2024 DETROIT TIGERS REGULAR SEASON THREAD

[monkeytargets39]

It amazes me that we’ve had the best record in the majors for the past 6 weeks but we are ranked 16th in power rankings by ESPN and haven’t really moved up more than 2 or 3 spots.

 

I wish I wrote articles for ESPN….must be the easiest job in journalism.

[Shelton]

9 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's something that gives you a sanity check for what you are thinking in your fan brain.

and this. In the end, everyone gets in or not after 162, but there is something special about watching the odds improve after your team is left for dead for good reason.

Yeah, to me it’s the sanity check. It’s easy to see two teams tied and think it’s close to 50/50. Obviously a team ahead in the standings has a better chance. But I think it is valuable and fun to know that a team might have a 1 in 5 chance of getting it done vs a 1 in 10 chance. 
 

a Seattle fan can look at say “crap we gotta go 8-1 and hope x y and z happen to have a chance.” I think it’s good to know that such a scenario might happen once every 20 seasons. 

[oblong]

ESPN only exists as league PR mouthpieces and gambling.

 

[IdahoBert]

13 minutes ago, monkeytargets39 said:

It amazes me that we’ve had the best record in the majors for the past 6 weeks but we are ranked 16th in power rankings by ESPN and haven’t really moved up more than 2 or 3 spots.

 

I wish I wrote articles for ESPN….must be the easiest job in journalism.

The most recent one posted yesterday ranked us 13th

”The Tigers have been carried by their pitching. If they hope to do what hardly anyone considered possible just a few weeks ago, they'll probably have to hit a bit more; their .685 second-half OPS is the eighth lowest in the majors.”

[Shelton]

41 minutes ago, Edman85 said:

They are based on playing time projections, but to my knowledge they do not make an attempt to figure out opposing platoon splits. They may bake those into playing time projections though? Like if the Tigers were projected to face 10 straight lefties, I think their system would weight Andy Ibanez a bit more than Jace Jung, or at least it should.

What I like about projection system based systems is it does factor in who is playing. Odds change (slightly) at the trade deadline. Odds change when a star player gets hurt. They are my go to.

Yeah, to me that’struing to be too cute. But nothing wrong with those that prefer it. I’m surely biased because it doesn’t appear to be crediting my favorite team with the performance they are getting from their pitching staff. 
 

No FG/zips/pecota projection system is going to rate the tigers well when the guys slotted into their playing time projection are the guys on our pitching staff. And to be fair, no projection system should be designed to do that. 
 

There are obviously different ways to get to the same result at the end of a season where you can say you hit your desired confidence interval and therefore your system is correct. But that also means that the different systems are going to miss in different ways. 
 

You look at roster resource and see who they have projected as tigers SPs, and it’s easy to see why that system is going to spit out a team that on balance will lose more than it wins. 
 

That doesn’t sit right with me in view their sustained success over the past 6 weeks. 
 

I also think the preseason projection bias being baked in doesn’t help a team like the tigers, who have already blown past the projected win totals. That doesn’t mean it is incorrectly designed, but I do think it is probably missing some of the quality that we currently have. 

[Shelton]

That said, on August 1, in view of all the player movement that may have happened and with the benefit of having a third of the season still to project, the FG outlook is probably preferable. 
 

 

[oblong]

You guys are talking over my head about things I don't concern myself with.... but how does the Tigers use of the opener situation cloud the ability to do these projections?  They don't know who's going to be pitching those games as opposed to having an idea that the starter in a normal rotation probably goes 5+.  Does that fit in?

 

[IdahoBert]

Also what is an FG outlook to make it so decisive? An Internet search of FG yielded nothing for me. 

[monkeytargets39]

19 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

Also what is an FG outlook to make it so decisive? An Internet search of FG yielded nothing for me. 

FanGraphs 

[monkeytargets39]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

ESPN only exists as league PR mouthpieces and gambling.

 

The gambling stuff is out of control.  It needs to go the way of tobacco advertising.

[Shelton]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

You guys are talking over my head about things I don't concern myself with.... but how does the Tigers use of the opener situation cloud the ability to do these projections?  They don't know who's going to be pitching those games as opposed to having an idea that the starter in a normal rotation probably goes 5+.  Does that fit in?

 

FG system doesn’t actually use a projected starter for these projections. But they do use an overall projected playing time for each pitcher on the staff based on how many games are left. I don’t think this calculation, especially for the tigers, is very accurate. Objectively speaking, these guys should suck, and their system reflects that. Maybe they do suck and we’ve just gotten very lucky and FG is right. 
 

But if that’s the case, then just fire fetter and lund. 
 

It’s up to you to decide how much stock you want to put into the actual performance vs what these guys are objectively expected to do.

 

At the end of the day, all of these projections and probabilities are just slightly different ways of weighting the coin you flip every game. It’s not that big of a deal. 

Edited September 20, 2024 by Shelton

[Shelton]

I just checked today’s numbers. FG still thinks the current tigers team would play .496 against a neutral .500 team. FG also thinks the current twins would play .523 ball against a neutral .500 team. 
 

I’m sure the system has its reasons for this, but this does not pass the smell test to me. 

[casimir]

1 hour ago, Shelton said:

The tiebreaker dictates no such thing because there is no need for a tie to broken at this time. You are projecting a tie nine from games from now to order the teams. No need to do that. 
 

Essentially and factually, there is a tie. It’s right there in black and white. 

But the Tigers need to win one more game than the Twins do from here on out.  If Minnesota goes 9-0, ain't nothing the Tigers can do about it.  Therefore, the Twins are ahead of the Tigers, there is no tie.

[IdahoBert]

47 minutes ago, monkeytargets39 said:

FanGraphs 

Duh. I was thinking it was a statistic, not an entity. I immediately knew what BR was, but didn’t relate it to something like that.

[oblong]

15 minutes ago, casimir said:

But the Tigers need to win one more game than the Twins do from here on out.  If Minnesota goes 9-0, ain't nothing the Tigers can do about it.  Therefore, the Twins are ahead of the Tigers, there is no tie.

I was thinking about this, but I think it's a case of its answering a different question.  It's not about making the playoffs, it's about which team is better.

 

[RatkoVarda]

26 minutes ago, Shelton said:

I just checked today’s numbers. FG still thinks the current tigers team would play .496 against a neutral .500 team. FG also thinks the current twins would play .523 ball against a neutral .500 team. 
 

I’m sure the system has its reasons for this, but this does not pass the smell test to me. 

should there be recency bias? over last 6 weeks, Tigers are literally best team in baseball and Twins have been floundering.

But a healthy Correra and Buxton have years long record of being better better than Sweeney and Meadows.

[Edman85]

Here's the projected playing time for pitchers the rest of the way that the system is based on. Obviously if you are doing this for all 30 teams, you have to take some short cuts, and you are trying to predict injury risk, etc.

https://www.fangraphs.com/projections?pos=&stats=pit&type=rfangraphsdc&lg=&team=6

[lordstanley]

52 minutes ago, casimir said:

But the Tigers need to win one more game than the Twins do from here on out.  If Minnesota goes 9-0, ain't nothing the Tigers can do about it.  Therefore, the Twins are ahead of the Tigers, there is no tie.

Incidentally, the Tigers now control their destiny. If the Tigers go 9-0, they’re in. Because either the Twins lose a game or if they don’t, the Twins will defeat the Orioles 3 times.  Which would give Baltimore at least 6 losses considering the Tigers beating them 3 times. 

[Tigermojo]

Isn't it really tough for the projections to predict what young players will do?

[oblong]

1 hour ago, lordstanley said:

Incidentally, the Tigers now control their destiny. If the Tigers go 9-0, they’re in. Because either the Twins lose a game or if they don’t, the Twins will defeat the Orioles 3 times.  Which would give Baltimore at least 6 losses considering the Tigers beating them 3 times. 

I like that thinking.

 

[casimir]

2 hours ago, lordstanley said:

Incidentally, the Tigers now control their destiny. If the Tigers go 9-0, they’re in. Because either the Twins lose a game or if they don’t, the Twins will defeat the Orioles 3 times.  Which would give Baltimore at least 6 losses considering the Tigers beating them 3 times. 

That's good stuff.  I'm moving you up the ranking of my favoritist MTFers.

[casimir]

3 hours ago, oblong said:

I was thinking about this, but I think it's a case of its answering a different question.  It's not about making the playoffs, it's about which team is better.

 

You might be right.  The Tigers are better, we can all upon that, right?

[monkeytargets39]

3 hours ago, Edman85 said:

Here's the projected playing time for pitchers the rest of the way that the system is based on. Obviously if you are doing this for all 30 teams, you have to take some short cuts, and you are trying to predict injury risk, etc.

https://www.fangraphs.com/projections?pos=&stats=pit&type=rfangraphsdc&lg=&team=6

Some of these seem like pretty accurate projections, but others are real head scratchers.

[Edman85]

7 minutes ago, monkeytargets39 said:

Some of these seem like pretty accurate projections, but others are real head scratchers.

I think it's a remnant of their early season stabs and rounding up to 1 IP.

[Edman85]

3 hours ago, lordstanley said:

Incidentally, the Tigers now control their destiny. If the Tigers go 9-0, they’re in. Because either the Twins lose a game or if they don’t, the Twins will defeat the Orioles 3 times.  Which would give Baltimore at least 6 losses considering the Tigers beating them 3 times. 

I had this thought earlier. Good to see it independently confirmed.