The Tigers May Need to Gamble

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If we take what Matt has relayed to us at face value, the Tigers are currently projected to finish a close third in the AL Central. On the one hand, that could be comforting since our third place finish in 2010 wasn’t close at all. On the other hand, that says that if everything goes as expected – these are mean win totals – the Detroit Tigers miss the postseason yet again.

It’s also worth noting that while the Tigers and White Sox have already addressed most (if not quite all) of their offseason business, the Minnesota Twins have not. We don’t hear much, but it sounds as though the Twins have better than 50/50 odds of getting Jim Thome and Carl Pavano back. Are these projections made assuming both return? One? Neither? Obviously the Twins would be significantly affected either way.

That’s not really what this post is about, though. I don’t know if these CAIRO projections are perfect, and I don’t know if they’ve been based on the rosters we’ll ultimately see come April, and that doesn’t really matter. What I know is that we see an ‘expected value’ (EV) for our win total less than the EV for the competition and I’d like to start a discussion of what that ought to mean for our strategy.

First things first, and here that means a bit of stating the obvious: if we all do exactly what’s expected of us, we don’t make the playoffs. We have to beat our projection by 1.7 more wins than the Twins beat theirs and 0.5 wins more than the Sox beat theirs in order to grab that Central pennant.

Of course, there is a lot of luck in baseball (especially from a managerial perspective) and you never can tell exactly where you will wind up. The Tigers (just like every other team) have what would be referred to as a ‘probability distribution’ around our EV of 84 wins. If I knew exactly what that was (which I don’t), I could tell you the odds that we would beat our projection by two wins, and if I knew the Twins probabilities too then I could tell you the odds that we’d beat them in the race. Somebody (or somebodies) in Vegas actually get paid to do this stuff, I’m sure.

Know all that stuff, and you’d be able to put a number on it. To estimate that the Tigers have, say, a 12% chance of winning the division in 2011. So what? Well, the way I see it the strategy of a dark horse team, a team that isn’t expected to win the division, should be quite a bit different from the strategy of a favorite. The reason, is that a lot of the risk and variability that any team takes on is due to front office decisions.

All players have pretty variable performance, sometimes they get hot or get lucky on balls in play or squeakers over the fence, or whatever. Some players are riskier than others. “Duh”, right? Everyone knows that. But it does have extra implications. Our mean forecast for 2011 probably includes something like 400 plate appearances for Magglio Ordonez. That’s not because he’s especially likely to miss 1/3 of the season, its that he has about a 30% chance of missing most of the season. If he stays healthy, he’ll beat his ‘expected’ contribution handily. But, he’s old and we’re gambling on him and we know that.

When a team adds riskier players rather than more predictable ones (and look at the numbers over the past 4 years or so on Adam Dunn and Jayson Werth to see what those might look like) we’re making it less likely that we wind up close to our 84-win EV and more likely that we wind up either way above or way below. The 2008 Tigers give us a pretty clear idea of what it looks like when the risks go mostly awry. The Twins will win the division if everything goes according to plan. A team like that ought to be risk averse, they want to cover their bases (as much as possible) to mitigate the impact of bad luck. They ought to focus on depth, among other things. That kind of a strategy won’t work for us.

The gist of it is this: just hitting our projection isn’t likely to be good enough. To win the division we need things to go right, and we need the possibility that things might go very right. We need a lot of risk, because that’s the only way we can get a lot of return. Young guys give you that, so do old ones, and guys with injury histories and past inconsistency. Jhonny Peralta, for example, isn’t a bad bet to fall over or under his projection by a full 2 WAR. More risk, for us, means a greater chance that we’ll wind up far enough beyond our EV to come our on top of the division. We should love risk right now (though maybe not as much as they should in Cleveland). I definitely think we’ve made some big gambles the past few offseasons and the question is: are we gambling enough?

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