Losing, Predictions, Shakespeare, Oh My!

The Giants receive their first shellacking of the year, Brad Hennessey has a 37.80 ERA, and Jose Castillo leads the team in extra-base hits. What better time to write my first post, and first wrong but fearless prediction?

The Detroit Tigers will miss the playoffs

"Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides: / Who cover faults, at last shame them derides"

-King Lear, I, i

I wish I wrote this post before they ran out of the gate 0-4; I'd look a lot smarter. Steve Phillips says the Tigers will score 1000 runs this year. They won't. PECOTA has the Tigers scoring 849 runs, while Baseball Musings' Run Projections has them at 904 runs, and looking at their lineup, they would need every player to be as good or better than they performed last year, which includes Maggs repeating his out-of-nowhere 87.8 VORP and 1.028 OPS (not happening, both I and PECOTA see that OPS dropping at least 100 points) and Edgar Renteria putting up numbers he hasn't come close to approaching in six years. They would also need all of their players to be healthy for the whole year, as replacing Miguel Cabrera or Curtis Granderson with Brandon Inge would be like replacing foie gras with earwax (which has already happened in this young year). The 2008 Tigers offense is going to look more like the 2007 Tigers (which isn't exactly bad, they scored 887 runs) than the 1927 Yankees.

And as Cordelia so eloquently elaborated above, time will always remove the clothes that cover your faults, and the long baseball season will remove the offense that covers the Tiger's fault - pitching. Jeremy Bonderman and Nate Robertson combined have had 2 years where they were average starters (ERA+ > 98), Kenny Rogers is 43... 43!, and Dontrelle Willis's WHIP over the last two years is 1.491, which coupled with his pedestrian strikeout rate makes for a fringe 3rd-or-4th level starter. Verlander is the only plus pitcher on the entire rotation, and even though he is quite a plus, he's only going to pitch once every 5 games, if that.

If the Tiger's rotation is mediocre, their bullpen is abysmal. The best comparison I could find is that the Tiger's bullpen = the Giants offense. Out of their entire non-DL'd bullpen, only Aquilino Lopez (17.3 innings), Yorman Bazardo (23.3 innings), and Bobby Seay (LOOGY, 46.3 innings) had WHIPs below 1.40, which means from innings 7-9, it's pure pain. If only Zumaya would quit playing Guitar Hero or moving 50-60 pound boxes with his dad.

So this is what will go down by October - Indians take the division, Tigers wistfully watch the Yankees win the wild card, and gas prices will eat away at my college tuition.