Detroit Tigers: Buck Farmer a reliable choice for the team

With the season drawing to a close, we are going to provide year-end grades to each Detroit Tigers player who donned the Olde English D in 2018.

The Detroit Tigers’ season is drawing to a close. It’s the first official year of the rebuild and it wasn’t the greatest season to watch. However, with any rebuild, the future is what we look forward to as the losses rack up.

As the season draws to a close we are going to evaluate each of the players that suited up for the Detroit Tigers. As we continue this series, you can look at the other players we have done so far including Michael Fulmer (here), John Hicks (here), Jose Iglesias (here) and Jordan Zimmermann (here).

As in other posts, we are grading players relative to what was expected of them. Just because we give a player an A or B rating doesn’t mean that they are elite, it simply means that they performed better than we expected.

Buck Farmer

If you ask many Tigers fans what they think of Buck Farmer, many people are proned to grimace at the sound of his name. However, if you look at four different projection models that FanGraphs had for him, he came out about even.

I’m a big fan of the ZiPS projection model, it’s been a personal preference of mine for years. This season ZiPS had Farmer pitching in 147+ innings, but he only pitched in 67+ for the Tigers. ZiPS also had Farmer with a 5+ ERA but as of this writing he has a 4.28 ERA.

Grading

I think that Farmer has become a reliable bullpen option for the Tigers. That might say more about the bullpen than it does about Farmer. However, he’s performed about right where I expected him to be before the season start, even if he didn’t log as many innings as expected.

Grade: C

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