Recently SI.com listed the top 20 young pitchers in baseball. Without getting into a debate about how Jeremy Bonderman was ranked way to low at #18, I wanted to highlight a related post by Will Carroll. Carroll, takes a look at each picture and assesses the pitcher’s mechanics. If you’re not familiar with Will’s work, in addition to his Under the Knife column at Baseball Prospectus, he literally wrote the book on pitching mechanics.

Here is Bonderman’s picture from the article and Will’s take:

For your comparative enjoyment, here is a picture of said Rocket at about the same point in his delivery:

While Jeremy Bonderman has gotten a lot of praise and hype for his performance this season (and deservedly so) the other right hander in the Tigers rotation has put together a very fine season as well. Jason Johnson had a 3.93 ERA and a 2-2 record going into tonight’s game. And if it weren’t for a horrible outing against Minnesota in which he lasted only a third of an inning, his ERA would be 2.65.

The question is can Johnson keep it up?

Looking at his peripheral stats it isn’t encouraging. Over 34 1/3 innings he only has 12 strikeouts against 11 walks. That anemic strikeout rate is reminsicent of Nate Cornejo in 2003. Looking at those periperhals one would expect Johnson to start getting hit harder unless he can improve his strikeout and walk ratio.

However, thanks to the Hardball Times we can get a little more insight into Johnson’s performance this year. The following is Johnson’s statline from the Hardball Times and the league averages.

Player       RA    ERA   FIP    DER   LD%   G/F   IF/F     K/9   BB/9  HR/9   HR/F
Johnson J. 3.93   3.93  4.39   .702  .090  2.14   .200     3.1    2.8   0.6     9% 
League     4.66   4.26  4.26   .698  .168  1.27   .140     6.1    3.1   1.0    11% 

What jumps out is that Johnson isn’t being hit hard. His line drive percentage is a little more than half of the league average. Line drive are the type of ball in play most highly correlated with hits, so keeping your opponents line drives down increases the fieldability of balls. His ground ball to fly blal ratio is well above the league average. Johnson’s G/F ratio was similarly high last year as he relied on his two-seam fastball and sinker. While ground balls aren’t as fieldable as flyballs, they also typically have less painful consequences if they aren’t fielded. Also working in Johnson’s favor is that is infield fly percentage is 40% higher than the league average. And as this article points out, infield flies are very fieldable.

If Johnson can continue to induce a lot of groundballs and infield flies, as well as continue to prevent line drives, it is reasonable to expect that he can expect to get decent results. Now whether or not he can continue these trends remains to be seen. Last year his ball in play numbers weren’t nearly as favorable. His groundball ratio was 1.55, his line drive percentage was .189 and his IF fly percentage was .082.

Based on his performance tonight, it looks like Johnson’s success is predicated on his ability to keep the ball down. In the early innings, Johnson was leaving the ball up and getting hammered in the process. As he settled in he started keeping the ball down and inducing more ground ball outs.

Pretty much since MLB went to the six division format in 1994, the AL Central has been among the weakest divisions each year. Cleveland has been the only AL Central team to make a World Series and the division has yet to supply the Wild Card team. The Central was supposed to be more competitive this year with 3 teams having a shot to challenge the incumbent champion Twins. However, an offseason that saw all major free agents choosing coastal teams figured to keep the division at a relative disadvantage. While the AL Central will once again house the worst team in baseball (the Royals), things are looking up. The division has the best team in baseball, the White Sox. Furthermore, if the season were to end today, they Minnesota Twins would grab the wild card slot. So how is it all happening? Is it some combination of luck and small sample size, or are the teams in the Central just getting better?

Taking a look position by position, the Central doesn’t necessarily distinguish itself. Mike Sweeney and the Twins combination of Morneau and LeCroy are tops in VORP at first base. Tadahito Iguchi is having a fine debut season at second base, but he still only ranks fourth best in the league at the position. Carlos Guillen is battling Miguel Tejada right now for title of best shortstop (and MVP if they keep up their current pace). Brandon Inge is second only to A-Rod at third base. At catcher Joe Mauer ranks third in VORP while an impatient Pudge has slipped to fifth (only a .310 OBA). At DH Travis Haffner and Dmitri Young are both playing well but rank only 4th and 5th at their position. And finally, in the outfield only Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones rank among the top 5 at their respective positions.

Where the Central has excelled early this season is on the mound. Johan Santana, Brad Radke, all the White Sox starters, and Jeremy Bonderman are off to tremedous starts. Out of the seven best pitched games this year (using game scores) 5 of them belong to the Central (the other two are Roy Halladay). Chicago as a team has the best ERA in the league with the Twins in second and the Tigers 4th.

The pitchers are getting a boost from great defense as well. Chicago leads the league in defensive efficiency while the Twins are 3rd and the Tigers are once again 4th.

So the Central has had some great pitching and defense mixed with some decent offensive performances. But what about Chicago’s 13-3 record in one-run games? Sure, the White Sox are exceeding expectations, but they’ve done so at the expense of the rest of the division. Looking at Baseball Prospectus’ adjusted standings – which figure out how many runs a team should score and allow based on batting events and adjusting for strength of schedule – the White Sox record dips significantly but the division as a whole becomes stronger.

Team    AdjW     AdjL
Twins   18.5     11.5
Tigers  17.2     12.8
Wht Sox 17.0     13.4
Indians 14.4     15.6
Royals  12.9     18.1

That adjusted record for the Twins is the best in the AL while the Tigers is the second best, and the White Sox are the 4th best. I know that you don’t get to the postseason based on adjusted standings, but it does show just how well the division is playing. Meanwhile there isn’t a team in the AL West above .500 after the adjustments.

This of course could change. We are only a quarter of the way through the season. But so far, the Central should be earning some respect.

Get Your Tickets Now!
Friday night the Tigers take on the Angels. The pitching match-up is a rematch of Saturday night’s 2-1 duel between Jeremy Bonderman and Bartolo Colon. The weather is supposed to be about 72 degrees at game time. It will be a beautiful night with our ace going up against the ace of a first place team. Yeah, yeah I know there is a Pistons game that night. Regardless, there is no reason that this game should not be sold out. Let’s get excited about Tiger baseball and let’s do it now.

So all three Tiger free agents have reached the disabled list this season – and we’re not even a quarter of the way into the season. Troy Percival will be out 3-4 weeks with a shoulder problem.

Good thing the Tigers held on to Ugueth Urbina.

Jamie Walker and Franklyn German stand to see more work as Trammell tries to keep Kyle Farnsworth’s bicep healthy.

UPDATE: The injury is described as ” a partial tear of his right flexor pronator muscle mass.” Chris Spurling will take his place on the roster.

Because I’m swamped at work right now, and my normal Tiger blogging time was consumed by attending the last two games, I’m going to keep this short. I’ll get a runner on base with a few brief comments, and then I’ll bunt to keep your interest moving along with a few links of note.

-Nate Robertson looked more impressive on Wednesday night. The walks were down significantly for him. The stadium radar gun had him in the low 90’s – even at 94. I’m not sure if Chicago’s gun was slow or Detroit’s was fast, but I don’t believe a swing that big in velocity between two starts.

-With regard to one run losses, I’ve done a little more work along those lines to follow up my earlier post. Hopefully I can get that done early next week. Until then let me pose this question: Would Alan Trammell be getting less heat if his team was losing by more than one run? Everybody is quick to jump on the manager for one-run losses, but isn’t it better than they’re playing competitive than getting blown out? I realize that winning is preferrable to both, but I just wonder if the Tigers were losing big if Tram would be getting the same criticism for losing close. Of all the criticisms leveled against Trammell this season, the only one I think holds water is that he’s resting guys way too much.

-Despite having one of the largest scoreboards in the majors, it is amazing how little information is presented. I’ll have more on this later also.

-Jim Hawkins had an interesting piece about Bobby Higginson.

Higginson’s unhappiness is such an old and tired story. First he wants a no trade clause, then he wants to be traded, then he wants to stay, now he wishes he was playing someplace else. I tried to find some value in Higginson this offseason, and I hoped he’d take to the spot-player role better. However, he needs to be released, and released as soon as Craig Monroe’s groin is healed.

-John Sickels spent 3 nights watching Burlington play West Michigan and has some reports and pictures. Here are photos of Brent Duglach and Jeff Frazier. Here are pictures of Andrew Kown and some commentary. Here is a post about Randor Bierd.
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-Tigerblog has added a new writer and he debuts with an excellent article about how the last ten years have taken a toll on the Tigers place in history.

-Finally, here are some links to newly discovered Detroit sports blogs: Terry Foster, MgoBlog, and Greg Eno.

I’ve mentioned in my last several posts how the Tigers’ pitchers are walking way too many hitters as of late. Once again they paid the price last night. Since it’s being covered extensively in the papers, I’ll just throw out this one arcane stat:

The last time Tiger pitchers allowed 31 or more walks in a five game stretch was at the end of the 1999 season. September 18th through the 22nd they allowed 10, 8, 7, 5, and 4 walks. Unfortunately I didn’t have last seasons logs easily searchable, so I’m hoping it didn’t happen last year. (Information once again from Retrosheet)

Aside from the walks, three other things stood out watching the game last night:

1. On the grand slam, Mike Maroth shook Pudge off on the pitch. Now it doesn’t seem to happen too often that Pudge gets shaken off. However, when it does happen, the ball tends to find the seats. I don’t have any proof of this, I’m just working from observation here. It could be that pitchers shake off Rodriguez all the time, and I have some sort of weird sense to only notice the times before a home run. It just seems that every time I see the pitcher look in and shake his head, I think to myself “Something bad’s going to happen,” or if I’m feeling more musically inclined I think “Eli’s coming.”

2. If you read regularly, you know that I’m generally a supporter of Craig Monroe and I expect him to be pretty good this year. Now granted, Monroe has picked up 19 RBI this season, but his approach after Carlos Guillen’s triple was disappointing. There’s one out, and at the time an important runner on third. Monroe didn’t seem to adjust his swing and it looked like he was swinging for the fences. It resulted in a pop up. Fortunately Thames picked him up with a two out single.

3. Pudge and Marcus Thames both homered on pitches high in the strike zone. I don’t have a lot to say about this except that those are typically the pitches, the high hard ones, that guys can’t hit and can’t lay off. For two players that have been struggling up until last night, it was nice to see them find the seats.

And that’s it for today. I’m off to tonight’s game, and I’ll be attending tomorrow’s as well. I haven’t been to a game for a while, so I should be able to handle the day game after a night game.

Watching the game last night, I noticed that Tiger hitters were bashing quite a few extra base hits. Craig Monroe had a double in the first. Brandon Inge, Omar Infante, and Carlos Guillen all tripled. And of course Carlos Pena had two dingers. While I know that the above sample has a mix of lefties and righties, what really struck me was the right hand hitters going up-the-middle or to the opposite field.

Monroe’s double was down the right field line into the corner, and Inge and Infante both drove the ball deep into the gap in right centerfield. In fact, from watching Inge it seems like most of his success this season has come from driving the ball up the middle or over the second baseman’s head. I took a look at his Hit Chart from MLB.com. Below is a cropped screenshot:

I wish that MLB.com would let you combine the results of all parks, but they make you pick a park so I went with Comerica. You can see that Inge isn’t really trying to pull the ball this year, and he’s had great success. He also hasn’t sacrificed power in not pulling. He’s still accumulated extra base hits, but he’s getting them in the right-center gap.

Now let’s contrast this with Omar Infante who’s numbers have been down this year (although not significantly). Below are Omar’s hit charts from
last year and this year.

While Infante has several ground balls to second, he hasn’t driven the ball to rightfield with any regularity. Last year he accumulated more hits pulling the ball, but he did a better job using the whole field. Hopefully last night’s triple (and his double to left center) will be a sign of things to come.

Other Stuff
Jeremy Bonderman looked tremendous in the first inning, but he followed the trap of other Tigers’ pitchers recently and allowed 5 walks in 6 innings. The difference is Bonderman is good enough to get guys to swing and miss on occasion.

The Tigers closed out April as one of the top defensive teams in the American League. Given that the Tigers were one of the worst defensive teams last year, and they only really switched two positions, this is unexpected. Especially considering that one of the upgrades was moving a corner outfielder to center (Monroe), and a catcher to third (Inge). Now as of late, said corner outfielder is back in right and there is a gazelle patrolling centerfield.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to see the Tigers right behind the White Sox in defense efficiency rating which is simply a measure of the percentage of balls-in-play that are converted to outs. The Tigers are at .7215 against a league average of .6952. This clearly warrants further investigation.

If you look at conventional fielding stats, the Tigers don’t fare nearly as well. They’re 10th in fielding percentage, 8th in errors, and 10th in double plays. While those are improvements on last year, they still are in the bottom half of the league.

So how are the Tigers doing it, if they’re doing it?

The ever valuable Hardball Times statistics shed a little light on the subject. While the Tiger pitchers are allowing fewer infield flys than the league average (infield pop-ups are the most fieldable of all balls in play), they are league average when it comes to ground ball/flyball ratio and they are the best at preventing line drives. Line drives of course being the least fieldable type of ball in play. Now whethter or not the lack of line drives has anything to do with the pitching staff or if it is a matter of luck remains to be seen.

Typically the performance of a pitcher is dependent on the defense behind them. However in this case, the performance of the defense may depend on the pitchers’ ability to serve up easy to field balls.

What a horrible series. The Tigers’ were fortunate to come away with a victory on Friday night, let a lead slip away on Saturday, and just played lousy on Sunday. And there’s nothing like a two game losing streak before the Fire Tram talk starts up. While Trammell did make some mistakes this series, I’m not pinning Saturday’s loss on him, and no amount of managing could overcome a 8-0 drubbing on Sunday.

Trammell received the most criticism for sticking with Jason Johnson even though he was “struggling” in the 7th inning on Saturday. While he did hit the Aaron Rowand leading off the inning, here are Johnson’s subsequent struggles and the count:
-Ground Ball (1-1 count)
-Ground Ball (first pitch)
-Sacrifice Bunt (first pitch)
-Ground Ball (1-0 count)
-Ground Ball (1-1 count)

Only of those ground balls was hit hard. I’m not sure that constitutes struggling, especially considering Johnson is a ground ball pitcher. He wasn’t falling behind, and guys were driving the ball into the ground – not the gaps. While I probably would have walked Podsednik to load the bases and try for the double play, I don’t fault Trammell for sticking with Johnson.

Now pinch-hitting Ramon Martinez was suspect. I understand that Carlos Pena has been in a funk, but if you’re going to pinch hit why use somebody who has one at-bat for the whole season?

Also, the resting the starter concept needs some work. I understand that Guillen was sore (reports are that he hurt his hamstring Saturday night, but I could have swore I saw him limping at first base after his 10th inning single on Friday night.), and that Young was sick. But knowing two of your top hitters were out, why subsititute another starter (Infante)?

Changing Sox
Finished for the time being with the White Sox, the Tigers have a 4 game set against the Red Sox. Cool temperatures might supress the crowds, but not the excitement of having the World Champs in town. I’m really looking forward to reading Blue Cats and Red Sox as her favorite team (the Red Sox) take on her second favorite team (the Tigers).