Toledo 3 Louisville 13
There was only one Tiger affiliate playing today, and it didn’t go well. Yorman Bazardo started and got shelled leaving in the 3rd inning He walked 4 and combined with 6 hits gave up 7 runs. Cory Hamman came on in relief and didn’t walk anyone in 3 innings work, but surrendered 6 runs on 3 homers.
The offense was mostly Ryan Raburn who had 2 hits and a walk. Timo Perez homered. Chris Shelton walked twice. Brent Clevlen was 1 for 3, but added 2 strikeouts.
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. But I as thought a little more, specifically about gold glover Rogers, how much did the pitchers help their own cause?
Fortunately, Pinto has already published the individual PMR numbers for pitchers. By subtracting the pitcher’s contribution from the total team’s defense when he was on the mound, we can see who was leaning on the guys behind him the most.
The order of the list gets shuffled. Kenny Rogers accounted for a third of the plays above expected. And Justin Verlander had pretty much neutral defense behind him. Meanwhile, Nate Robertson got the most help.
In the comments to the other post Brian questioned why some pitchers consistently exceed or lag their fielding independent stats. The pitcher’s ability to help his own cause may – emphasis on may – in some cases be a part of the reason.
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.
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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.
While delving into Curtis Granderson’s strikeouts, I calculated many of the same stats for the rest of the team. Here they are:
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Here’s a fascinating post looking at Kenny Rogers stellar playoff performances.
The author uses video to break down Kenny’s mechanics and demonstrate the extra effort and the quicker tempo Rogers was throwing with against the Yankees. Particularly interesting was the video comparison showing a regular season start and the Yankees playoff start. Rogers rushed his delivery considerably in the playoffs and the result was a significantly faster fastball.
Now I’m pretty sure that Kenny Rogers couldn’t throw like this and make it through a whole season. So don’t be looking for crazy-angry-emotional Kenny in a midseason tilt against the Royals. But in the process he probably learned something about himself that he can draw on in tough situations.
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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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. (more…)
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
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.
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After examining the depth of plate appearances for the Tigers and MLB as a whole, I wanted to take a look by individual Tiger at what happens as a plate appearance grows longer. Of course this would prove to be a massive post because each player would need their own table and or chart.
Instead, I decided to invest the time in dumping the data into a usable format in Excel so others can look up their favorite players, or teams.
There are 2 files, one for teams and one for players. There’s a simple front end where you can select teams or players via a drop down and the calculations and graphs will be generated for you. The data is also accessible if you want to play around. One word of caution though, the calculations in the player file aren’t exactly speedy.
Now because this is a Tiger blog, I did break out a file with just Tiger players.
If anyone comes across something or someone interesting, please let me know.
File: padepth.zip (570k) contains all teams and all players
File: padepth_player_det.zip (30k) contains just Detroit Tigers
Fox Sports Net Detroit is certainly going to warm Tiger fans up as we wait for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training. The station will be airing the Tigers 7 consecutive playoff wins in the ALDS and ALCS. The games will be shown in their entirety along with some of the postgame reactions and press conferences. For someone like myself who watches the Ordonez homer about once a week, this will be a treat.
The schedule is below so get your DVRs ready.
Mon. Jan. 29, 7:00 PM – ALDS Game 2 at New York (Tigers 4, Yankees 3 – played 10/5/06)
Mon. Feb. 5, 7:00 PM – ALDS Game 3 at Detroit (Tigers 6, Yankees 0 – played 10/6/06)
Mon. Feb. 19, 7:00 PM – ALDS Game 4 at Detroit (Tigers 8, Yankees 3 – played 10/7/06)
Mon. Feb. 26, 7:00 PM – ALCS Game 1 at Oakland (Tigers 5, Athletics 1 – played 10/10/06)
Mon. March 12, 7:00 PM – ALCS Game 2 at Oakland (Tigers 8, Athletics 5 – played 10/11/06)
Mon. March 19, 7:00 PM – ALCS Game 3 at Detroit (Tigers 3, Athletics 0 – played 10/13/06)
Wed. March 21, 7:00 PM – ALCS Game 4 at Detroit (Tigers 6, Athletics 3 – played 10/14/06)
Certainly there is more to plate discipline than first pitch swinging. We’ve seen that the Tigers aggressiveness in that regard actually pays dividends. We also know that the Tigers strike out more than any other team in the American League and walk less than only the Cubs and Mariners. One hazard of first pitch swinging is that it short circuits long at-bats, but is there a benefit to working deep into the count?
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In the comments to the first first pitch swinging post Nate asked about the differences in the time of game reasoning that the value in wearing down a reliever is minimal. It was easy enough to break it down by starter versus reliever.
The Tigers swung at the first pitch slightly more against relievers going after 32.6% of first pitches as opposed to 30.7% for starters.
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