2026 DETROIT TIGERS REGULAR SEASON THREAD

[gehringer_2]

46 minutes ago, NorthWoods said:

Ted Williams was in combat as a pilot.

and there must have been a big Yankees fan on the draft board because he got called back for Korea and once had to make an emergency landing after his plane got shot up!

Edited Thursday at 11:22 PM by gehringer_2

[Tiger337]

25 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Hinch would take him out after 6 innings to bring in a AAA pitcher...lmao

He would have left him in to pitch complete games the way everybody else did in that period.  If you look around the league, you see that a lot of managers manage the way Hinch does now.  The Tigers are not the only team platooning and pulling pitchers early.  

[gehringer_2]

3 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Lolich threw 376 innings in 1971!

circling back to the discussion about 'max effort all the time' pitching, Lolich is one of the guys who at least claims that it was very different when he pitched, that  he did not pitch hard to a good part of the line-ups he faced.Now it's true that sometimes guys re-image their own histories a bit, but that is what Mickey has said on record.

[gehringer_2]

5 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

He would have left him in to pitch complete games the way everybody else did in that period.  If you look around the league, you see that a lot of managers manage the way Hinch does now.  The Tigers are not the only team platooning and pulling pitchers early.  

and it's for good reason: Almost every pitcher today is out of gas and does lose effectiveness somewhere around 100 pitches, which is probably more evidence that the old timers didn't throw max effort all the time, because there is no reason at all to think that today's pitchers should have less stamina.

[NorthWoods]

19 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Lolich threw 376 innings in 1971!

I really don't think you can attribute all of it or even a majority to weaker hitters.    

[Tiger337]

1 minute ago, NorthWoods said:

I really don't think you can attribute all of it or even a majority to weaker hitters.    

I attribute it to different times.  If they were pitching today throwing max velocity and max spin on every pitch, they would not be pitching 300+ innings.  Ryan was a freak and would be today so he'd still be leading league in innings every year, but nowhere near the same volume.  

[Screwball]

4 hours ago, chasfh said:

2002 for pitch type, pitch value, and plate discipline; 2007 for velocity and movement; 2008 for contact and strike zone location; 2014 for spin; 2020 for arm angle Pre-2007 was measure by Sports Info Solutions; 2007 and on, Statcast and Pitch Info started measuring. 

When I did some research on the electronic strike zone I ran into the companies and tech behind all this. Wild and interesting stuff. And incredibly impressive.

[gehringer_2]

49 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I attribute it to different times.  If they were pitching today throwing max velocity and max spin on every pitch, they would not be pitching 300+ innings.  Ryan was a freak and would be today so he'd still be leading league in innings every year, but nowhere near the same volume.  

JV was almost as much a freak as Ryan, and he has said that things changed even between the beginning and end of his career. When JV first came up he could throw mostly a ~91-95 mph fastball for 2 or three innings, add more offspeed the 2nd time through then comeback with the 97-99 heater on the third pass, and even when he was dealing up to triple digits he'd be adding and substracting from the fb by several mph pitch by pitch. No one pitches like that today.  Today Skubal comes out of the gate at 97 or more throwing all his pitches, and the FB hardly varies.But Verlander had enough spin at 91-93 he could get away with it early in the game. Nobody can get away with that anymore. 

Plus there have been changes in the K zone. My impression is that in the years prior to it finally being fixed in one place by QuesTec, FX etc., a lot of umps called a lower zone - more like bottom of knees to waist than knees to letters, and it was probably harder to hit those low pitches for much power. The higer K zone took hitters a while to adjust to, but I think there may be more power in  higher plane swings.

Edited yesterday at 12:39 AM by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

This has been a fascinating conversation on the art of pitching.

The max effort stuff is interesting IMO. I played a bit of ball back in the day (early 70s) and there was no shortage of some husky farm boy throwing little tiny pills. Problem was, the pitch didn't do anything - a straight line - and then someone timed it, and barreled it, as they always do. That's why they don't go anywhere. Velocity isn't enough to get them to the big show.

You don't have to throw in the 90s to get people out. It's call pitching. Think of the guys who don't throw hard enough to break a window, and make the batter look like a fool. Approach, execution, location, and take advantage of the weakness. 

As a pitcher, the hardest thing to face is you can blow it past someone anymore. You need a new approach. A thrower vs. a pitcher. 

Remember a game in Detroit one year. Great seats, 20 rows up around home plate. Cleveland. Kenny Rogers. Third hitter for Cleveland jacked a shot. After that, he shut them down and the Tigers won. He dazzled them with a bunch of junk for the next 8 innings. I thought he was a true master of his craft, and that game was a perfect example.

That is the art of pitching.

 

[chasfh]

5 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

Velocity goes back to 2007 on FanGraphs.  Spin rate and other stuff available back to 2015 on baseball savant.   

According to AI, Military engineers used electric timer and high-speed wire cameras to clock Walter Johnson at 91 MPH in 1917.  Dopplar radar tracked Nolan Ryan's fastball at 100.7 in 1974.

And that was before the new ball every few batters era, precipitated by the Ben Chapman beaning. Can you imagine a dirty brown baseball winging toward your body at 90 miles per hour in the late innings of an April game with a sunset looming?

[Sports_Freak]

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

He would have left him in to pitch complete games the way everybody else did in that period.  If you look around the league, you see that a lot of managers manage the way Hinch does now.  The Tigers are not the only team platooning and pulling pitchers early.  

True, back in those days, nobody cared about pitch counts. Some people think today's pitchers are conditioned to only go 100 pitches. IDK, or care, if thats true.

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, Sports_Freak said:

Hinch would take him out after 6 innings to bring in a AAA pitcher...lmao

I would think Nolan would go all Robin Ventura on A.J. if he tried to do that. 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

circling back to the discussion about 'max effort all the time' pitching, Lolich is one of the guys who at least claims that it was very different when he pitched, that  he did not pitch hard to a good part of the line-ups he faced.Now it's true that sometimes guys re-image their own histories a bit, but that is what Mickey has said on record.

I don’t think a guy hard-wired for competitiveness would lie to make himself look like he’s working less hard, so I would take Mickey’s word on this.

[Tiger337]

1 minute ago, chasfh said:

I don’t think a guy hard-wired for competitiveness would lie to make himself look like he’s working less hard, so I would take Mickey’s word on this.

yeah, It's not like he said he pitched to the score.  

[chasfh]

6 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

True, back in those days, nobody cared about pitch counts. Some people think today's pitchers are conditioned to only go 100 pitches. IDK, or care, if thats true.

It was right in the middle of the Nolan Ryan era when the pitch count function started to gain some adherents, helped along by a book called The Diamond Appraised, written in 1989. It basically served as ground zero for the discussion of pitcher abuse and pitch limits.

[Tenacious D]

On a day where we collectively mourn the trading of Connor Seabold, let me offer some levity

 

[papalawrence]

Harris' teams as assistant gm in SF had a similar path. Sort of a straw man 107 win season, followed by 81 and 78. 

If they lose Skubal and Mize and go into rebuild I may pick up a habit like cocaine

[papalawrence]

13 blown saves so far. Team record for a season is 34. They're on pace......gives me something to follow

[papalawrence]

Has Harris ever been extended? Is this his final year under contract?

[casimir]

8 hours ago, papalawrence said:

Harris' teams as assistant gm in SF had a similar path. Sort of a straw man 107 win season, followed by 81 and 78. 

If they lose Skubal and Mize and go into rebuild I may pick up a habit like cocaine

What kind of extension would be reasonable for Mize?  He's become a very good pitcher, but he cannot stay healthy.

[casimir]

7 games out of the wildcard and everybody to jump over to get there.  They've put up a league average run prevention and have been a below average offense at 3.81 runs scored per game vs 4.39 for MLB.

They've been hit by injuries to both aspects of the game.  Some of those key cogs are in in rehab and/or shortly due to be there.

They were a .500 team in March and April.  In May when injuries were at their peak, they've gone 6-20.  Beyond the record, there's objectively to everyone been sloppy play and subjectively (from the outside anyway) bad vibes.

If/when those primary players that have been missing in action return, and its got to be sooner rather than later, is there enough season left to dig out of this hole?

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, casimir said:

7 games out of the wildcard and everybody to jump over to get there.  They've put up a league average run prevention and have been a below average offense at 3.81 runs scored per game vs 4.39 for MLB.

They've been hit by injuries to both aspects of the game.  Some of those key cogs are in in rehab and/or shortly due to be there.

They were a .500 team in March and April.  In May when injuries were at their peak, they've gone 6-20.  Beyond the record, there's objectively to everyone been sloppy play and subjectively (from the outside anyway) bad vibes.

If/when those primary players that have been missing in action return, and it’s got to be sooner rather than later, is there enough season left to dig out of this hole?

They dug out of a similar hole in August 2024.

[Tenacious D]

Let’s agree this was a pretty flawed team even before the onslaught of injuries.  Those only made things worse.  The team’s record over the last 100 games or so, going back to last season is one of the 3 worst.

Player development at both the major and minor league levels has taken a setback.  Colt Keith is a prime example.  The kid is huge and a good contact hitter, with zero homers through 1/3 of the season. That’s hard to accomplish and probably something mechanical.

Our minors are a mess, too.  A handful of healthy, promising pitchers and many positional players who have regressed (though many have moved up a rung so could be adjustment periods).

Here’s our organizational team records through 5/29: 
 

 

[monkeytargets39]

27 minutes ago, chasfh said:

They dug out of a similar hole in August 2024.

Yeah and it was the most unlikely playoff run in the history of the sport.  I don’t expect that to happen again

[Tenacious D]

11 minutes ago, monkeytargets39 said:

Yeah and it was the most unlikely playoff run in the history of the sport.  I don’t expect that to happen again

Not unless we get Trey Sweeney back.