sabretooth

I understand rules and regs but if the above applies to every team all of the time that would be a pretty strong strait-jacket. That would imply a lot less flexibility for owners than I had previously thought was the case.

....in terms of situational stats..... .....and they were 6th in FIP and 8th in ERA and 7th in WAR, pretty similar to the NYY in most statistical respects, and right behind CLE in FIP (3.47 v. 3.39). With basically a bunch of castoffs and nobodies. You make it seem like there was some huge gulf in performance....with regards to HOU, yes, there was, and an ENORMOUS gap in terms of talent, HOU has an elite bullpen. A performance gulf existed between DET and CLE to a lesser extent, but DET was pretty damn similar to NYY. They certainly weren't projected to be anywhere near NYY or CLE, but they wound up performing nearly as well as NYY and were in the ballpark with CLE. NYY was projected to have between 4.5 and 6 WAR from the bullpen from Steamer and ZIPS, whereas DET had a -1.9 WAR projection from ZIPS and a 1 WAR projection from Steamer; DET and NYY wound up with 5 - 6 WAR. Incredible overperformance this year and in 2021 from DET. The argument that players always play to their level of talent regardless of the situation or how they are used is disprovable in almost any sport. It always surprises me to hear knowledgeable sports guys around here credit performance to talent as if that's a cinch. The fact that BPs are filled with mostly marginal guys (in the Tigers' case, nearly all of them qualify as such) means that it takes more judgment and work on part of coaching/managment to produce a good BP than to produce a good lineup, even if you have the high-priced guys on the back-end of the BP (which of course the Tigers don't). WPA and RE24 aren't somehow better or more telling about bullpen performance than FIP or WAR. WPA and RE24 are useful, sure, sort of similar to how +/- stats can be useful in basketball or hockey, in a situational context. Of course FIP tells you more about how the pitcher performed relative to what was actually within his control. And in that measure the Tigers BP was 6th.

I hypothesize that an owner can obtain capital financing other than through the MLB financing facilities? If that is the case I would further hypothesize that an owner who obtains capital financing *without* using the MLB financial facilities mentioned above, would *not* have to abide by all of the rules and restrictions indicated above? In short, the hypothesis is that if you use the MLB financing facilities, you have to play by all of their rules, but you have the option to obtain your capital financing elsewhere and avoid all of the aforementioned rules and restrictions. Is the above hypothesis correct?

The argument by way of specific example against the presumptive positive influence of a good/excellent hitting coach is that Coolbaugh himself coincided with both very good seasons and very bad seasons back-to-back with Grossman + Candy in 2021 and 2022. I get it, and I really don't know of specific examples of where a hitting coach/approach turned an offense around and/or where the departure of a hitting coach significantly harmed a team's hitting. I do know of a number of examples including Fetters where a Pitching Coach seemed to have made a major positive influence, especially on a bullpen and/or a starter or two. I do feel that the Tigers failed to help their hitters adapt to the deadened ball this year. Other teams had bad first 1/3rds of the season and then turned it around. The Tigers had some modest turnarounds (Baez after a tough start almost perfectly matched his career norms from June 1st to the end of the season), but it's hard to argue this year where any of the hitters overperformed their established norms. and examples abound as to hitters who crashed and burned.

There's no doubt that Hinch and Fetters do a wonderful job with the bullpen, and that's not because the GM handed them better pitchers than other Managers had. They have had mediocre talent and have turned it into a top-5 bullpen worth 5 WAR. There are different metrics that capture different aspects of this, but I am not sure how best to express it numerically. I think a good bullpen Manager is worth more than the WAR differential because of the marginally positive effect that a good bullpen has situationally in games, and also in helping to optimize starter arms, and such. Bottom line is that I think a top 5 bullpen vs. a bottom 5 bullpen can improve a team's won-loss outcome by more than 5 wins. There's also the marginal positive influence that a Manager can have on player selection for the bullpen and bench, and the back end of the rotation (which overlaps with the bullpen outcome), if that Manager has an excellent relationship with the Front Office/GM. For example, Leyland said openly in 2006 and afterwards that he was able to influence the 2006 bullpen positively, by advocating for promoting Zoom and putting him into the bullpen, among other things. The injuries and bad hitting notwithstanding, I think Hinch and his staff were worth more than 5 and something less than 10 wins this year vs. what Gardenhire or Ausmus would have produced, for example. I think if Hinch had the equivalent of a Fetters on the hitting side, the impact of him and his staff could have been close to 10 games vs. a poor Manager and staff.

Yeah I guess I was starting my life on the west side of the state in the 1996-1998 time frame as a first time executive, then from 1998-2002 I got married and had little babies, and the woes of the Tigers just didn't register with me. I also didn't have access to all of the data I do now to compare players and teams, and the only way to share opinions between fans was at the ballpark or listening to/calling into Sports Wrap on 760 with Steve and Dan. Now I play fantasy baseball and watch a lot with my kids, and so information and expectations are shared between us and online, and everything is elevated all of the time, so yeah it seems worse now. That's the hope!

This is a great post and I hope you're right.

First bolded part: absolutely 100% agreed. Middle part: I think Chris signed off on a long-term plan, saw profits every year, and didn't care enough to dig any deeper until the big crash this year. I hope this is a sign of awakening, i.e., Mike I in 2002, and not WCFS rearranging the deck chairs every 10 years or so to no avail. Second bolded part: this is the plan! I don't want Jerry Jones of course, but every successful owner I've heard of is an engaged part of the accountability system.

Yes, the As, Rays, Cardinals, Astros, Braves, Red Sox, Dodgers and Indians all do a consistently better job at this than the Tigers have for a long time. Turning that around for the Tigers is one of the requirements for Harris to be successful.

Pull out Miggy's insane Mike I contract that Chris would have unloaded if Miggy had been tradeable, and they have had a bottom 5 payroll from 2018 - 2021. That's not a decent budget at all. It was more of a decent budget this year, but the spend was executed by an incompetent GM that Chris should have known was incompetent just by looking at the disastrous 2017/2018 firesale and the lack of development of minor league talent. All of the indicators have been that Chris I is a low-risk/profits first owner who has been laughably disengaged from the reality of the situation. I don't mind the profits motive at all, but it cannot be combined with a low-risk approach and a lack of accountability for results. THAT is why Chris I has been a failure and that's why I feel that Harris has to somehow convert Chris' way of thinking about risk tolerance and resource allocation to make this work. And Harris has to set the standards for organizational excellence, define success clearly with metrics, and get Chris to buy into that model.

I will let others speak for themselves. There has been a pretty consistent crowd of anti-DD people who prefer to do things "the right way". Many of them touted the Royals as the right way, before it became clear that it was a fluke development class that caused a 3-year bump in an otherwise unbroken 30+year losing period. Many touted the Cubs without apparently noticing the trades, FAs, and overall spend. Many touted the As without noticing that the As basically never tanked to become a low-salary team (maybe this year the A's changed their minds and are embracing tanking, I hope not, time will tell). Everybody loves the Rays and Cardinals, but who can be THAT good? Obviously the Dodgers are a great organization who also have a great market base, we can learn from the first example. The Yanks also have very strong leadership but basically work off of a giant payroll. Boston also has a large market base but also generally does everything well. There are other teams that enter the discussion like the Indians and Giants. The Indians seem like a wanna-be Rays/As model, and are certainly better at development than the Tigers, but not as good as the teams they emulate. That leaves the Astros and Braves, who do seem to do everything pretty well or excellently, AND they spend at least an average payroll, so THAT is why I think we should be like them.

If you like Scott Harris, I challenge you to avoid the trap of requiring him to magically build a Rays/As style low-payroll success here. If that could be repeated simply by hiring a good GM then everybody would be doing it. And the As have hamstrung their once-in-a-millenia talent in Billy Beane to the point where even his As have only had winning seasons 1/2 of the time. Not bad, but is that the goal? As for the Rays, again, that is a wonderful organization, and I would love to see that here, but again, if that could be duplicated by simply plugging in a good GM and President then the Rays model would have been duplicated elsewhere, and it has not. The Cardinals are the Rays but with a consistently average or above average payroll. I would love to emulate that model, and since we are a mid-or-better market, we have more economic resources to draw on than St. Louis. I don't suppose we can match the Cardinals in terms of organizational competency (few if any can), but we can (like Houston and Atlanta) make up some of the difference with larger market resources. Houston and Atlanta are probably the closest and most relevant models that Detroit/Harris should try and emulate -- we have a fairly similar market as they do, they are fairly recent (last 10 years) entrants into the upper class of organizations (unlike the Cardinals, who have been pretty continuously successful for about 75 years). Houston and Atlanta, like the Cardinals, also continuously commit nominal/average resources/payroll (or more), and don't slip in that regard. THAT should be our goal, to build, commit, and maintain excellence in all phases, never going for the "cheap" solution. So my hope is that Harris can be the influencer of ownership, the leader of the front office, the architect of organizational excellence, and technical master that will lead this team from historical incompetence under Chris/AA to Astros/Braves level competence, resource commitment, and success.

I like Scott Harris but Chris I blows. Chris I said some good things but he needs to show that he will actually support the resources to put the best product on the field and not hamstring Harris by continuing to provide a below-average payroll. I will be happy to crown this duo as "it" when I see them produce nominal developmental success from the minor league system AND more importantly, put a freaking winning product on the field. Until I see results count me as skeptical that Harris can overcome the Chris I factor. I do like Harris though, don't mistake my attitude as reflective of anything negative against him. I just highly doubt that he has the insight and skills to get Chris over the hump.

Sorry to be a broken record, but when the GM that we dumped and scorned the memory of and the great players that we dumped for nothing are STILL leading winnings teams and are STILL getting teams into the playoffs 5-7 years AFTER we dumped them, and we have NOTHING to show for it, I am going to keep calling out those people that have consistently claimed that it was all for the best, and have not even bothered to change their tune. I wish that I had lived in Houston, Boston, Washington, and now Philadelphia, to have enjoyed the success brought about by our cast-offs, instead of suffering with this crap-fest of an organization and it's stupid owner, and worse-yet to listen to how much better off we were to have gone this predictably failed and boring as hell route for all of these years, with the prospect of ANOTHER rebuild in front of us.

Huh, isn't that weird....strange, unexpected...I mean, what fool would have guessed such an improbable event, after a lost decade of Philly futility? After their GM was let go by one of the all-time great organizations, the Tigers, which has done so well without him. And DD just lucks his way into his sixth straight winning season as a GM post-Tigers (along with 4 post-Tigers winning seasons and 3 playoff appearances and a WS). DD was washed up, a has-been, and according to the salary scolds and DD haters around here, the Tigers were going to rise like the Phoenix from the ashes of his incompetence. Some people are **still** convicted that we are better off. Not that **anybody** here disagreed with them. Oh, I get it, our wonderful and amazing owner here would NEVER have worked well with DD, because our wonderful owner is far too progressive and smart to work with a retrograde like DD. Well, hopefully, our new GM can some day begin to sniff the kind of success as the head honcho that DD has been experiencing for several decades. Maybe someday. Maybe we can start to be good just in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 2006 team? Or maybe the 25th? Wait 'till next year (2024, that is)!

Well, because AA cut the payroll, we fans saved a LOT of money....oops, it wasn't our money, we didn't save anything. Well, at least we saw a winning team built the "right" way....oops, the minor leagues suck and we're really bad at developing talent. Well, at least we have an exciting young core of players...eh, even our top 1st round picks are underperforming. At least the owner is happy with how his decisions have panned out...oops, he fired his GM after 6 seasons. I realize that 2022 was a year of bad luck, and things could rebound quickly from horrible to not-so-bad or even better, but it should never have gotten to this point in the first place.

I reflect often on the fact that the man on the left (I assume that's Mike I) fired his GM in 2015, who then went on to win four straight years with three playoffs and a WS with BOS and has his PHI team in the playoffs in year 2 after a lost decade before his arrival. And the GM that the man on the left hired in 2015 (AA) went on to lose 6 out of 7 seasons (all of the losing seasons happened after Mike I died), with a 427-672 record and a .388 win-pct, with no playoff appearances (and I think Chas said that we've had a bottom 5% 6-year run in MLB history?). And after Mike I's death, AA traded away every good player on the team, including 2 no-doubt HoFers for basically nothing... .....as well as JD and other good players, also for basically nothing. And nobody here seems to want to project this team to be a winner for at least a couple of years, meaning that we could realistically commemorate the 10 year anniversary of DD's firing in 2025 about the time we are a winning/playoff team again? 10 years??? ....nobody can reasonably support a 10 year hiatus from competitiveness, not for any reason. I am not saying that if DD stayed that we would definitely have been a good team most of the time, but we could not possibly have done any worse than we have, and my guess is that we would have at least have been a decent team, maybe better, and we could have been just as profitable as we were as a horrible team.

This is what I looked like watching the Tigers in 2022.

They played more competitive ball in most of their games last year than they have since the 4th Q of the Vikings game. It seems like they are taking huge steps backwards. They need a top notch effort against Dallas. Nothing less.

ERod had flashes of velo as the season approached the end, but then it would drop in the same or next inning, and there seemed to be an immediate correlation to hard-hit balls.

I can still see myself as a Dan C/Ben J/Brad H fan with a strong running game and OL, even if the D is poor and the passing game is inconsistent this year. They have to find an identity, stick with it, AND at least execute their core on-field approach well. OTOH, if the running game isn't going to be above average, and they have poor D, and the passing game is inconsistent, then this whole season would feel like a total bust.

Not that this applies to ERod, since he's not a very effective PTC guy, but the modest positive pitch-to-contact movement in the MLB towards sinkers and away from sliders (which I assume would be marginally better on pitcher's arms) in 2021 - 2022 is going to take a beating in 2023 with the banning of the shift.

Based on his sudden drop in velocity and K's, and his age, and his recent history, and his general inability to stay on the field even before 2022, I'd say for worse.

All reasonable....I hope he does what you are saying, or what I'm saying...or anything that makes this team win for that matter.

I hope your confidence can withstand getting pasted by OSU in their building, 'cause their speed will probably kill our power, especially with our weak pass rush and lack of elite DB play.