contact. Polanco has always been a tough strike out, and for his career he’s made contact with 91% of his swings. For some context, the average is 80%. [...]

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Leyland sets lineup and leadoff platoon

03.23.2007 2 comments

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 [...]

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Statistical Leftovers

03.03.2007 3 comments

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 [...]

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Curtis Granderson and his strike outs

02.24.2007 9 comments

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 [...]

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More on battling with 2 strikes

02.22.2007 5 comments

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

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Battling with two strikes

02.21.2007 11 comments

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 [...]

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Best Tiger Offensive Seasons

02.11.2007 11 comments

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 [...]

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