Every organization wants to be perceived as honest, but not each one can be taken at its word. It was refreshing to hear the Phillies acknowledge not too long ago that they won’t be contending over the next few years. As obvious a point as it was to make, it was important to hear the Phillies be truthful about their situation. As for the Tigers, it’s no secret what they’ve been doing. They’ll come right out and say it: they’ve been trying to win right away, in large part for the sake of Mike Ilitch. The Tigers haven’t acted like they’ve had the luxury of time, and Wednesday they made another big win-now move, keeping Victor Martinez at a four-year guarantee worth $68 million. Per usual, there are questions about the back. Per usual, that’s not the priority.

It’s a fairly simple move to explain, if you buy into the greater organizational pattern. The Tigers are set up to be competitive, and they could’ve used a bat, so they kept one of their best, at a substantial price. One of the things that was so perplexing about the Doug Fister trade was that it made the Tigers immediately worse. That broke from the trend, and caused some to wonder if the team might be slowly trying to plan more for the future. Martinez is about 2015. Martinez is about winning before the future even has a chance to happen. What does Mike Ilitch care about the years down the road?

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what that writer would’ve seen in many of the other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and I’m in the midst of a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

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It’s not a stretch to say that heading into the ALDS, the biggest concern in Detroit was about the bullpen — specifically how first-year manager Brad Ausmus had chosen to deploy it late in the season. Baltimore ended up sweeping the Tigers in three games, and the bullpen was directly involved in two of Detroit’s losses. At least one Ausmus decision — lifting Anibal Sanchez for Joba Chamberlain in Game 2 — was enough to get the manager torched by analysts and fans. There were some unhappy, as well, about Ausmus’ decision to bring in Chamberlain in Game 1 and with his choice to pinch-hit Hernan Perez for Andrew Romine in the ninth inning in Game 3 (as though that were really a thing that mattered at all).

Ausmus’ inexperience was perceived as a weakness. He made unpopular decisions that went poorly, and now his team is headed home. Guess we know where to place the blame, right? This is some quality #narrative, of course. It’s not necessarily wrong, entirely, because Ausmus certainly made some choices that didn’t require second-guessing, since they’d been first-guessed in the moment. It’s just a little too simplistic, a little too convenient.

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Yasmany Tomas, LF

Hit: 40/45+, Game Power: 55/65, Raw Power: 70/70, Speed: 45/45+, Field: 45/50, Arm: 45/45+

Upside: .275/.350/.480 with 25-30 homers, fringy defense & baserunning value in left field

Note: The “upside” line is basically a 75 percentile projection as explained here, while the tool grades are a 50 percentile projection. See the scale here to convert the hit/power tool grades into production.

Tomas is the latest Cuban defector to hit the market: he should be declared a free agent shortly and is holding private workouts in the Dominican this week after a big open workout for over 100 scouts from all 30 clubs on Sunday at the Giants Dominican complex. The above video is from last summer when the Cuban national team faced college Team USA in Durham, North Carolina. The Cuban team had a lot of trouble making contact against a loaded USA pitching staff (five pitchers from the staff went in the first round last June) and Tomas in particular struggled, going 3-for-19 with 3 singles, 1 walk and 8 punch outs over the 5 game set. Tomas was in bad shape and looked lost at the plate at times when I saw him, but he has shown big league ability in other international tournaments and as a professional in Cuba.

The carrying tool here is raw power, which draws anywhere from 60 to 70 grades on the 20-80 scale from scouts, but the question mark is how much he will hit.  Tomas has a short bat path for a power hitter and quick hands that move through the zone quickly.  The tools are here for at least an average hitter, but Tomas’ plate discipline has been questioned and he can sometimes sell out for pull power in games (here’s video of a particularly long homer in the WBC).  Some scouts think it’s more of a 40-45 bat (.240 to .250 average) that may keep Tomas from getting to all of his raw power in games, while others see a soon-to-be-24-year-old with the tools to hit and think the hot streak of Cuban hitters in the big leagues will continue with him.

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People love a breakout, so they’re always on the hunt. You’ll see a bunch of potential breakouts get written up in the first half, as season sample sizes start to grow. Among those potential breakouts, you will find the actual breakouts. But you’ll also find the noisy duds, because it turns out half of a season has a limit on how meaningful it can be. In the first half of this season, Lonnie Chisenhall posted a 163 wRC+. In the second half of this season, he’s posted just about the same wRC+, except without the 1 in it. Chisenhall’s gotten much much worse. Early on, J.D. Martinez was another potential breakout. As I write this his wRC+ is sandwiched between Giancarlo Stanton‘s and Paul Goldschmidt’s. Martinez, to a large extent, has kept things up, and he’s produced like one of the top hitters in baseball.

Because one half of one season can be noisy, two halves of one season can be noisy, particularly when a guy hasn’t been a full-time player from the start. Martinez hasn’t totally established his new baseline yet, but it’s not like this came without warning — Dan Farnsworth was all over it in December. I think we can see J.D. Martinez is better. So the question is: How much better is he?

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Victor Martinez has been the best hitter in baseball this season.

Granted, that’s just an opinion that I’ve presented as fact, but he has a strong case. The strongest part of his case is that, at the time of this writing, he leads the MLB in both wOBA (.412) and wRC+ (167). There aren’t any better hitting metrics than those two, but in case you want more evidence, he’s also second in batting average (.337), first in on-base percentage (.407), second in slugging percentage (.575), 10th in isolated slugging percentage (.238) and second in total batting value behind only Mike Trout, thanks to a disparity of plate appearances. Victor Martinez has the same total batting value as Giancarlo Stanton and he’s come up to the plate 56 fewer times. That’s how good he’s been. He’s been so good, some have tossed his name around in the MVP discussion, despite serving primarily as a designated hitter. A DH has never won the MVP award.

But he has been much more than just a great hitter. He has been a downright fascinating hitter. One thing that really jumps out when looking at his numbers are his walks and strikeouts. He has the lowest strikeout rate in the MLB, at 6.5%. He also has a 10.7% walk rate. No other player in baseball has walked more than they’ve struck out this year. Victor has 22 more walks than strikeouts (not including his league-leading 25 intentional walks). His strikeouts and walks, as well as his still-elite bat speed, are things I touched upon when I wrote about Martinez for this site back in May. But that’s in the past. The contents of that post were remarkable because of the circumstances, e.g. his age, injuries and past as a catcher. The content that follows in this post is remarkable because of its place in history.
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The Royals lead the American League Central by one game over the Tigers after Detroit defeated the Indians Thursday night, 11-4 in 11 innings. The teams are even in wins with 77; the Tigers have two additional losses. The Royals are 19-19 in blowout games and 20-22 in one run games. For the Tigers, those numbers are 23-18 (blowouts) and 20-18 (one run games). Both teams have a higher winning percentage on the road and both have dominated in interleague games.

This morning, FanGraphs’ playoff odds gave the Tigers a 54.5% chance of taking the division. The Royals’ odds are at 44.4%. No other division race features such closely-divided odds. Even in the National League West race between the Dodgers and Giants — which the Dodgers lead by two games with 22 to play — FanGraphs gives LA an 83.3% chance of winning the division.

If you believe the projections, the AL Central race is as close as it can get between the Royals and the Tigers. And yet the teams have reached this point in completely different ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Numbers are the easy part, so let’s start with some numbers. David Price got thrashed by the Yankees, ending with twice as many hits allowed as outs recorded. He was charged with eight runs, all of them scoring in the top of the third, which Price began, but which Price was removed from without getting an out. That third inning saw Price allow nine consecutive hits, the first time that’s happened to a pitcher since 1989. The all-time record for consecutive hits in an inning by a team is 11, and that was in Colorado. Never before had Price allowed nine hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed eight hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed seven hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed six hits in an inning. In Price’s previous game, he one-hit the Rays.

Price on Wednesday got one swinging strike. His previous season low was six. In his regular-season career before Wednesday, he’d allowed at least nine hits just 20 times. He’d allowed at least eight runs just four times. Price set a new career Game Score low, of 2. In Price’s own words: “That was probably the worst game I’ve ever had in my life.” It was an awful game, but really, it was an awful inning. And, technically, it was an awful fraction of an inning. David Price is one of the best known pitchers in the universe.

Maybe it’s enough to just say what’s happened. A nine-hit disaster happened, to an excellent pitcher. Maybe now we ought to just move on. But it seems like we should reflect at least a little deeper. It isn’t often a terrific pitcher gets lit up like this. It isn’t often a team manages to string a bunch of hits together, and nine is extreme. We should go past just the numbers. What in the hell was that top of the third? Can the video show us anything?

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So, this stuff doesn’t really need to be reviewed, because you’re baseball fans, and you’re baseball fans who read FanGraphs, but recently, of course, the Angels lost Garrett Richards for the year. Meanwhile, Anibal Sanchez experienced a setback in his injury rehab, and now it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to return in the regular season. Not coincidentally, trade rumors have popped up, as the Angels are fighting for the AL West, and the Tigers are fighting for the AL Central or a wild-card slot. Losing guys like Richards and Sanchez aren’t easy injuries to overcome.

A disadvantage for both teams is that the injuries have taken place after the non-waiver trade deadline, so moves now are limited and difficult. Really good players just aren’t available, so the guys who are are mediocre or expensive. But, you’ll notice the calendar’s almost turned to September. That presents an advantage. That greatly reduces the need to go out and get a new pitcher for the short-term.

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Buck Farmer, despite the name, is a real person who exists. A month ago, he was making his final start for the Single-A West Michigan Whitecaps in Clinton, Iowa, a town that has a smaller population (26,885 in 2010) than 21 of the 30 MLB teams pack into their ballparks on any given night. When he did, on July 25, the Tigers, the top of Farmer’s Detroit organization, had a 6.5-game lead in the AL Central and a 94.0% chance of winning the division, had just picked up Joakim Soria, and were about to add David Price to a rotation that was already very good.

This isn’t about Farmer, really, though he’s part of it. He’s just a pretty good entry point into how the Tigers, a team that was flying free and clear to their fourth straight division title against relatively indifferent AL Central competition, could manage to turn that lead into a 1.5-game deficit into fewer than six weeks. Those playoff odds, which seemed to make them a near-certainty to win the division, dropped all the way to 43.3% before the Royals lost last night, which, as Jeff showed yesterday, is by far the biggest downturn of any team in baseball. They wouldn’t even be in the wild card playoff at the moment, thanks to the fact that the AL West has two of the best teams in baseball and a Mariners club that has just stopped losing.

A month ago, Farmer was pitching in A-ball. A week ago, he was getting exactly one out while allowing eight runs for Toledo against a Columbus team that had someone named Giovanny Urshela hitting cleanup. Surrounding that, he’s made two major league starts for a Tigers team desperately trying to hold off one of the biggest collapses we’ve seen in years. If you want to know how the Tigers have fallen apart, that’s a great place to start.

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