Reviews, Previews, and Ranks: Detroit Tigers
Introduction & Glossary Post Here
After covering a couple of bad but exciting young teams, we are on to the Detroit freaking Tigers. What a gross franchise.
The Tigers pitched to a mediocre, but not awful, 4.06 ERA in 2022. They put up a quite bad 19.8% K%. The problem was their offense, which posted a .633 OPS to be second-worst in the league, hitting a league-worst 110 homers. That was 17 homers less than Cleveland who was second-worst. An astounding power outage in Detroit.
This one should be easy, let’s bang it out!
Pitchers
Tarik Skubal
The one ray of light in the rotation was Skubal, but you would have to call his season a letdown mostly due to injury. He led the team in innings, which is crazy because he threw just 117.2 of them - lol.
He pitched to a 3.52 ERA with a 1.16 WHIP, but a disappointing 24.5% K%, although the BB% was strong at 6.7%. The guy will only be 26 next year, and he’s shown some really good signs so far in his career - so he’s definitely someone we want to get right for 2023.
Some 2021 → 2022 comparisons
K%: 25.9% → 24.5%
BB%: 7.4% → 6.7%
SwStr%: 13.0% → 13.4%
CSW%: 29.0% → 29.4%
GB%: 39.3% → 47.1%
Brl%: 13.9% → 5.5%
There’s a lot of good news there. The change he made in 2022 was increased slider usage, here are the usages on his main pitches shown in that same 2021 → 2022 way:
Slider: 22.8% → 30.9%
Four-Seam: 42.8% → 26.6%
Sinker: 12.9% → 21.1%
Changeup: 12.1% → 14.9%
Curveball: 6.8% → 6.4%
Fewer four-seamers, filled in with the slider and sinker. That is a recipe for increasing ground balls and decreasing barrels - so that’s a good explanation for that. Hard to get a feel on how he’ll approach 2023, but the better bet would be that he sticks with how he went about it in 2022 since that worked pretty well and since there was clearly a plan to transform the arsenal a bit during the 2021-2022 offseason.
Unfortunately, the slider didn’t perform all that well by the SwStr% (12.5%) and CSW% (28.7%).
It’s a hard slider with a ton of downward movement and very little horizontal movement - so a bit like the sinker. To me, it makes sense that he wouldn’t get a ton of whiffs on the pitch - but the higher ground-ball rate is backed up by the arsenal (all of his pitches above average on downward movement).
He gets a good amount of whiffs on the four-seamer and a ton on his rarely-thrown changeup (15% usage but a 26.3% SwStr% on those 285 pitches). Skubal has a lot of tools in the toolbox to work with, I think the upside is really alluring.
The inconsistency is shown there, and maybe that will just be who he is, but it’s forgivable as a younger pitcher that is still tinkering with his arsenal and dealing with some health problems.
I’m not going to go anywhere near calling Skubal “safe”, and he’s probably not a “short list” guy for me either, but I like him just fine and I imagine he’ll be cheap enough where it will be a pick justified by the upside.
Comps/RankArounds: Brady Singer
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