Best of the Best: Defensive Single Seasons in Tigers History

I'm currently engrossed in learning how to use MySQL, a database program, which will help me do some great lists of the best _____ in Tigers history. Whenever I get it figured out and the code working, I'll be creating a series of the ten best Catcher's in Tigers history, ten best first basemen in Tigers history and so on and so forth. Those will all be in the side bar to the right, just  below the 'about me' in a section called Best of the Best.

In lieu of that, however, I bring you a different list that didn't take any database code.

Sean Smith's released Wins Above Replacement numbers for every player in the major leagues since 1871. You can peruse them at his site and, if you like 'em, support him by donating $25 to use them however you'd like. I did that and got the hitters and pitchers files. That is what I'll be using to look back into plunge into Detroit Tigers history. What I'll be focusing on here, is defense.

Sean Smith has created TotalZone which he uses to judge defense through play-by-play box scores from Retrosheet. You can read his methods here.

So this begs the question: Who had the greatest defensive season in the history of the Detroit Tigers? Find out the answer after the jump...

Radio Interview Reminder

I am going to be on the Radio tomorrow around 11:30 AM on WXOU Radio to talk Sabermetrics and the Tigers.

Edit: You can listen to my appearance on WXOU Radio this morning right here.

Position Player Value Breakdown

Inspired by these cool graphs, I've taken to a less-asthetically-pleasing graph of value breakdown. I don't have a cool graphing program, so these are just Excel graphs. I also couldn't decide which I liked better -- horizontal or vertical bar graphs -- so I've got them both, for your view pleasure.


Click on both images to enlarge.

What these graphs show is, obviously, how each player I've looked at arrive at their cumulative value. I didn't include "Replacement" runs which turns "Runs Above Average" into "Runs Above Replacement" and then, when you divide by 10, you get "Wins Above Replacement."

Predictably, Miguel Cabrera's value lies in his immense talents at the plate. But what I find most interesting from these graphs, is the way it depicts the "invisible" value that players have -- defense and position.

Taking Gerald Laird, for example, I've included defense into his numbers. Fangraphs doesn't carry defensive estimations for Catchers because it's hard to figure out what to give to them. There have been some attempts, but I'm going off of this leader board put together over at Beyond the Boxscore on August 5th. For Laird, what I've done is taken his 16.12 runs above average in his first 711 innings and extrapolated it out over his 981 innings which gives him 22.4 runs above the average catcher. That is what I mean by "invisible" value. You know that Gerald Laird has been excellent in throwing out runners this year, but did you know that when you include passed balls and his reputation around the league are added in, his defense makes up about half of his total value?

Tigers fans have lamented the offense this year -- and for good reason -- but Gerald Laird brings much more to the table than his paltry batting line this year.

Quick hits about the graph(s):

-Miguel Cabrera's offense alone (40.2 runs) is more than anyone else's total value in these graphs (Laird, 32.1 and Granderson and Polanco are both at 31.2 total).

-Marcus Thames should probably be gone next year. He's only going to be more expensive and while his $2.275 million didn't break the bank this year, it's just money being wasted.

-Clete Thomas may have a long swing that leads to a lot of K's, but his defense this year has been unreal; +13.4 runs this year already.

Leave any questions you've got in the comments, I'll answer them. I also want all criticism on what would make these graphs better understood/look better.

I'll Be on the Radio Part Deux

So, I had to cancel my radio spot last Thursday, but there's good news: You can hear me mumlbe about sabermetrics and the Tigers as I've been invited again despite having to cancel at the last minute, and should be on the air this Thursday. I'll give specific times in the next day or two, but the show runs (I think) from 11-2, so you can listen live at WXOU Radio. Please pass it around!

I'll Be on the Radio

Got some free time tomorrow around lunch time? Flip on your internet and listen to me mumble through Tigers related topics and sabermetrics on WXOU, the Oakland University radio station. My friend Kyle's offered me the chance to come on anytime I would like tomorrow, so tune in starting at 11:30 am. You can listen live right from the WXOU website. Pass it around!

I unfortunately had to cancel at the last minute.

Curtis Granderson's Trade Value

So there's been much scuttlebutt about trading Curtis Granderson. Ian's covered this once before and did so again today. Kurt covered it in-depth today as well. I'm sure Billfer and Lee will chime in with thoughts at some point. This all comes in relation to Lynn Henning writing his weekly "Detroit should trade _____" articles, and he picked Granderson to be the focal point. He's not new to this at all, writing before about trading Granderson and spending many written words about dealing Magglio Ordonez.

It begs the question: Should the Tigers trade Curtis Granderson?

I'm of the opinion that no one is off limits. The closest the Tigers have to an "untouchable" player is Miguel Cabrera followed by Curtis Granderson. But, no one is truly untouchable. Albert Pujols is not even untouchable. It'd just take a package that's too large and franchise-crippling to make a deal for him.

Everyone is down on Granderson this year due to his .248/.331/.457 line. He's also been beyond terrible against left-handed pitching, posting a paltry line of .169/.241/.234. That's awful. I'm not going to defend it. OK, maybe I will try. He's got a .211 BABIP this year against lefties. That's the lowest he's had against southpaws in his career. He had a .296 BABIP against lefties in 2006, .211 in 2007, and .292 in 2008.

What does that mean? He'll probably regress to the good in 2010 and post a more respectable, league-average line against left-handers.

Including 2009, his career BABIP against lefties is .254. So, he's currently 43-points below his career average BABIP against LHP. Let's normalize that up to .254 and assume that they're all just singles. This just adds on 3 more hits, but raises his split against LHP to a line of .188/.259/.253 for an OPS of .512. Still awful and well below the .258/.323/.411 average line for LHB vs. LHP's. The average BABIP for LHB's vs. LHP's in 2009 is .304. Just for fun, we'll normalize Granderson's line out to that league average BABIP for LHB's vs. LHP's. Doing so, we get this: .225/.292/.292 for an OPS of .584 -- again, awful.

What we know for sure is that he's absolutely terrible in 2009 against left-handers. He's also shown to be awful against southpaws in 2007. But, he was average or better in 2006 and 2008. So what do we believe his true talent is? Somewhere in the middle.

This is why the love affair with split stats -- even platoon splits -- are a dangerous game. The small samples lead to misleading results. He's closer to his career .617 OPS against LHP than he is to his terrible sub-.500 OPS this year.

That was a lot of words to basically try to warn of pinning a player's value on his platoon splits only. Because, he's facing about triple the amount of right-handers than left-handers (2146 PA's versus RHP and 659 versus LHP in his career). Remember how everyone, including me, was up on arms about Dusty Ryan not getting the chance to play and how he was better than his 29 PA sample this year showed? Well, Curtis Granderson only has 28% of his plate appearances against southpaws.

So what is Grandy's true value? How about a 3.2 Wins Above Replacement season this year? What was he last year when he was much better against lefties? 3.8 WAR. Granderson's appeared in 140 of 143 Tigers games this year -- 98%. Give him 98% for the final 19 games and we're predicting another 18-19 games played for Curtis. We'll give him 19. We can expect about 0.43 WAR in those 19 games. Add that to his 3.2 already accumulated and he's on pace for a 3.63 WAR season -- not far off from his "much better season" from last year.

His offense is down 15.8 runs from 2008, but his defense is up 10.2 runs over 2008. After all the math gets crunched out, he's pretty close to his value from 2008.

With that said, and in an attempt to wrap up this rambling piece, what is he worth? He's currently 28 and posted WAR's of 3.6 (I'm projecting that out) in 2009, 3.8 in 2008, and 7.4 in 2007. Weight that out and you get 4.42 WAR over the last three years. Let's use that going forward. I think that he'll age well given his body type and work ethic, so instead of knocking off 0.5 WAR the rest of his contract, I'll take off 0.25.

2010: 4.4
2011: 4.15
2012: 3.9
2013: 3.65

If we use Sky Kalkman's Trade Value Calculator, that would look like this:



What we see here is I've projected him for 16.1 WAR over the next four seasons. His 2013 season is an option and there's a $2 million buyout, which essentially cuts his salary from $13 mil down to $11 mil. The projection puts him at $79.1 million in performance value while he'll only be costing the Tigers $34.8 million and that gives the Tigers a surplus value of $44.3 million.

Essentially, he's underpaid, if this back-of-the-envelope methodology is accurate (which I'm not saying it is infallible) by $44 million.

Now, if we know 0.5 wins off each year for aging we get this:

2010: 4.4
2011: 3.9
2012: 3.4
2013: 2.9

What's that look like in value?

Basically projecting 14.6 WAR which is worth $72.3 million in that time frame and will be a surplus value of $37.6 million.

In short: he's under paid and under valued. Even if we start him at 4 WAR next year rather than 4.4, you get the following value:

There's $30.4 million in surplus value.

Basically, Curtis Granderson's surplus value to the Detroit Tigers is too great to be traded. Here's a table of research done by Victor Wang.

To get fair value for Curtis Granderson in the three projections we would need to get back:

First projection of $79.1 million: 2 top-10 hitting prospects (as ranked by Baseball America; $73 million in value) and one Grade-B pitcher (graded by John Sickels; $7.3 million). Total package value of $80.3 million.

Second projection of $72.3 million: 2 top-10 hitting prospects ($73 million in value).

Third projection of $65.1 million: 1 top-10 hitting prospect ($36.5 million), 1 top-10 pitching prospect ($15.2 million) and a Grade-B pitcher ($7.3 million), one grade-B hitter ($5.5 million). Total package value of $64 million.

Here's Baseball America's top 100 prospect list from before the season if you'd care to gander at the top 10 hitting prospects or top 10 pitching prospects.

Basically, Granderson's not going anywhere. But there's no harm in fielding offers for him.

Jeremy Bonderman PITCHf/x

Jeremy Bonderman's had a couple of relief appearances in September and I've been meaning to put the PITCHf/x nerd in me to good use with his couple outings. Billfer's covered the raw numbers, so I'm here to bring the visuals. Last time we saw Bondo, he was bad in a June start against the White Sox. I took a look at Bonderman through the PITCHf/x lens in July when he was reported to be a potential relief candidate in the future. Here's his pitch flight path from that start:


Now, here's his pitch flight path from his two relief outings thus far:

In eyeballing the graphs, his fastball seems to have some more arm-side run and his slider's been getting more sink. Billfer's raw numbers he posted back this up, as well.

And now for enough graphy goodness to last you through the night, first, his average release points in relief:

Pretty close cluster together. Consistent release points are a good thing.

Here's how his release points look on all 36 pitches in September from Bondo:

Re-confirming the tight cluster of release points.

Here's the strikezone plot:

This is from the catcher's point of view (as all the release points are, as well), so he's really working inside to the left side of the plate a.k.a. to right-handed batters. Speaking of that, here's how he's worked right and left-handed hitters:

The number inside of each slice of the pie graphs is the actual number. I forgot to include the percentage for the total pitch selection, but thus far he's gone with 72% fastballs, 28% sliders. Also, I did not correct for varying park factors that could be coming into play. PITCHf/x in different parks is not created equal, unfortunately. So, things can be skewed due to multiple parks we're pulling this data from. All other caveats apply.

Like Bill said, small sample alarms are sounding pretty loud. Let's not read too much into this, but given how flat and non-sinking his pitches seemed to be in his start against the White Sox back in June, it's nice to see him making some improvements and hopefully build upon the great 19 starts he had in the beginning of 2007.

I plan to have a similar post on Nate Robertson in the next couple of days. At least, that's the tentative plan.

Ernie Harwell

I'm not sure how I should go about this. I'm a Tigers fan, thus, I am an obligatory Ernie Harwell fan. He's revered by both Tigers fans and the national baseball media. He's quiet, unassuming, humble, and always went out of his way to keep the focus of anything he did on or near a baseball diamond on the actual game. Like the cold rebuffings he kept giving when brought into the booth by FOX during the 2006 playoffs. He seemed uncomfortable and unwilling to give tales upon tales of "how things used to be" when he started and, rather, wished the focus of everything was on the game at hand.

But here's the tricky part: I'm just 23. I don't listen to games on the radio and have grown up in an age where baseball is readily available on television. Ernie broadcast his last game as a full-time announcer on September 29th, 2002. I was 16.

I liked baseball when I was 16. I also liked girls, music, friends, and doing anything I could to cause trouble. I have always been a big sports fan, but it wasn't until I was around 19 that I became a baseball fanatic and fell in love with the numbers-side of the game of baseball.

Needless to say, I am not a baseball fan born and raised by Ernie Harwell. Yet, I think the biggest compliment that some anonymous blogger from the complete other side of the state like myself can give him is this: I didn't grow up in the glow of a radio listening to Ernie paint a baseball picture in my mind, yet I've got more of an attachment to Ernie than I've got to Mario Impemba, Rod Allen, Josh Lewin, Kirk Gibson, Ken Daniels, Mickey Redmond, or any other broadcaster who's ever come in, around, or through Detroit on their broadcasting career -- regardless of sport.

I don't even have an Ernie Harwell memory. I'm sure there's plenty of people who remember this one specific call from Ernie in this one specific game in this one specific year (probably 1984). I don't. I have the couple of times he's been in the booth filling in while Rod has been gone, or the aforementioned FOX interview during the '06 playoffs. But, here's my dirty little secret: I wasn't really paying attention then. I was busy watching baseball.

I guess in this entire ramble-y, poorly written post what I'm confessing to is just wishing to have been born in a different era. The era of television. Where you don't need the game painted in words for you. Where you don't, actually, need anyone at all to talk about the game. Because you can see it. In an air conditioned house with a beverage and good food.

Through all of the advantages I've got in getting a baseball fix -- the internet, television, MLB.tv, the Extra Innings package on cable -- I'd like to have fallen asleep listening to Ernie Harwell, like some got to do.

More Jarrod Washburn

UPDATE, 6:33 PM: In replying to the comments, here's Washburn's Hit Tracker Online card. True home run distances of the 10 HR's allowed (one wasn't measured and it was in Anaheim) are as follows, starting with the most recent:

355
409
392
354
360
439
441
447
382
450

And of those, only the 441 foot bomb from Cuddyer, 360 foot bomb from Mike Sweeney, and the 354 foot shot from Kenji Johjima were labled "JE" which is "Just Enough's." You can't add the Carlos Pena homer in there (355-feet) because that was roped right down the right-field line.

As far as the "short porch" (in comparison to Safeco), it is true because Safeco kills right-handed hitters. That said, he's had only 4 homers allowed to left field, and of those, only the Sweeney and Johjima homers were classified as "lucky" or "just enough." Cuddyer's was barely out to dead centerfield.

His average true distance and speed off the bat is 402.9 feet -- 403 -- and 103.71 MPH. Does anyone know the average true distance and SOB in the major leagues this year?

In prepping for an article to write for Beyond the Boxscore (and is moving very slowly at the moment), I've compiled the UZR totals from Fangraphs for both infield and outfield defense for each team.

Some clues Washburn would regress in Detroit:

Seattle infield defense: +9 runs above average

Detroit infield defense: +17 runs above average

Seattle outfield defense: +56 runs above average

Detroit outfield defense: +18 runs above average

Detroit's defense has been upper echelon this year, but the outfield defense doesn't compare to the M's. Heck, Franklin Guttierrez has been worth 20.9 runs this year in the outfield by his lonesome. Yes, one player has saved more runs above the average defender for the position than all of Detroit's outfield defenders combined.

Add in that Safeco Field favors left-handed hitters and kills right-handed power bats (or right-handed bats in general) while Detroit suppresses both a bit (not as much as Safeco), and the BABIP factor and Washburn was screaming regression to the mean in a big time way. Unfortunately, we gave up a back-end starter under club control until 2014 for him.