2020 ZiPS Projections: Detroit Tigers

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

The Detroit Tigers will continue to struggle to score runs. I don’t mean in the “occasionally getting shut out by the Orioles” sense, but more like when you’re watching Tigers games, you should channel flip when they’re at the plate rather than during the commercials. What makes this worse isn’t that they’re just awful offensively, but that there’s really almost no source of potential upside outside of Jeimer Candelario.

Jonathan Schoop and C.J. Cron are both legitimate major leaguers, but in this offense, they’re practically the centerpieces, and the most the Tigers can really hope for is that they’re good enough to flip for a prospect in July. Normally, I’d rather see lottery tickets instead of fill-in veterans since the offense will be absolutely wretched under any circumstances, but Detroit doesn’t really even have many of those types either. Nor have the Tigers done any sweeps of minor league free agency to find any; it’s been an extraordinarily quiet winter in the Motor City.

It’s kind of sad to see Miguel Cabrera with a negative number, but his power was non-existent last year and it’s hard to have value at designated hitter when your isolated power is the same as Hanser Alberto’s. Cabrera blasted the team’s lineup for his lack of power in 2019, but the truth is that Cabrera just isn’t a good hitter any longer. One of the most dangerous fastball hitters in baseball at one point, Cabrera only had an xSLG of .600 against fastballs in what Statcast calls the “heart” of the strike zone. That sounds like a big number, but the league as a whole was at .615. That number was .928 for Cabrera as recently as 2016, and at 17% of pitches thrown in the heart of the zone last year, pitchers gave him more fastballs down the middle than ever before in his career. He just can’t do much with them these days.

One mystery I’m eager to see solved in 2020 is the defensive disappearance of JaCoby Jones. Both UZR and DRS loved Jones before 2019 but absolutely hated him last year. From 2018-19, Jones lost 19 defensive runs in center field according to UZR and a whopping 23 runs by DRS. It’s a big deal for a player like Jones, whose value relies heavily on performing on defense.

Pitchers

One reason the Tigers may be more watchable than the Orioles in 2020 is that the games will actually end. The Tigers combine their atrocious run-scoring machine with a rotation that, to be perfectly honest, really isn’t all that bad. No, the heights aren’t that high, but the Tigers have what essentially amounts to a surplus of adequate-ish pitching. This sounds like a joke, but it isn’t: a rotation made of Detroit’s sixth-through-10th-best starting pitchers projects to be better than Baltimore’s actual rotation.

ZiPS forecasts Matt Boyd to allow fewer home runs than in 2019, but this is partially counteracted by some regression in his strikeout rate. While ZiPS weighs recent strikeout rate very heavily — because that’s what history says you should do — it still must be convinced that all of Boyd’s three-strikeouts-per-game improvement is supported by the peripheral data. Outside of Iván Nova, whose strikeout rate has descended into the range in which he has a massive downside, I don’t think ZiPS is particularly grumpy anywhere in the rotation.

ZiPS also continues to see Spencer Turnbull as a reasonable third starter and views Michael Fulmer, when he eventually returns, in a similar light. The bullpen’s projections are nowhere near as optimistic, but they really ought not be at this point in a rebuild; Detroit’s still going through the sorting-out process here, and some of the starting pitching prospects that don’t work out will likely end up as relievers. The one exception is Joe Jiménez, the only member of the bullpen that ZiPS has projected to better than league-average. As with Boyd, ZiPS does not think that Jiménez’s homers allowed matches how he pitched in 2019. Statcast data agrees with this as the xSLG for Boyd and Jiménez both come in at least 50 points under the actual slugging percentages allowed.

Prospects

When counting pitchers with 10 projected WAR remaining in their careers, ZiPS sees the Tigers as having nine of them. The 2020 projections aren’t complete yet, but this would have ranked them fourth among the 2019 teams. Matt Manning and Casey Mize project to have bright futures, both with significant ace-type upside, and while ZiPS isn’t quite as optimistic about his ceiling, the computer also thinks Tarik Skubal has a 60% chance to have multiple two-WAR seasons in the majors.

The challenge for Detroit is that they’re not going to be able to just sit on their pitching prospects to build a winner. If ZiPS is correct, the only player in the farm system who will ever have much value in the majors is Isaac Paredes. Paredes projects as a solid long-term starter for the Tigers and the only prospect to have better than a 2% chance — according to ZiPS — of hitting 20 WAR in their career. Paredes is at 41.4%. Next are Kody Clemens at 1.2% and Daz Cameron at 0.9%.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

 

 

 

 

 

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.