With the day off I’ve taken the opportunity to play around with some of the cool stats that the folks at Baseball Reference have made available. Looking through the wins and losses so far this year it seems that the Tigers have either been jumping out to early leads or coming from behind and stealing a win. With that I took a look at run averages for each inning so far this year as compared to the 2006 season.
Below is a graph showing both the average number of runs scored in each inning for the 2006 season as well as the 2007 season so far.
While most innings are pretty similar to last years statistics, and we can expect this to even out more as the season goes on, you will notice that both the first inning and ninth inning have averages quite a bit higher than last year. In fact, 30% of the Tigers 2007 runs so far have been scored in either the first or ninth inning, 20% in the first inning.
Yes, the Tigers have been a pain to a number of opposing starters. At the same time, Tiger starters have been performing at a pace close to 2006 but the same cannot be said for Tiger relief pitchers. Below is a graph showing runs allowed averages by inning for the 2006 season and 2007 through yesterday.
Runs allowed in the eighth inning have nearly doubled from last year’s pace and with Joel Zumaya to be out until August then Dombrowski has some work ahead of him to get this current pace down. It felt to me last year that if the starter could hand over a lead to Zumaya/Rodney tandem in the 7th inning then Detroit would likely win.
I know a number of folks out there, at least from reading Jason Beck’s latest mailbag, have continued to focus on closer Todd Jones. Looking at the data it appears the focus really needs to be elsewhere for now.