4/8 to 4/10 Series Preview: Detroit Tigers

It’s time for the first road trip of the season. The Yankees begin a six-game, seven-day road trip this afternoon in Detroit. It is the Tigers’ home opener, hence the afternoon game. The two teams will be in Comerica Park for three games this weekend.

What Have They Done Lately?

The Tigers played two games in Miami earlier this week to open the 2016 season. Detroit swept the two-game series — they won the first game 8-7 in eleven innings, and the second game 7-3 in regulation time — and they are currently one of only five remaining undefeated teams this season. The Orioles, Cubs, Pirates, and Reds are the others. The Reds!

Offense & Defense

Last season the Tigers finished in last place, partly because they scored only 4.28 runs per game, the sixth lowest total in the league. Over the winter they added OF Justin Upton and OF Cameron Maybin, and committed to C James McCann behind the plate. (Maybin is out with a broken wrist.) They’ll also have a full season of 1B Miguel Cabrera. He was limited to 119 games by a calf strain last season.

Because the season is still so very young — Upton leads the Tigers in plate appearances with eleven — I’m going to do what I did with the last series preview. Here are the 2015 performances and 2016 ZiPS projections for everyone on Detroit’s roster. Sorry for dumping a big glob of numbers on you so early on a Friday morning.

Jarrod Salty is Jarrod Saltalamacchia. His name is too damn long and it was screwing up the table formatting, so I had to shorten it. Anyway, the Tigers still have a very dangerous lineup. Cabrera is one of the best pure hitters in the world and J.D. Martinez has broken out as a big time power threat. The Astros released him two years ago, the Tigers picked him up, tweaked his swing a bit, and he’s hit 61 homers the last two seasons.

Victor Martinez did not play in the team’s first two games of the season because there was no DH during the interleague series in Miami, but he came off the bench and managed to hit a pinch-hit home run in both games. He’s currently rocking a 1,340 wRC+. Manager Brad Ausmus stacks his best hitters at the top of the lineup. He doesn’t get cute by sticking a bat control guy (Iglesias) in the two-hole or anything like that. Kinsler, Upton, Miggy, and the Martinezes (Martini?) are his 1-5 hitters. That’s a tough stretch of lineup right there.

Defensively, the Tigers are not so good. Castellanos is probably the worst defensive third baseman in the game today. He’d be at first or DH (maybe left field) for most teams, but the Tigers don’t have room for him in those spots. Upton and Martinez are weak in the outfield corners too. Here is Sean Dolinar’s cool defensive visualization for the Tigers:

I’m surprised to see the numbers don’t like Gose in center field. Of course, Gose recently called defensive stats a “big scam” and insinuated they’re designed to make players look bad so the owners save money. I guess we’ll get three games to judge him with our own eyes this weekend.

Pitching Matchups

Friday (1pm ET): RHP Luis Severino (vs. DET) vs. RHP Jordan Zimmermann (vs. NYY)
This offseason Zimmermann became the first pitcher in baseball history to sign a $100M+ contract after having Tommy John surgery. (Shin-Soo Choo did it previously as a position player.) The Tigers signed the 29-year-old Zimmermann to a five-year contract worth $110M because, well, he’s really good. He had a 3.66 ERA (3.75 FIP) in 201.2 innings last year and it was a down year. The year before that he had a 2.66 ERA (2.68 FIP) in 199.2 innings. Zimmermann has never been a huge strikeout guy (19.7% in 2015) nor a huge ground ball guy (42.0%), but he limits walks (4.7%) and excels at getting weak contact. If you square him up though, you can do some damage (1.07 HR/9). Historically Zimmermann has been far more effective against righties than lefties, mostly because he doesn’t have much of a changeup. He threw his mid-80s changeup only 2.7% of the time from 2013-15, including 0.3% of the time in 2015. Zimmermann uses his low-to-mid-90s four-seamer — he has long been considered a guy whose fastball plays up because it has a lot of life, which folks are attempting to quantify these days using spin rate — to set up his mid-to-upper-80s slider and low-80s curveball. I’m interested to watch Zimmermann going forward. He’s coming off a down but still very good year, and is making the NL-to-AL transition.

Saturday (1pm ET): LHP CC Sabathia (vs. DET) vs. RHP Mike Pelfrey (vs. NYY)
I am convinced Pelfrey is the next Jamey Wright. We’re going to look up in about ten years, and Pelfrey’s still going to be there, signing minor league contracts each offseason and helping teams as the last man on the staff. Before you know it the guy’s going to have a 20-year career. Anyway, Pelfrey, 32, signed a two-year deal worth $8M per season over the winter. He had a 4.26 ERA (4.00 FIP) with an awful strikeout rate (12.0%) but good to great walk (6.3%), grounder (50.8%), and homer (0.60 HR/9) numbers in 164.2 innings with the Twins a year ago. Last season was the first full healthy season of his career in which he had a big platoon split. Big Pelf has a sinker right around 94 mph and he throws it a lot, more than 70% of the time last year. A low-80s splitter is his main secondary pitch, but he only threw that 15% of the time a year ago. The remaining 15% of his arsenal is filled by below-average sliders and curves, and get-me-over four-seam fastballs in 3-0 counts. That lack of a knockout secondary pitch is the reason Pelfrey hasn’t been able to live up to the hype of being the ninth overall pick in the country (2005). He’s serviceable, but that’s about it.

Sunday (8pm ET): RHP Masahiro Tanaka (vs. DET) vs. RHP Justin Verlander (vs. NYY)
Verlander, now 33, is the longest tenured Tiger. It wasn’t too long ago that he was the best pitcher in the world, and even though those days are over, he was very good last year — did you know he had a 3.38 ERA (3.49 FIP) in 2015? I bet you didn’t — and looks primed for a great 2016 now that he’s over the lingering triceps injury that hampering him for much of last summer. His strikeout rate is only a touch better than league average these days (21.1%), but he still doesn’t walk anyone (6.0%) and he remains a pop-up master. That why he had a better than average 0.88 HR/9 despite a microscopic 34.6% grounder rate last year. Verlander’s had a pretty significant reverse split the last few seasons because his upper-80s changeup is so good. To wit:

Nasty. Verlander doesn’t throw 100 mph on the regular like he did earlier in his career — PitchFX says he threw his last 100+ mph pitch in September 2013 — but he can still hump it up into the mid-90s. He also still has that hammer curveball and a sneaky good slider. At his peak, Verlander was operating with two 80 pitches (fastball, curveball) on the 20-80 scale and a third that was a 60 or so (changeup). Everything is down a grade or two nowadays, which is still enough to be effective. Verlander took a no-hitter into the sixth inning against the Marlins on Opening Day. He was ultimately charged with three runs on three hits and two walks in six innings.

Bullpen Status

The Tigers have a bad bullpen. I don’t even know if that’s correct, but it’s been true for so long that I assume that’s the case. New closer RHP Francisco Rodriguez has already blown a save, coughing up a three-run lead in the ninth inning on Opening Day. The relief corps has been pretty good aside from that, allowing two runs in 7.2 innings in the first two games of the year. Here is their bullpen and some numbers:

Ausmus is currently without RHP Alex Wilson, who was the team’s best reliever from start to finish last season. He’s on the 15-day DL with a sore shoulder. Also, former hotshot prospect RHP Bruce Rondon is in Triple-A because he continues to struggle with a) throwing strikes with his upper-90s heater, and b) his conditioning. Those are two guys I’m sure the Tigers were hoping would be big pieces of the bullpen out of the gate.

The three guys at the back of the bullpen (K-Rod, Lowe, Wilson) look like a formidable trio, assuming they repeat their 2015 numbers and don’t pitch to the projections. Justin Wilson is basically the same thing as Aroldis Chapman, I hear. Death, taxes, the Tigers having a bad bullpen. It is the natural order of things.