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Season Preview: Detroit Tigers.
Somewhere, bearded men in baseball pants are stretching listlessly, which means it?s season preview time! Each article in our series will cover the 10th through 90th percentile outcomes for the team in question. You can read every entry in the series here.
In the decade following the Great War and the Russian Revolution, Joseph Stalin seized power of the Communist Party within the Soviet Union and embarked on a series of what he described as ?revolution from above.? His primary goal was to take a scattered, agrarian poplace and transform it into an industrial powerhouse, creating and stocking factories, and collecting and nationalizing farmland. From 1928-1932, the USSR embarked on what became known in the West as the first of the Five Year Plans.
If that was the main goal, goal 1A was the effect that this nationalism would have on the kulak, or wealthy landowning class, that had been a target of Lenin?s for years. In an effect that was mirrored decades later in China, the dissolution of private property provided the government with an opportunity to wipe out the middle class entirely, sending millions off to the gulag or the great beyond.
Of course, if you want to make an omelette, you?re going to have to crack a few million eggs, especially if you?re a mediocre cook. The Five Year Plan did succeed in broadening the Soviet Union?s industrial base and, eventually, put them in a position to muscle their way into Berlin in 1945. But that didn?t mean the plan wasn?t a net failure. Blanket policies and overly optimistic quotas led to widespread famine, wiping out not just the landed gentry but a lot of the unlanded folks the government was supposed to be saving.
Major League Baseball has adopted its own version of the Five Year Plan, ever since the Houston Astros of 2010 exiled their wealthy citizens and conducted their own revolution from above, re-emerging to make the playoffs half a decade later. And just as history proved, while the primary goal of actual advancement can be hit-or-miss, the secondary benefit is priceless. Nowhere is the culture more ingrained than the AL Central. The Royals, always a little behind the times, are in Year 4 of their post-championship reshuffling. The White Sox, entering Year 5, appear stocked and ready to ascend. And then there are the Tigers, who round out their own Five Year Plan appearing to have forgotten to plan.
This is it. This is what Tigers fans have earned. In 2020, before the season was cut short, PECOTA projected the team to finish 69-93. In 2021, their median result is four wins worse. You could call it a quagmire.
***
Key Additions (Projected 2021 WARP): Robbie Grossman (1.5), Jose Urena (0.5), Wilson Ramos (0.5)
Key Deductions: C.J. Cron (1.3), an entire year of everyone?s lives
***
90th Percentile Outcome
The 1990 Braves were a mess, wrapping up the year in the cellar, at 65-97. A pennant contender half a decade prior, it couldn?t get more bleak. Their face of the franchise and former MVP looked washed up in his mid-thirties. The lineup was patched together with decaying prospects: Oddibe McDowell? Jim Presley? Andres Thomas? The rotation had a couple of hot prospects, sure, but they hadn?t done much: Smoltz looked okay with his 3.85 ERA and decent strikeout rate, but Glavine was four years deep in his career with a losing record and a strikeout every other inning.
That?s the best that the 2021 Tigers can hope for: That the plan was fine, and that they only needed just the one more year. That Matthew Boyd can be their Charlie Liebrandt, and that the trio of Mize, Skubal and Manning can be, if not Glavine/Smoltz/Avery, at least Millwood/Neagle/Schmidt. That not only does the team hit on its blue chips, but finds its Jeff Blausers and Mark Lemkes, the guys who hold down the bottom of the lineup for the better part of the decade. Maybe Willi Castro just never stops hitting. The 1990 Braves were almost there; folks just couldn?t see it yet. Maybe it?s just that hard to see.
FINAL RECORD: 73-89
80th Percentile Outcome
Daz Cameron waves at an Evan Marshall curveball that lands in front of the plate; it bounces up and off Jonathan Lucroy?s shoulder and into the grass nearby. The young center fielder jogs up the line with all the energy of a child being sent to clean their room while the veteran collects the ball and tosses to first. Gavin Sheets steps off the bag, his mitt up, and you and your friends break out into a cheer. We made it, you all wordlessly cry, saluting each other with warm half-full cans of Hamm?s. We?ve survived it all.
Eighteen months after your lives all shrank impossibly inward, eighteen months of online grade school and weight gain and politics and fights with friends over carelessness, it?s over. Baseball is often called a marathon, but this time it was yours, not theirs: living underwater, afraid even to turn your head. Each day, breakfast, zoom meetings. Each night, the Tigers, playing the way everyone felt. It?s not over; it?ll be years before it?s truly over, for them or for you. But it?s a little over. The 2021 Tigers are no more, and you?re within arms? reach of your friends as you bury them.
FINAL RECORD: 70-92
70th Percentile Outcome
All sports fandom can be condensed into a poem by a six-year old named Nael, called The Tiger:
The Tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
It?s that second YES: That moment between the present tense and the future, between when you understand what has happened and when the possibilities blossom out ahead of you. That moment when the truth is just as true as it?s always been, but suddenly real because you embrace it, accept it into your own truth. YES. The tiger is now part of the world that you are also a part of; you are part of each other.
After a while, the Tiger will settle into a solid two-win second act, mixing in secondaries to make up for the aging fastball. It doesn?t matter. The poem isn?t about what the tiger does. It?s about what the tiger is about to do. That?s the only tense worth living in, as a baseball fan. As a tiger.
Otherwise you have to start thinking about how a six-year-old wrote a better poem than you will in your whole life.
FINAL RECORD: 68-94
60th Percentile Outcome
We rank these by standings, but the 60th percentile outcome might be the worst of all. Not just for these Detroit Tigers, but for life: It?s that faint amount of positive feedback that can sucker people into sinking more into the pot, pulling that lever one more time, hoping that she?ll finally leave that other guy, keep working those weekends. It?s the right amount of feedback to dream straight into oblivion. It?s hardly worth firing a GM over a season that edged above expectations, right? You can?t tear it down when things are building up, even when it?s building so slow you?ll never see it finish.
Jeimer Candelario taps into his power and hits 30 home runs, giving the Tigers an actual, deserving All-Star. The rest of the team goes nowhere but it?s something. It?s everything, if you can block out everything else.
FINAL RECORD: 66-96
50th Percentile Outcome
The funny thing about the Tigers? 50th percentile outcome is that it bakes in a Matthew Boyd that PECOTA assumes will return to two-win form in 2021. Think about that: Detroit is projected to be four wins worse than last year even as their ace is projected to be three wins better. This is where we bring up that five-year-plan thing again: if the Tigers really did have one, they absolutely would have cashed in on their apparent good fortune and converted the lefty into talent applicable to The Actual Window. It?s awful that baseball is like this now. We should wish for Boyd to grow a bushy mustache and live out a career like Dan Petry. We should wish for a lot of things we can?t even imagine.
Boyd?s been homer-prone his entire career, and you can?t claim that he hasn?t made adjustments; last year, he went from throwing 42.3 percent of his pitches in the strike zone to 37.6. Hitters responded by making more contact on all his pitches, the strikes and the balls. The next logical step is probably to just stop throwing fastballs, especially if he?s going to throw them here:
There?s a freedom in disaster. We spend most of our lives afraid, usually of things so wordless and imperceptible that they?re not even there. We build habits because our parents want to get us to bed on time, and we do the same thing with our own children in time, but we also do it to ourselves, because deep down we secretly know that we are our own limitations, that what we can?t do, where we stop, is what ultimately defines us. Fear is our border. And when there?s suddenly nothing left to fear, it gives us the rare opportunity to redraw those borders, to redraw ourselves. We can just stop throwing fastballs down the middle every day, if we really try. But, to be very fair to Matthew Boyd: We don?t. We never do.
FINAL RECORD: 65-97
40th Percentile Outcome
You sit with your daughter on the living room carpet, a pile of old worthless baseball cards poured out before you like rainbow vomit. She doesn?t care much for baseball; you tried, but it?s not like the Tigers made much of an argument, and all she cares about is singing anyway. The games don?t even make the TV much anymore, replaced by music videos. A lot of K-pop, apparently; who knows which school friend got her into that. She likes craft projects, though, so on this quiet afternoon you take scissors and cut the cards to shreds, using the borders and the heads to make collages.
That?s all they are to her, of course, just heads, goofy smiles and silly clothing. She particularly enjoys the ones with the serious faces, the rough-skinned cheeks and the bushy mustaches.
?You?ve got a lot of this guy,? she says, twisting her scissors carefully around the cardboard. God, she?s so grown up, so careful now. ?He must have been really good.?
You peer at the card. ?Dan Petry,? you say, your memory not really grasping anything in particular. ?He was in every pack of cards, seemed like. He wasn?t great but it just seemed like he was on the team every year, no matter what.?
?Why did they keep letting him pitch if he was so bad??
?Bad? Oh, honey, he was better than anyone they have now.?
She doesn?t say anything, but neatly trims the mustache out of the card and glues it to her collage in the sky, like a bat.
FINAL RECORD: 64-98
30th Percentile Outcome
It was surprising when the Tigers called up Mize, Skubal and Issac Paredes on August 17, 2020, six games into a nine-game losing streak. Before it began, Detroit had started the abbreviated season at 9-5, and there was reason to think that, as with other rebuilds, their time had come. The move came both a week too late and, to some, a year too early, starting the clock on the service time aggregation that has become the foundation for the modern baseball team.
And so, when the Tigers hit a rough patch, blow their few winnable ballgames and get swept by the Mariners and Royals in May, they look at the calendar and the roster. 2021 is another lost season, and so they decide to lose it entirely: Every man on the team with a roster and a future heads to Toledo. The three prospects they promoted simultaneously the year before are all demoted together, with Daz Cameron and a newly summoned Matt Manning alongside. They call it the massacre.
There?s consternation among fans, doomed to watch Derek Holland and Julio Teheran notch marks on their prison walls all summer. There?s consternation among the union, noting that Mize and Skubal were in fact showing progress, and did nothing to earn their demotions beyond the gaming of service time. The Tigers don?t respond; they?ve gone back into early hibernation, the marketing team left to fend for themselves. Candelario is gone at the deadline, traded for live arms. Al Avila is let go at the end of the year. The Tigers pick first overall, and somewhere, a new window opens for fans to stare outside, waiting for spring.
FINAL RECORD: 62-100
20th Percentile Outcome
It?s May 28 and Miguel Cabrera is hitting .158/.241/.276 with a single home run. There have been no scorching liners into gloves, no warning track flies. His knees ache, and his stare is glassy as he reads pitchers from the on-deck circle as if their sliders were written in French. The milestones that were supposed to provide festivals for the faithful, 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, feel impossibly distant, like so many things.
More plans canceled, after so many the past two years. And everyone?the team, the fans, and privately, Cabrera himself?discover that this season is different from the others, because it?s a funeral. For Cabrera?s career, and for the Mike Ilitch teams of which he preserves as the that he served as the last surviving member, a story that should have ended any other way. It?s awful to watch, but as Mize hits the IL and Skubal returns to Triple-A, there?s nowhere else to look, nothing else to summarize this stale, hot summer. Cognizant of the tension over in Los Angeles, where a Wild Card-chasing Angels team sees its fanbase turn on a depleted Albert Pujols, the Tigers give their star a subdued, unofficial farewell tour and quietly buy out his contract in the winter. It?ll never be the same.
FINAL RECORD: 60-102
10th Percentile Outcome
Granted, it was a short season. But for all the attention (and rightfully so) that the Phillies bullpen received for its worst-in-90-years performance, the Tigers? rotation was almost equally miserable. Put it this way: The last bullpen with a worse collective ERA than the 2020 Phillies was the 1930 Phillies. The last rotation with a worse collective ERA than the 2020 Tigers was in 1996. Before that ? was the 1930 Phillies. Tigers starters in 2020 combined for a higher ERA than any Colorado team in history.
That 1996 team? Loyalists may have already guessed, but it was the Felipe Lira-led Tigers. That team, undergoing its own rebuild after dousing the final embers of the Trammell-Whitaker era, would remain in the dark for another decade before Justin Verlander arrived. Sometimes plans, no matter how meticulous, just fall apart.
Detroit may not be the most miserable baseball city; Seattle still exists. But they?ve walked their share of deserts. They?re near the top of the dune now, but on the other side, it may just be more dunes.
FINAL RECORD: 58-104
Summary:
There are no five-year plans. They?re a lie. A useful lie, sometimes even a necessary lie, like the kind that gets you to climb onto that exercise bike, but a lie. The Soviet Union used the Pyatiletka to create benchmarks for its strategy for industrialization and communalization. Those benchmarks proved not only arbitrary and unattainable in their own right, but their existence created side effects, some intended, some unintended, responding to respond to the incentives party leaders that they themselves created. Farmers slew their animals and starved rather than hand them over to the bureaucrats. The government arrested them, only to discover that the plan still demanded their production, resulting in massive prison labor camps. All of this not to modernize the country, which was happening anyway, but to meet the arbitrary deadline.
There is no clock in baseball, at least not yet, but the bell is tolling for the Detroit Tigers. Their fans, like so many, have given them faith on loan and it is time to collect. It is very unlikely that there will be assets to seize, but that is no surprise; they, too, are in on the lie. What will happen? It will turn out to have been a six-year plan after all, given the pandemic, given this, given that. Then seven. There is no limit to the power within the human spirit when it comes to deceiving one?s self.
Baseball Prospectus and Rebbiv
Somewhere, bearded men in baseball pants are stretching listlessly, which means it?s season preview time! Each article in our series will cover the 10th through 90th percentile outcomes for the team in question. You can read every entry in the series here.
In the decade following the Great War and the Russian Revolution, Joseph Stalin seized power of the Communist Party within the Soviet Union and embarked on a series of what he described as ?revolution from above.? His primary goal was to take a scattered, agrarian poplace and transform it into an industrial powerhouse, creating and stocking factories, and collecting and nationalizing farmland. From 1928-1932, the USSR embarked on what became known in the West as the first of the Five Year Plans.
If that was the main goal, goal 1A was the effect that this nationalism would have on the kulak, or wealthy landowning class, that had been a target of Lenin?s for years. In an effect that was mirrored decades later in China, the dissolution of private property provided the government with an opportunity to wipe out the middle class entirely, sending millions off to the gulag or the great beyond.
Of course, if you want to make an omelette, you?re going to have to crack a few million eggs, especially if you?re a mediocre cook. The Five Year Plan did succeed in broadening the Soviet Union?s industrial base and, eventually, put them in a position to muscle their way into Berlin in 1945. But that didn?t mean the plan wasn?t a net failure. Blanket policies and overly optimistic quotas led to widespread famine, wiping out not just the landed gentry but a lot of the unlanded folks the government was supposed to be saving.
Major League Baseball has adopted its own version of the Five Year Plan, ever since the Houston Astros of 2010 exiled their wealthy citizens and conducted their own revolution from above, re-emerging to make the playoffs half a decade later. And just as history proved, while the primary goal of actual advancement can be hit-or-miss, the secondary benefit is priceless. Nowhere is the culture more ingrained than the AL Central. The Royals, always a little behind the times, are in Year 4 of their post-championship reshuffling. The White Sox, entering Year 5, appear stocked and ready to ascend. And then there are the Tigers, who round out their own Five Year Plan appearing to have forgotten to plan.
This is it. This is what Tigers fans have earned. In 2020, before the season was cut short, PECOTA projected the team to finish 69-93. In 2021, their median result is four wins worse. You could call it a quagmire.
***
Key Additions (Projected 2021 WARP): Robbie Grossman (1.5), Jose Urena (0.5), Wilson Ramos (0.5)
Key Deductions: C.J. Cron (1.3), an entire year of everyone?s lives
***
90th Percentile Outcome
The 1990 Braves were a mess, wrapping up the year in the cellar, at 65-97. A pennant contender half a decade prior, it couldn?t get more bleak. Their face of the franchise and former MVP looked washed up in his mid-thirties. The lineup was patched together with decaying prospects: Oddibe McDowell? Jim Presley? Andres Thomas? The rotation had a couple of hot prospects, sure, but they hadn?t done much: Smoltz looked okay with his 3.85 ERA and decent strikeout rate, but Glavine was four years deep in his career with a losing record and a strikeout every other inning.
That?s the best that the 2021 Tigers can hope for: That the plan was fine, and that they only needed just the one more year. That Matthew Boyd can be their Charlie Liebrandt, and that the trio of Mize, Skubal and Manning can be, if not Glavine/Smoltz/Avery, at least Millwood/Neagle/Schmidt. That not only does the team hit on its blue chips, but finds its Jeff Blausers and Mark Lemkes, the guys who hold down the bottom of the lineup for the better part of the decade. Maybe Willi Castro just never stops hitting. The 1990 Braves were almost there; folks just couldn?t see it yet. Maybe it?s just that hard to see.
FINAL RECORD: 73-89
80th Percentile Outcome
Daz Cameron waves at an Evan Marshall curveball that lands in front of the plate; it bounces up and off Jonathan Lucroy?s shoulder and into the grass nearby. The young center fielder jogs up the line with all the energy of a child being sent to clean their room while the veteran collects the ball and tosses to first. Gavin Sheets steps off the bag, his mitt up, and you and your friends break out into a cheer. We made it, you all wordlessly cry, saluting each other with warm half-full cans of Hamm?s. We?ve survived it all.
Eighteen months after your lives all shrank impossibly inward, eighteen months of online grade school and weight gain and politics and fights with friends over carelessness, it?s over. Baseball is often called a marathon, but this time it was yours, not theirs: living underwater, afraid even to turn your head. Each day, breakfast, zoom meetings. Each night, the Tigers, playing the way everyone felt. It?s not over; it?ll be years before it?s truly over, for them or for you. But it?s a little over. The 2021 Tigers are no more, and you?re within arms? reach of your friends as you bury them.
FINAL RECORD: 70-92
70th Percentile Outcome
All sports fandom can be condensed into a poem by a six-year old named Nael, called The Tiger:
The Tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
It?s that second YES: That moment between the present tense and the future, between when you understand what has happened and when the possibilities blossom out ahead of you. That moment when the truth is just as true as it?s always been, but suddenly real because you embrace it, accept it into your own truth. YES. The tiger is now part of the world that you are also a part of; you are part of each other.
After a while, the Tiger will settle into a solid two-win second act, mixing in secondaries to make up for the aging fastball. It doesn?t matter. The poem isn?t about what the tiger does. It?s about what the tiger is about to do. That?s the only tense worth living in, as a baseball fan. As a tiger.
Otherwise you have to start thinking about how a six-year-old wrote a better poem than you will in your whole life.
FINAL RECORD: 68-94
60th Percentile Outcome
We rank these by standings, but the 60th percentile outcome might be the worst of all. Not just for these Detroit Tigers, but for life: It?s that faint amount of positive feedback that can sucker people into sinking more into the pot, pulling that lever one more time, hoping that she?ll finally leave that other guy, keep working those weekends. It?s the right amount of feedback to dream straight into oblivion. It?s hardly worth firing a GM over a season that edged above expectations, right? You can?t tear it down when things are building up, even when it?s building so slow you?ll never see it finish.
Jeimer Candelario taps into his power and hits 30 home runs, giving the Tigers an actual, deserving All-Star. The rest of the team goes nowhere but it?s something. It?s everything, if you can block out everything else.
FINAL RECORD: 66-96
50th Percentile Outcome
The funny thing about the Tigers? 50th percentile outcome is that it bakes in a Matthew Boyd that PECOTA assumes will return to two-win form in 2021. Think about that: Detroit is projected to be four wins worse than last year even as their ace is projected to be three wins better. This is where we bring up that five-year-plan thing again: if the Tigers really did have one, they absolutely would have cashed in on their apparent good fortune and converted the lefty into talent applicable to The Actual Window. It?s awful that baseball is like this now. We should wish for Boyd to grow a bushy mustache and live out a career like Dan Petry. We should wish for a lot of things we can?t even imagine.
Boyd?s been homer-prone his entire career, and you can?t claim that he hasn?t made adjustments; last year, he went from throwing 42.3 percent of his pitches in the strike zone to 37.6. Hitters responded by making more contact on all his pitches, the strikes and the balls. The next logical step is probably to just stop throwing fastballs, especially if he?s going to throw them here:
There?s a freedom in disaster. We spend most of our lives afraid, usually of things so wordless and imperceptible that they?re not even there. We build habits because our parents want to get us to bed on time, and we do the same thing with our own children in time, but we also do it to ourselves, because deep down we secretly know that we are our own limitations, that what we can?t do, where we stop, is what ultimately defines us. Fear is our border. And when there?s suddenly nothing left to fear, it gives us the rare opportunity to redraw those borders, to redraw ourselves. We can just stop throwing fastballs down the middle every day, if we really try. But, to be very fair to Matthew Boyd: We don?t. We never do.
FINAL RECORD: 65-97
40th Percentile Outcome
You sit with your daughter on the living room carpet, a pile of old worthless baseball cards poured out before you like rainbow vomit. She doesn?t care much for baseball; you tried, but it?s not like the Tigers made much of an argument, and all she cares about is singing anyway. The games don?t even make the TV much anymore, replaced by music videos. A lot of K-pop, apparently; who knows which school friend got her into that. She likes craft projects, though, so on this quiet afternoon you take scissors and cut the cards to shreds, using the borders and the heads to make collages.
That?s all they are to her, of course, just heads, goofy smiles and silly clothing. She particularly enjoys the ones with the serious faces, the rough-skinned cheeks and the bushy mustaches.
?You?ve got a lot of this guy,? she says, twisting her scissors carefully around the cardboard. God, she?s so grown up, so careful now. ?He must have been really good.?
You peer at the card. ?Dan Petry,? you say, your memory not really grasping anything in particular. ?He was in every pack of cards, seemed like. He wasn?t great but it just seemed like he was on the team every year, no matter what.?
?Why did they keep letting him pitch if he was so bad??
?Bad? Oh, honey, he was better than anyone they have now.?
She doesn?t say anything, but neatly trims the mustache out of the card and glues it to her collage in the sky, like a bat.
FINAL RECORD: 64-98
30th Percentile Outcome
It was surprising when the Tigers called up Mize, Skubal and Issac Paredes on August 17, 2020, six games into a nine-game losing streak. Before it began, Detroit had started the abbreviated season at 9-5, and there was reason to think that, as with other rebuilds, their time had come. The move came both a week too late and, to some, a year too early, starting the clock on the service time aggregation that has become the foundation for the modern baseball team.
And so, when the Tigers hit a rough patch, blow their few winnable ballgames and get swept by the Mariners and Royals in May, they look at the calendar and the roster. 2021 is another lost season, and so they decide to lose it entirely: Every man on the team with a roster and a future heads to Toledo. The three prospects they promoted simultaneously the year before are all demoted together, with Daz Cameron and a newly summoned Matt Manning alongside. They call it the massacre.
There?s consternation among fans, doomed to watch Derek Holland and Julio Teheran notch marks on their prison walls all summer. There?s consternation among the union, noting that Mize and Skubal were in fact showing progress, and did nothing to earn their demotions beyond the gaming of service time. The Tigers don?t respond; they?ve gone back into early hibernation, the marketing team left to fend for themselves. Candelario is gone at the deadline, traded for live arms. Al Avila is let go at the end of the year. The Tigers pick first overall, and somewhere, a new window opens for fans to stare outside, waiting for spring.
FINAL RECORD: 62-100
20th Percentile Outcome
It?s May 28 and Miguel Cabrera is hitting .158/.241/.276 with a single home run. There have been no scorching liners into gloves, no warning track flies. His knees ache, and his stare is glassy as he reads pitchers from the on-deck circle as if their sliders were written in French. The milestones that were supposed to provide festivals for the faithful, 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, feel impossibly distant, like so many things.
More plans canceled, after so many the past two years. And everyone?the team, the fans, and privately, Cabrera himself?discover that this season is different from the others, because it?s a funeral. For Cabrera?s career, and for the Mike Ilitch teams of which he preserves as the that he served as the last surviving member, a story that should have ended any other way. It?s awful to watch, but as Mize hits the IL and Skubal returns to Triple-A, there?s nowhere else to look, nothing else to summarize this stale, hot summer. Cognizant of the tension over in Los Angeles, where a Wild Card-chasing Angels team sees its fanbase turn on a depleted Albert Pujols, the Tigers give their star a subdued, unofficial farewell tour and quietly buy out his contract in the winter. It?ll never be the same.
FINAL RECORD: 60-102
10th Percentile Outcome
Granted, it was a short season. But for all the attention (and rightfully so) that the Phillies bullpen received for its worst-in-90-years performance, the Tigers? rotation was almost equally miserable. Put it this way: The last bullpen with a worse collective ERA than the 2020 Phillies was the 1930 Phillies. The last rotation with a worse collective ERA than the 2020 Tigers was in 1996. Before that ? was the 1930 Phillies. Tigers starters in 2020 combined for a higher ERA than any Colorado team in history.
That 1996 team? Loyalists may have already guessed, but it was the Felipe Lira-led Tigers. That team, undergoing its own rebuild after dousing the final embers of the Trammell-Whitaker era, would remain in the dark for another decade before Justin Verlander arrived. Sometimes plans, no matter how meticulous, just fall apart.
Detroit may not be the most miserable baseball city; Seattle still exists. But they?ve walked their share of deserts. They?re near the top of the dune now, but on the other side, it may just be more dunes.
FINAL RECORD: 58-104
Summary:
There are no five-year plans. They?re a lie. A useful lie, sometimes even a necessary lie, like the kind that gets you to climb onto that exercise bike, but a lie. The Soviet Union used the Pyatiletka to create benchmarks for its strategy for industrialization and communalization. Those benchmarks proved not only arbitrary and unattainable in their own right, but their existence created side effects, some intended, some unintended, responding to respond to the incentives party leaders that they themselves created. Farmers slew their animals and starved rather than hand them over to the bureaucrats. The government arrested them, only to discover that the plan still demanded their production, resulting in massive prison labor camps. All of this not to modernize the country, which was happening anyway, but to meet the arbitrary deadline.
There is no clock in baseball, at least not yet, but the bell is tolling for the Detroit Tigers. Their fans, like so many, have given them faith on loan and it is time to collect. It is very unlikely that there will be assets to seize, but that is no surprise; they, too, are in on the lie. What will happen? It will turn out to have been a six-year plan after all, given the pandemic, given this, given that. Then seven. There is no limit to the power within the human spirit when it comes to deceiving one?s self.
Baseball Prospectus and Rebbiv
