As we’re reminded every time they face the Yankees and give up homers by the half-dozen, the Orioles are a very bad baseball team. At 39-82, they’re 41 1/2 games out of first place, and on pace for 52 wins, which means they could lose more than two-thirds of their games for the second season in a row. They’re just nine homers away from breaking the single-season record for dingers allowed (258). And yet they’re not even the majors’ worst team. Neither are the Marlins, who through the first 41 games of the season slipped below the Throneberry Line by losing 31 games.

That so much attention has been paid to those bad ballclubs might be chalked up to yet another instance of East Coast Bias, because tucked away in the more wholesome Midwest are the Detroit Tigers, who are doing things (and not doing things) to rekindle memories of their 2003 squad, which gave Throneberry’s 1962 Mets a run for their money by losing 119 games. At 36-81, these Tigers are on pace to go 50-112, but a slight slippage could send them past last year’s 115-loss Orioles. In the words of James Brown, “People, it’s bad.”

This — what’s the opposite of web gem? — might be the 2019 squad’s signature play (h/t @suss2hyphens):

The Tigers were a competitive concern as recently as 2016, when they went 86-75 but slid out of a Wild Card spot in late September. That was the last gasp of the core that won four straight AL Central titles from 2011-14, and one that probably should have begun scattering to the four winds earlier. As it was, general manager Al Avila — who replaced Dave Dombrowski in late 2015 — traded Alex Avila (his own son!), J.D. Martinez, Justin Upton, Justin Verlander, and Justin Wilson in a six-week span in mid-2017, as the team was en route to 98 losses.

The Tigers are rebuilding, but their rebuild has been hampered by a farm system weakened by years of bad drafts and repeated mining to keep their competitive window open. One has to dial back to 2011 to find a year in which the Tigers’ top draft pick (James McCann, who was a second-rounder) ever suited up for the team in the regular season, and 2012 (Jake Thompson) for one who even played in the majors. Baseball America’s annual organizational rankings placed their system between 26th and 30th annually from 2014-17. That’s a lousy platform from which to launch a rebuild, and it’s shown. Last year’s Tigers lost 98 games under new manager Ron Gardenhire, and this year’s crop is worse. Much, much worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can see where they rank among their new teammates; our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
Read the rest of this entry »

Having already bolstered their bench with super-utilityman Tony Kemp, the Cubs have added a more substantial bat in the form of right fielder Nicholas Castellanos, a pending free agent who has spent his entire career with the Tigers. The 27-year-old righty swinger heads from the Motor City to the Windy City in exchange for a pair of right-handed pitching prospects.

Cubs get:

OF Nicholas Castellanos

Tigers get:

RHP Alex Lange
RHP Paul Richan

A supplemental first-round pick in the 2010 draft out of a Florida high school, Castellanos spent the bulk of his first four full major league seasons (2014-17) playing third base — and badly at that (-25.8 UZR, -64 DRS). During that time, he hit for a modest 104 wRC+ in 2,304 plate appearances, good for just 4.8 WAR. The bulk of that value arrived in the last two of those years, as he began to hit for more power and trimmed his strikeout rate. He bopped a career-high 26 homers in 2017, the same year that he took up playing right field in September, two months after J.D. Martinez was traded to the Diamondbacks. Though he hit only 23 homers last year, he set across-the-board career highs in all three slash stats (.298/.354/.500) as well as wRC+ (130) and WAR (3.0).

Castellanos has been unable to match that performance this year, hitting .273/.328/.462 for a 106 wRC+ with just 11 homers in 439 PA. His average exit velocity has dropped from 89.6 mph to 88.3, and his xwOBA, too, from .377 to .335. He has chased pitches out of the zone like never before (a career-high 41.2% O-Swing%), and while he continues to crush fastballs (as Devan Fink noted last week), he has been vulnerable to changeups outside the zone and has experienced a spike in popups on such pitches; where he hit for a career-best 167 wRC+ against changeups last year, he’s back down to 117 this year, though he has cut his swinging strike rate on them by more than half (from 21.8% to 10.2%). He has struggled against sliders, whiffing on them 22.6% of the time, and hitting for just a 74 wRC+ against them. Pitchers have noticed; changeups and sliders have accounted for 36.3% of the pitches he’s seen, up from about 28-32% from 2016-18. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tigers are rebuilding as the Braves have tried to build a bullpen on the fly all season long. The match between the two teams is an easy one to make, and Ken Rosenthal is reporting that the Tigers are close to trading away closer Shane Greene to the Braves. Robert Murray has added the return for the Tigers. Here’s the deal:
Braves Receive:

• RHP Shane Greene

Tigers Receive:

• LHP Joey Wentz
• OF Travis Demeritte

A season ago, Greene racked up 32 saves for the Tigers, but he generally wasn’t a very good reliever. His ground-ball rate at 40% was lower than in previous seasons, and too many fly balls meant too many homers and a 4.61 FIP and an ERA over 5. This season, Greene was able to get back to his ground-balling ways with a sinker/cutter/slider arsenal, and he’s been a pretty good pitcher as a result. Looking at Greene’s ERA might lead one to believe he is a great pitcher, but the underlying numbers don’t completely support that greatness.

Greene has a 1.18 ERA, which is certainly really good. Only Kirby Yates‘ 1.02 mark bests Greene among relievers this season. Expecting Greene to continue to post a 1.18 ERA is folly. He has struck out 29% of batters, which is good, while walking 8% of batters, which is roughly average. His ground-ball rate on the season is 54%, and that’s going to keep the ball in the park and limit damage, but those things alone aren’t enough to take a 3.80 FIP, which is about 20% better than average in these heightened run environments, and move it to a 1.18 ERA.

Greene’s BABIP is .181 and his left-on-base rate is 85%, and neither number is sustainable going forward. He’s also given up six runs on the season which weren’t earned, more than double his total of five earned runs. This isn’t to say Greene isn’t good, but it is enough to say Greene isn’t great. Over at Statcast, his xwOBA is a solid .282, but his actual wOBA is about 60 points lower. Greene is a solid addition to the Braves pen, and 15 years ago, the ERA and saves might have netted the Tigers a top-50 prospect. Today, Greene is another solid reliever among many available at the trade deadline. The Braves are likely to pay a premium for that need, but their top prospects were always going to be off limits. Read the rest of this entry »

Evidently, Nicholas Castellanos doesn’t love playing in Comerica Park.

“This park is a joke,” he told Chris McCosky of The Detroit News on July 21. “It’s to the point where how are we going to be compared to the rest of the people in the league in terms of power numbers, OPS, slugging and all that stuff when we got a yard out here that’s 420 feet straight across center field?”

As we approach the July 31 trade deadline, it appears likely that Castellanos won’t have to call Comerica home for much longer. The Tigers are 30-67, and as MLB.com’s Jon Morosi reported on Wednesday, they are “virtually certain” to trade him by the deadline. But a change of scenery might not be the solution to Castellanos’ problems. Playing the majority of his games in Detroit isn’t why the outfielder has taken a slight step back this season (130 wRC+ in 2018; 114 wRC+ in 2019).

First, let’s dispense with Castellanos’ claim. Here are Castellanos’ 2019 home and road splits:

Those are some pretty drastic splits, but it’s clear that Castellanos is not being hindered by the effects of Comerica Park. The wRC+ split ⁠— which, as we know, adjusts for park factors ⁠— tells the full story. While Castellanos has been a better hitter on the road than at home, it’s not the fault of the ballpark. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2017, Shane Greene appeared to have turned a corner. He was coming off his first season as a near-full time reliever, one he’d finished with an ugly ERA (5.82) but a pretty nifty FIP (3.13). The latter mark, as is typically the case, proved to be the more predictive number, as he finished the 2017 season with a 2.66 ERA, though it came with a slightly higher 3.84 FIP. The following season, the wheels came off again, as he posted a 5.12 ERA and a 4.61 FIP. All told, Greene entered 2019 with a career 4.89 ERA and 4.14 FIP in five seasons split between the Yankees and the Tigers. What’s he up to now? Pretty much what you’d guess: leading all major league pitchers with an ERA of 1.06 in 34 innings.

It may seem surprising, but Greene has been around for some time now. He’s already 30, has been both a starter and a reliever for extended periods of time, and has been given a prominent role on a few lost Tigers teams over the years. Yet because of the drastic swings in his performance from year to year, we seem to know very little about him. Even if we focus solely on this year, there is still conflicting information. His ERA is obviously fantastic, but it comes with a 3.65 FIP and a 4.04 xFIP. To put the last number in context, his xFIP during his forgettable 2018 season was 4.05. Considering his contract status (he’ll be a free agent after 2020) and his role as closer for a 29-61 team, Greene is going to be a popular name in trade conversations for the rest of the month. It seems pertinent to ask, then: What exactly do we make of him?

Let’s get a few underwhelming facts about him out of the way first. His opponents’ BABIP of .179 this season is well below his career average of .304, and his strand rate is 86.1%, well above his career average of 69%. Those stats depend a lot upon luck, and 34 innings is a minuscule sample size for luck-based metrics. The fact that Greene is performing so well in them — seventh in the majors in BABIP, 32nd in LOB%, among all pitchers with at least 20 IP — gives us good reason to be suspicious of Greene’s suddenly elite ERA.

It’s easy enough to look at those measures and declare Greene as the beneficiary of unsustainable luck, and a clear candidate for regression — in fact, it’s too easy. Because while he may appear lucky at first glance, there are reasons to believe Greene really is a notably better pitcher than he’s ever been. Read the rest of this entry »

In April, Matthew Boyd gave up two homers. In May, five balls left the yard against the Tigers lefty. Last month, Boyd’s breakout season slowed as he gave up 10 homers. As we enter July, Boyd has a solid 3.57 FIP and a 3.72 ERA, and has been worth 2.6 WAR, which ranks 17th among pitchers this season. Those are good numbers to be sure, but as June began, Boyd’s ERA and FIP were both 2.85 and his 2.5 WAR ranked third for pitchers behind only Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. Boyd’s strikeouts and walks have been slightly better than they were earlier in the season; his BABIP is slightly higher and his LOB% is a little bit lower. But that doesn’t explain his 5.90 ERA and 5.37 FIP. It’s the home runs that are hurting Boyd, and with the trade deadline a month away, trying to determine whether they are randomly bunching across a few starts or the beginning of a trend is an important exercise for teams looking to reinforce their rotations.

As for how Boyd broke out in the first place, the answer is a bit easier to find — the work has already been done for us. Sung-Min Kim detailed Boyd’s transformation earlier this season, showing how Boyd lowered his arm slot to gain spin on his fastball, and raised the location of the pitch. He also buried his slider more often, gained a consistency in his delivery, and basically eliminated the two-seamer. David Laurila also wrote on Boyd earlier this season, discussing his work with Driveline to create a better slider.

Boyd’s season can be carved up any number of ways depending on how you might want to use (and abuse) arbitrary endpoints. If we took away the first three spectacular Boyd starts of the season, where he struck out 29 and walked six, his FIP is 4.09, his ERA is 3.95, and he’s averaging nearly two homers every nine innings. If we look at just his first 10 starts, he’s one of the best pitchers in baseball. He has five starts with 0 or 1 runs. He’s only got two starts where his strikeouts don’t at least equal his innings pitched. The only time he walked as many as three batters, he struck out 13 Yankees. If Boyd had evenly spaced out his 17 homers across his starts, we’d be discussing a moderate breakout. Instead, we have a massive breakout followed by concern. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Shelby Miller, Daniel Norris, Tyler Olson — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

———

Shelby Miller, Texas Rangers

“I probably didn’t start throwing a curveball until high school. Growing up, my dad always told me they’re not good for your arm — not at an early age — and that changeups are better. But then there was this guy named Jerry Don Gleaton in my hometown — he played professionally, and was a baseball coach at Howard Payne University and I worked with him. He taught me some mechanical things, showed me some grips, and it kind of went from there. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Mets made an out-of-the-box move yesterday, hiring 82-year-old Phil Regan as their interim pitching coach. The former big-league hurler, and longtime coach, takes over for Dave Eiland, who along with understudy Chuck Hernandez, was relieved of his duties in the throes of what has been an underachieving season.

As you should be aware, Regan’s nickname is “The Vulture.” It was given to him by Sandy Koufax, in a year that Regan went 14-1 out of the Dodgers bullpen with 21 saves and a 1.62 ERA. Prior to that 1966 season, he’d pitched primarily as a starter for the Detroit Tigers, the team he grew up rooting for in rural Michigan. Overall, Regan appeared in 551 games, for four teams, from 1960-1972.

The excerpted interview that follows was conducted approximately five or six years ago and was intended for inclusion in a book project — conversations with Detroit Tigers players of yesteryear — that has remained on the back burner. Given the timeliness of Regan’s hiring, I am choosing to share highlights from the interview here.

David Laurila: You were born in 1937, and grew up in southwest Michigan rooting for the Tigers.

Phil Regan: “Yes, I grew up in a town called Wayland. My earliest recollection of the Tigers was listening to Harry Heilmann call games on the radio. I recall players like George Kell, Johnny Lipon, Hoot Evers, Johnny Groth, and Vic Wertz. But my favorite of all was Hal Newhouser. He always seemed to be the one who pitched on Sundays, often against Bob Feller. He was my hero.

“During the week, I’d rush home from school, turn on the radio, and listen to Harry Heilmann and then, later on, Van Patrick. In those days we didn’t have a lot of television, but we always had the games on the radio. Of course, being from Michigan, I grew up wanting to play for the Tigers.”

Laurila: You ended up signing with them after graduating from high school.

Regan: “I did. As a kid, I never really got to play many games of baseball, because I lived out on a little farm, near a little town. Mostly I threw against a barn, with my brother, and stuff like that. But I had a good arm, and after graduating I was invited to Tiger Stadium to work out. They offered me a contract, but I decided that I wanted to go to Western Michigan [University]. After a year at Western, I decided to sign with the Tigers. From there I went into their minor league system.”

Laurila: How much did you sign for? Read the rest of this entry »

Tyson Ross has had an uneven career since being selected in the second round of the 2008 draft by the Oakland Athletics. Along with his original organization, he’s pitched for the San Diego Padres, Texas Rangers, St. Louis Cardinals, and now the Detroit Tigers. Injuries have been an issue. Currently on the 60-day Injured List with ulnar nerve neuritis, the 32-year-old right-hander previously underwent Thoracic Outlet Syndrome surgery in 2016.

When healthy, he’s been a quality big-league pitcher. Ross was an All-Star with the Padres in 2014, and the following year he led the National League in games started. His ERA over that two-season stretch was 3.03, while his K/9 was a robust 9.4. A mid-90s fastball played in a big role in that success, but it’s never been his best pitch. Ross has — when at full strength — one of the game’s best sliders.

Ross talked about his signature pitch, as well the cutter his college coach didn’t know he threw, and what he’s learned since purchasing a Rapsodo, when the Tigers visited Fenway Park in late April.

———

David Laurila: You’re known for your slider. What is the history behind it?

Tyson Ross: “It’s always been my go-to pitch. I went to college at Cal-Berkeley and threw a ton of sliders when I was there. But I originally learned the pitch when I was 11 years old. I was in All Stars, playing third base, and we ended up needing an emergency pitcher. I could get on the mound and throw strikes with a fastball, but I needed a second pitch. My buddy’s dad said, ‘Hey, grip it like this and throw it like a fastball.’ The second or third one broke. He didn’t actually call it a slider — he just called it a breaking ball — but it felt good in my hand, and I’ve been throwing it the same way ever since.”

Laurila: Is there anything unique about it?

Ross: “Nothing special. It just works the way it does, for whatever reason.” Read the rest of this entry »