Category Archives: Statistics

Offense, Players, Statistics

Inge’s Offense

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Brandon Inge’s offensive contributions the last few years have supplied me a ton of material. Iin the early years he was very, very bad. But then after a demotion to Toledo in 2003 he came back as a different hitter. He sustained that for 2 years into mid 2005 and had me declaring that he had transformed into an offensive threat. But then he swooned late last year, and this season he is once again a different hitter, an all or nothing masher.

Let’s start by looking at the various stages of Inge’s career, picked somewhat arbitrarily and summarized using the Day by Day Database:

		GS	AB	BA	OBA	Slug%	OPS	AB/HR	ISO	BB/K
pre 7/1/2003	148	677	.183	.242	.292	.534	61.5	.109	.241
7/1/03-7/1/05	232	869	.284	.350	.446	.796	36.2	.162	.489
> 7/1/05	163	598	.227	.281	.420	.701	23.9	.193	.313

While there was a definite shift in Inge’s career with his 2003 demotion, another change seems to be in progress. From his peak, he seems to have given up 50 points of batting average, and some additional OBP in exchange for 30 additional points of ISO (isolated power: Slugging-Batting average). And while not a huge number of at-bats, the totals are probably indicative of more than just luck. Continue reading Inge’s Offense →

2006 Season, Offense, Pitching, Statistics

Distributing the Runs

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Last year Dave Studemund of the Hardball Times had a couple interesting posts taking a closer look at how many runs a team scores a game. This isn’t looking at average runs a game, but how many runs they score (and conversely allow) in each game. What Studes found is that consistency in scoring 2-6 runs is most important. At the time of the study, the White Sox average runs per game were a half run below average, but they very rarely were held to less than 2 runs. I found the study interesting enough to perform last year for the Tigers, and I’ll repeat it this year.
Continue reading Distributing the Runs →

2006 Season, Statistics

The Last 20

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If you don’t know, there is a stat site simply titled Dougs Stats. It has your basic information, but is also has a summary of the stats from the last 20 games. From the AL Leaderboard, here are some Tiger stats of note:

  • Marucs Thames leads the AL over the last 20 games with a 793 OPS. We all know about the homers and he’s tied for 6th with 6. What I found surprising is he is tied for 4th with 8 doubles.
  • Brandon Inge has the 7th worst BA at .157
  • Carl Crawford, Scott Podsednik, Jeremy Reed, Ichiro Suzuki, those are the names you expect to see on top of a triples list. What you don’t expect is to see Pudge Rodriguez alongside them.
  • Curtis Granderson is tied for 6th with 13 walks. Unfortunately he is also on the strikeout list with 21. He’s not alone though as Chris Shelton (21) and Carlos Guillen (19) help fill out the top 10.
  • Nate Robertson is 8th with a 2.83 ERA and he also makes the list for innings pitched (28 1/3)

The Tigers 11-9 mark was bettered only by the Yankees and Rangers. This is despite the fact that the Tigers were in the bottom half, or lower of most team categories.

2006 Season, Pitching, Statistics

PECOTA said this might happen

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Now that we are at the 40 game mark, people are starting to really try and determine which surprises are real. The Tigers have received a lot of attention, what with the best record in baseball and all. Most has been positive, but there are dissenters, and they have just cause. The Tigers, particularly the pitching staff, are playing at levels that are by and large, well above what their careers would indicate. But back before the season started, PECOTA thought this might happen. Continue reading PECOTA said this might happen →

2006 Season, Statistics

Team WPA leaders

Fangraphs, which recently started publishing Win Expectancy graphs for each game, now has season totals for WPA. In terms of the Tigers, the WPA measures reinforce what we already know – the pitchers have been carrying the team.

Hitters     -35.7%
Starters    283.6%
Relievers   202.1%

Now the net for the Tigers is +450%. To win a game a team needs 50% of WPA (each team starts at 50%, and the winner of course is at 100%). So the pitchers are essentially responsible for the team being nearly 10 games over .500, while the offense has them almost a game below .500. This makes sense intuitively because the Tigers haven’t won a slugfest yet. The wins have been blowouts, or close low-scoring games. In a low scoring game, it is quite intuitive that the pitchers would carry a larger weight. In a blowout, while it would seem the offense would carry the day, each additional run has diminishing value. Meanwhile, each additional out secured by the pitchers gets the team closer to a win.

The team leader in WPA is Mike Maroth at 107.1%. He’s followed by Fernando Rodney at 90.9%. The top hitter of course his Chris Shelton at 62.8%. Placido Polanco who has hit for a decent average, but has a poor on base and slugging percentage is tops of the anti-leaderboard at -67.9%.

2006 Season, Statistics

Series Wrap: Twins at Tigers

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This series will go down in Tiger history as 33-1, which of course was the run differential. This will be good for all kinds of trivia, but I’m not sure what Tiger fans can really glean from it. In fact, I’d say we learned more about the Minnesota Twins than we did about the Detroit Tigers. The Twins are struggling, and while things will inevitably get better, there chances don’t look good this season. Their rough start, punctuated by this series even has some speculating about Johan Santana’s future as a Twin.

But on to the Tigers… Continue reading Series Wrap: Twins at Tigers →

2006 Season, Statistics

Series Wrap – Tigers at Angels

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The Tigers only managed to take one of three from the Angels. Actually, they only managed to score in one of three games as the Angels handed Detroit their first two shutouts of the season. Once again Detroit got very solid pitching, but the bats that were showing signs of slumpiness in Seattle went completely silent in Anaheim. The result is that a mere 14 runs were scored in the series, which is one less than in the previous series. Detroit has now scored 15 runs in their last 6 games.

Tigers Angels
Wins 1 2
Offense
Runs 5 9
BA .185 .191
OBP .265 .255
SLG .261 .315
HR 1 2
SB/CS 0/1 2/0
Pitching
BB/9 2.8 3
K/9 4.2 9.3
ERA 2.77 1.67

Continue reading Series Wrap – Tigers at Angels →

Pitching, Players, Statistics

Breaking down Bonderman

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A Tiger season wouldn’t be a Tiger season without doubt about Jeremy Bonderman. In 2003 when he struggled out of the gate, there was much speculation that he was brought to the majors to quickly (which he may have been). He then shutdown Oakland. In 2004 after a particularly rough spell, there was talk of demoting Bonderman from the rotation or even sending him to Toledo. He then went out and struckout 14 White Sox. In 2005 he faltered down the stretch, was hit by a line drive, and people wondered if he was injured…and he was.

So when Bonderman dropped his second and third games, and struggled in the first inning of his fourth, there was a right to be concerned that the previous year’s injury was still around. Or perhaps we think to highly of Jeremy and he’ll never be the stud we thought he could be. Or he was rushed and never had a chance to develop that third pitch.

Even after bouncing back against the Angels, Bonderman’s ERA stands at 5.04 which is worst among the Tiger starters. But with a closer look at the stats, one could argue that he has pitched the best, or at least question why he hasn’t had better results. Continue reading Breaking down Bonderman →

2006 Season, Statistics

Tigers-Mariners Series Wrap

It’s not often that a team can only muster 10 runs in a 3 game series, and still double the production of your opponent. Fortunately the Tigers had the 10 runs, and it was good enough for a road sweep of the Mariners

Tigers Mariners
Wins 3 0
Offense
Runs 10 5
BA .240 .185
OBP .306 .276
SLG .370 .207
HR 3 0
SB/CS 4/0 1/2
Pitching
BB/9 3.3 2.7
K/9 6.7 7.3
ERA 1.67 2.30

Of course the story for the Tigers was the starting pitching, which is good because the offense didn’t give them a lot to work with. In 20 innings of work they gave up one lone run. That’s giving even the 2003 Tigers a chance to win. A manufuctured run, anda late inning cushion via the homer were all that the pitching staff needed.
Continue reading Tigers-Mariners Series Wrap →