One of the few mysteries for Tigers fans to debate this spring is the batting order. The players that will comprise that lineup have long been identified, but their positioning has a few questions. One of those was answered today with the announcement that Ivan Rodriguez will bat 8th. Does that make sense for the Tigers, or does it even matter. We’ll turn to the lineup optimizer to see what we can find out.
John Lannan and Max Scherzer on the mound and Ivan Rodriguez returns to Comerica Park
With a disastrous season completed it is time to head into the offseason. Given the gravity of the collapse, you know with the high payroll and the last place-edness, there is probably a tendency to overreact and second-guess. While a deep dive analysis is definitely called for, there is also some inaccuracy being bandied about. … Continue reading 2008 Offseason Preamble
When I was driving home last night shortly after the trade came down, I was listening to WDFN. I was more than a little taken aback by the number of callers saying good-riddance to Ivan Rodriguez. While there may be something to that in terms of evaluating the trade, there also seemed to be a … Continue reading A little Pudge appreciation
PREGAME: Holy craftiness Batman. Kenny Rogers and Paul Byrd. That’s 80 years worth of pitcher doing battle tonight. The Tigers fresh off a 3 game road trip to Comerica Park play a Cleveland Indians team that is showing some signs of life. Since the last time these two teams hooked up, the Indians have been … Continue reading Game 105: Tigers at Indians
There will be 23 Tigers players on hand at Saturday’s Tigerfest. They are: Jeremy Bonderman, Tim Byrdak, Miguel Cabrera, Curtis Granderson, Jacque Jones, Todd Jones, Macay McBride, Zach Miner, Magglio Ordonez, Placido Polanco, Rick Porcello, Ryan Raburn, Clay Rapada, Edgar Renteria, Nate Robertson, Ivan Rodriguez, Kenny Rogers, Bobby Seay, Jordan Tata, Marcus Thames, Justin Verlander, … Continue reading Tigers announce Tigerfest 2008 lineup
Ivan Rodriguez and Placido Polanco were honored today as MLB announced the Gold Glove winners. For Pudge it was his 13th while it was Polanco’s first. But were they the most deserving Tigers? Rob Neyer took a look at the inherent biases or trends in the voting. A couple of these helped the Tigers (previous … Continue reading Two Tigers win Gold Gloves, but not the right two
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 … Continue reading Fish Eye on the Tigers
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but Todd Jones and Mike Rabelo don’t really go together. If Jones is peanut butter, Rabelo is asparagus and if you look back at the game logs you see that Mike Rabelo has caught half of games where Jones has allowed runs. Luckily it seems that Jim … Continue reading Mike Rabelo – the anti-save
PREGAME: Andrew Miller is pitching for the Tigers so the opposing starter must be an ancient 40 year old – ah look, it’s Jamie Moyer. Okay, so it’s only the second time it happened (with Braden Looper being the other starter Miller has faced), but the only possible way to move up the old crafty … Continue reading Game 67: Tigers at Phillies
PREGAME: Interesting match-up of young pitchers tonight with Justin Verlander taking on Adam Loewen. Verlander is coming off a start in which he limited the Royals to one unearned run on 2 hits. It wasn’t a perfect outing though with 5 walks. Loewen was the 4th overall pick in the 2002 draft. The left hander … Continue reading Game 8: Tigers at Orioles
PREGAME: First of all, Happy Easter to everyone (or at least those that celebrate). It’s the rubber match and it will be Jeremy Bonderman taking on Brandon Duckworth. This will be the first start of the year for Duckworth, who has a tendency to allow a lot of baserunners. Over the last 3 years his … Continue reading Game 5: Tigers at Royals