Now that the 2025 Major League Baseball season is well behind us, and the sting from the Detroit Tigers\u2019 final-game marathon against the Seattle Mariners has begun to subside, I thought it would be a fine idea to look back at some Tigers statistics from, as the saying goes, a \u201cthirty-thousand-feet-up view.\u201d Stats are from Baseball Reference and Baseball Savant.<\/p>\n
You can go deep down the rabbit hole unpacking each one, following the trail from wOBA, to xwOBA, to the magical xwOBACON. What is xwOBACON? And can we get eggs and hash browns with that?<\/p>\n
(Expected Weighted On-Base Average on Contact) is a measure from Statcast that considers a player\u2019s offensive production only when they make contact, removing strikeouts, walks, and hit-by-pitches to assess the quality of batted balls, indicating how well a player should have performed on contact alone, not what they actually got.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re not serving xWOBACON right here though. There\u2019s something to be said for stepping back and just considering the basics relative to the rest of the league.<\/p>\n
These statistics will only be within the 15-team American League. What happens over there in the National League, anyway? Are there dragons on the field? Nobody knows. That\u2019s just a strange parallel universe that only crosses into \u201creal\u201d baseball now and again, and frankly, I wish we didn\u2019t have to have any interleague play at all. What\u2019s this? They\u2019ve had the DH for years now? Ok, well good for them. But, I digress; I\u2019ll be selecting some statistics which I find interesting, surprising, important, silly, or all four of those.<\/p>\n
OPS: .730 (6th place, league average .719)<\/p>\n
This one was a little surprising, given how often it seemed like the Tigers struck out. However, you\u2019d expect roughly seven or eight teams above the league average, and seven or eight below, but the average was skewed upwards by the Yankees (.787) and Blue Jays (.761) far ahead of the third-place A\u2019s (.749). Last place in the league? Your AL Central-champion Guardians (.670), which makes me irrationally mad.<\/p>\n
Strikeouts: 1454 (4th place, league average 1371)<\/p>\n
Ah, there are the whiffs. Again, the average was skewed upwards by one team in particular: the Angels (1627), who were single-handedly trying to cool southern California with all those swings. We like to complain about our free-swingers, but holy mackerel, they had six people in triple-digits, led by Mike Trout who only played in 130 games.<\/p>\n
Home runs: 198 (5th place, league average 196)<\/p>\n
Again, some serious skewing by the Yankees (274); indeed, the Tigers were in fifth place in the entire league, but only two home runs above league average. Still, for all the strikeouts and the second half collapse, the Tigers hit their share of home runs and it\u2019s a big reason they can overcome their strikeout rates, at least in the regular season.<\/p>\n
Stolen bases: 61 (15th place, league average 114)<\/p>\n
The Tigers were last by a longshot, sixteen behind the Blue Jays. But hey, the Jays took the Dodgers to extras in Game Seven, so I guess it\u2019s not that important, right?<\/p>\n
Runner runs: 8.0 (1st place, league average \u20130.1)<\/p>\n
Essentially, this is the number of runs created on the basepaths by advancing extra bases and not getting thrown out. The Tigers led all thirty MLB teams in Advance Attempt Percentage, which means they were the most aggressive team on the basepaths; they tried to advance 40% of the time in all situations where the average expected percentage would have been 36% for a generic runner. Now, they did get thrown out fifteen times on the bases, highest in the Major Leagues, but life\u2019s about taking chances.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an interesting mix between stolen bases and overall baserunning. The Tigers aren\u2019t exactly stacked with speed, but even considering that they really don\u2019t try to steal much. You\u2019d like to see them at least present a threat to steal more often to keep opposing pitchers and catchers on their toes. That they managed to make up for it by taking the extra base to such a degree that they were the best baserunning team in the American League is pretty impressive.<\/p>\n
Team shutouts: 17 (1st place, league average 11)<\/p>\n
Sure, one of those was a complete-game masterpiece by Tarik Skubal, but the other sixteen were, by definition, a team effort. When you can throw a boatload of fresh, reliable bullpen arms in there for one inning each from the sixth onward, that\u2019s going to smother the other team\u2019s chances pretty nicely. Remember the Royals\u2019 World Series three-headed bullpen monster that helped them to a World Series title in 2015? Yeah, even more like that, please.<\/p>\n
Intentional walks: 14 (12th place, league average 21)<\/p>\n
It appears that AJ Hinch generally isn\u2019t a fan of the intentional walk, which is fine by me. Like cologne, it should be used sparingly, and only when it would give you a huge advantage and\/or scare away dangerous wildlife, and then Jose Ramirez. The Angels, though? Their hitters strike out, and their pitchers intentionally walked the most in the league (44). Maybe that\u2019s partly why the Angels had the worst ERA in the American League.<\/p>\n
BAbip against: .288 (7th place tie, league average .288)<\/p>\n
Batting Average on Balls in Play (BAbip) generally shows how lucky or unlucky a given hitter is. A batter goes on a hot streak out of nowhere, but his BAbip is .450? That\u2019s not gonna last. But this statistic shows that Tigers pitchers were tied with the Mariners for exactly-average luck (measured in this particular way at least). There weren\u2019t an unusually large numbers of \u201cground balls with eyes\u201d or easy fly balls that just weren\u2019t caught. Then again, individually, Chris Bassitt of the Blue Jays led the league with a .315 BAbip-against, and he had a decent year on the mound; last year he had a similarly-solid year but was incredibly unlucky at .335.<\/p>\n
Run Value on a particular pitch: Tarik Skubal\u2019s changeup, 25 (1st place)<\/p>\n
Alright, so this isn\u2019t surprising: Skubal\u2019s changeup may well be put on trial for murder. Cleveland\u2019s Joey Cantillo actually gets a higher swing-and-miss percentage on his changeup (49.4% to Skubal\u2019s 46.8%), but when hitters make contact with both those changeups, Skubal\u2019s slugging percentage-against is .227 to Cantillo\u2019s .270. Those are both great, but Skubal\u2019s is the lowest in the Major Leagues on that particular pitch. (The three worst Run Values belong to Rockies four-seam fastballs. Gotta love that thin mountain air.)<\/p>\n
Outfield assists: 16 (14th place, league average 22)<\/p>\n
Perhaps this also isn\u2019t terribly surprising: Tigers outfielders generally don\u2019t gun guys out on the bases: the less said about Riley Greene\u2019s arm the better, and with Akil Baddoo signing with Milwaukee, at least we won\u2019t have to watch him try to heave a baseball into the infield in a Tiger uniform again. The only team below Detroit was the Yankees; Aaron Judge had an arm injury for a good part of the year, but they\u2019d sure rather have him out there than Giancarlo Stanton these days.<\/p>\n
Catcher framing runs: Dillon Dingler, 7 (6th place)<\/p>\n
Assuming that 0.125 runs are generated for every extra expertly-framed strike, that\u2019s pretty nice. The leader in the American League was Toronto\u2019s Alejandro Kirk with 17, but the runaway winner overall was the Giants\u2019 Patrick Bailey with 25. That Dingler fellow, he\u2019s a keeper.<\/p>\n
Double Plays turned by pitchers: 14 (1st place, league average 8)<\/p>\n
When I saw this I had a hunch: \u201cI bet a bunch of those were by Skubal on weak comebackers.\u201d Nope! Skubal was involved in exactly zero double plays this year. Keider Montero and Will Vest each turned a pair, and even Dylan Smith got one in his brief cup of coffee, on June 25 against the A\u2019s.<\/p>\n
As the old saying goes, \u201cThere are lies, damn lies, and statistics.\u201d Well, make of these statistics what you will, but none of the stats here told any lies. Some might be fairly meaningless, some might be telling, but in the end, counting things is fun: just ask Count von Count from Sesame Street, he\u2019ll tell ya. Do you have any surprising, important or strange stats? Feel free to share them with us, and everyone else, in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now that the 2025 Major League Baseball season is well behind us, and the sting from the Detroit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[173254,363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-347036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-detroit-tigers-analysis","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}