Detroit Tigers: Things to improve, things to maintain for playoff push
By Matt Snyder
Things the Detroit Tigers need to improve or maintain if they hope to make a playoff push down the stretch in 2017.
Through 45 games the Detroit Tigers are, more or less, who we thought they were heading into the season. At 22-24 they might be underperforming a slight bit but most projection systems saw them as a roughly .500 team coming into the season.
When we looked at preseason predictions, most experts thought the Tigers could be in the mix for a Wild Card spot, but the middle of the American League looked like it would be a bunched up mess. That’s the way things are playing out so far in the AL with the fifth place Cleveland Indians and the tenth place Tigers being separated by only two games.
Even now as they sit there in tenth place, reasonable projection systems give the Tigers a 20-30% chance to reach the postseason. They still see the Tigers as basically a .500 team — maybe a game or two north of that — but that can sometimes be enough for a team to make the playoffs if aided by a hot week or two.
That’s typically how these projections work. They take a team’s estimated true talent level and run simulations. A team projected to go 81-81 will win 75 games a certain percentage of the time and 87 games a certain percentage of the time. All those simulations might average out to a .500 record, but it doesn’t always come out that way in a 162 game sample.
In order to hit that top 20-30% of the projections — where the Tigers are probably winning 86+ games — they’ll need to benefit from good luck (or, more literally, random variation that goes in there favor) and also play at the upper end of their abilities.
Here’s a look at what the Tigers need to do down the stretch to hit that top 25% of the projections.