Category Archives: Statistics

2007 Season, Statistics

April Musings

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Some good, some bad, some stats for the month of April:

  • Gary Sheffield managed 19 walks which is pretty incredible for a guy who is hitting .200 in front of a guy hitting 344/434/622. That total matches Bobby Higginson’s 19 walk effort in 1999 as the most walks by a Tiger in April
  • Marcus Thames managed to slug 515 while batting 182. He hit only one single for the month – and 3 homers
  • Another interesting Thames note, he had 35 plate appearances, and with his 15 K’s, 2 walks, and 3 homers, the defense only needed to do something in 15 of those plate appearances
  • I’m not complaining about Curtis Granderson’s production at all, he’s slugging 525 after all. But…Granderson has only 6 walks against 28 k’s. The exact same ratio as Craig Monroe.
  • Pudge Rodriguez who was exercising some plate discipline during the spring hasn’t seen that translate. Rodriguez only has 1 walk on the season.
  • Jeremy Bonderman is sporting the ultra-impressive 33:5 strikeout to walk ratio. The second best ratio behind Bonderman belongs to the much maligned Fernando Rodney who is at 13:4.
  • Chad Durbin was next at 18:6. Of course these were April only stats.
  • The Tigers turned 24 bases loaded at-bats into 32 runs. Four grand slams and a couple doubles will help with that.

Today I heard several local sports talk hosts talk about the Tigers struggles and disappointing month. I’m just not seeing it. Granted, they weren’t clicking on all cylinders, but they’re hanging with the rest of the division. Heaven forbid the Detroit has a month in which they can only manage a 12-12 record. It wasn’t a great month team wise, but I’d still have to rate it as pretty good.

Cold as Ice: April is in the books ยป Mack Avenue Tigers has more April musings for your enjoyment.

2006 Season, Defense, Pitching, Statistics

Luck of the Pitcher

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I think it is pretty common knowledge at this point, that in large part the Tigers pitchers results exceeded their performance last year. If you subscribe to the DiPS theory, that pitchers have limited ability to control whether balls in play turn into hits, then in general the Tigers pitchers got by without striking out a lot of guys because the defense was so good behind them. Part of me wondered it the pitchers still deserved some of the credit. That perhaps they were allowing more “fieldable” balls, thus having better defense behind them.

Well David Pinto at Baseball Musings has answered the question.
Continue reading Luck of the Pitcher →

2007 Season, Minors, Pitching, Spring Training, Statistics

This time it counts…a tiny bit

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So while yesterday was the exhibition to the exhibition season, this one was against the New York Mets, a bona fide big league club. And the Tigers won. Mack Avenue Tigers has the wrap-up so I won’t duplicate it here. I will just point out good games for Marcus Thames, Curtis Granderson, and Andrew Miller and a pretty rough game for Neifi Perez.

Because of research and video blogs and interviews, I’m a full week behind on links and such so I’ll try to catch-up.

Scott Sizemore
Scott Sizemore – credit Roger Dewitt

Pictures

When the big club is away, the kids will play. Roger DeWitt caught some of the action so if you want to see the possible Tigers of the distant future, you can see Dallas Trahern, Jeff Larish, and Audy Ciriaco (who I’m hoping has a big year) sporting Tigers road garb.
Continue reading This time it counts…a tiny bit →

Offense, Players, Statistics

Curtis Granderson and his strike outs

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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

There has been a ton of interesting discourse about this over the last few days. Jason Beck notes Granderson comes in with a retooled swing that cuts down on extra movement. John Lowe points out that striking out a lot isn’t necessarily bad, just look at Grady Sizemore.

Leyland made a whole lot of sense when meeting with reporters on Thursday on the subject:

I think he (Granderson) will cut down some (on strikeouts) because he’s going to be a more mature player. But I don’t want to turn him into some get-a-walk, Punch-and-Judy type of guy.”

“I’ve never known how to figure it out. We tell our hitters to be aggressive all the time, and at the same time we tell them, ‘Work the pitcher.’ “

Lowe also quotes Granderson identifying that a more aggressive approach may actually lead to fewer strikeouts

“The simple approach is that if I stay aggressive, I’ll hit less often with two strikes in the count,” he said. “I’ve been aggressive, but I’ve missed pitches. If I can put them in play earlier in the count, I eliminate the two-strike approach.”

I really agree with this. We’ve seen that hitting with 2 strikes is no picnic, and once the at-bat reaches 2 strikes it was over pretty quick for Granderson.

So there is some good stuff on the theory front, but what do the stats say? Detroit Tiger Tales looked at K/BB ratios for the whole team, and Granderson’s K’s out weight his decent walk total and push him into the bottom half of the league. But let’s look a little deeper still…
Continue reading Curtis Granderson and his strike outs →

Offense, Research, Statistics

Battling with two strikes

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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 means they get to, and struggle with their share of 2 strike counts. But are they really worse than the rest of the league when down in the count?

The following table shows both the Tigers stats when the count reaches 2 strikes, as well as all of MLB in 2006.


Continue reading Battling with two strikes →

Pitching, Statistics, Tiger History

Worst Tigers Pitching Seasons

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Following up on last weeks look at the best and worst offensive seasons, we’ll look at the pitchers now.

Armed with the power of the Baseball Reference Play Index I was able to pull the worst Tiger season in terms of ERA+ for those pitchers with at least 10 starts. Using the suckage index calculation of 

(80-ERA+)*IP

from Batters Box here are the ten worst pitching seasons in Tigers history.

Full spreadsheet available
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Offense, Statistics, Tiger History

Best Tiger Offensive Seasons

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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 of 450 plate appearances (I upped this from the 300 used in the suckage index. The calculation was simply:

(OPS+-100)*PA

It’s not at all scientific, and don’t mind the resulting values too much. This is was simply a way to rank the players combining success and playing time.

The top 10 awesomeness seasons follow:

The full spreadsheet is also available
Continue reading Best Tiger Offensive Seasons →

2006 Season, Statistics

The Tigers and Baserunning

In today’s mailbag Jason Beck answers questions about the Tigers aggressiveness on the basepaths. Beck notes:

I think what you’ll see this season is an emphasis on more aggressive baserunning aside from stolen bases, such as going from first to third or second to home on singles more often. They have the personnel to improve in that area. Guys like Placido Polanco and Ivan Rodriguez aren’t speedsters, but they’re intelligent baserunners, and their stats on taking the extra base back it up. Brandon Inge and Craig Monroe also have potential in that area.

This makes the perfect reason for me to link to the detailed work that Lee has been doing on the Tigers and baserunning. Continue reading The Tigers and Baserunning →

2006 Season, Pitching, Statistics

Plate Appearance Depth for pitchers

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After taking a look at how hitters did as plate appearances grew longer, it seemed easy enough to see how the pitchers fared.

I decided to take a look at two Tigers with contrasting styles, Jeremy Bonderman and Kenny Rogers
Bonderman performance by depth of PA
The MLB 2006 norm was for OBPs to start increasing once the plate appearance went beyond 4 pitches. However, Bonderman’s stayed relatively flat throughout. This could be indicative of Bonderman’s unwillingness to “give in” to an opposing hitter. It was an approach that had pretty good results for Bonderman, but the rise in slugging percentage may indicate he got burned this way on occasion.
Continue reading Plate Appearance Depth for pitchers →