Pitching

Rod and Mario kept talking about Jim Leyland mentioning that changes were a-comin’ with the pitching staff. I’m sure that much of that has to do with injuries - or recovery from injuries - but a fraction has to do with performance.
We know that Kenny Rogers is back on Friday night. [...]

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Credit Roger DeWitt
The Tigers called up pitcher Eulogio De La Cruz today to take a shot at being a bullpen stud.
De La Cruz has spent a good chunk of his minor league career as a reliever, until last year when he was moved to the rotation and started to find success. This [...]

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Reuters
I wish I could type up something poetic or dramatic or chuck full of literary goodness. I don’t really have that in me, and I don’t think I could muster it right now anyways. But watching this unfold was a thing of beauty. Justin Verlander was good in the first inning, and [...]

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One of the more encouraging things I saw at Sunday’s game took place before the game even started. I saw Kenny Rogers throwing long toss for about 15 minutes. He was throwing from the gate of the visitors bullpen to the left field foul line. In a game he’s starting, he’ll actually warm [...]

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A couple weeks ago we took a look at Joel Zumaya’s 2 inning save against Toronto through the eyes of MLB.com’s Enhanced Gameday. Last night against the White Sox Zumaya had an outing on the opposite end of the effectiveness spectrum.
Zumaya basically couldn’t find the strike zone to save his life last [...]

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Taking advantage of the enhanced gameday data once again, I’ll take a look at Jeremy Bonderman’s and Roy Halladay’s awesome performances last night.
We’ll start with Jeremy Bonderman. The table below shows the mix of pitches and results for Bonderman:

It was a little surprising to see that Jeremy Bonderman didn’t miss that many bats last [...]

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I think everyone was mighty blown away by Joel Zumaya’s 2 inning save last night. He pounded the strike zone with 100mph plus heaters and buckled knees with his curve ball. But just for fun, and because we can, let’s take a look at all the pitches that made up his night.
I don’t [...]

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I’ll be a day late on announcing the DVD Giveaway winners. I promise it will be announced tomorrow night. In the meantime, some stuff worth reading:
PECOTA and the Central
The straight run of Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projections for the AL Central put the Tigers in 3rd place with 85 wins. Nate Silver makes [...]

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Things have been lighter for the last week on the blog. Part of that is a lack of terribly interesting news coming out of Lakeland - which is a good thing. This offseason I’ve been trying to compensate for these lulls by cranking through some analysis. That’s kind of what I’ve been [...]

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Finally, some real news! Jason Beck reports that Jeremy Bonderman will be the Opening Day starter. He’ll be followed by Kenny Rogers, Justin Verlander, Nate Robertson, and Mike Maroth. While I don’t think the rotation will matter a great deal, this is the same order I would have picked (not that Leyland [...]

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In my last post I pointed out that Kenny Rogers, Nate Robertson, and Justin Verlander were the beneficiaries of some combination of good defense and good luck. Basically I was trying to point out that while all 3 had solid seasons, there were some breaks that were beyond their control that went their way. [...]

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