Detroit Tigers 40-Man Roster Preview: Has Buck Farmer finally hit his stride?

Baseball is almost back, and here at Motor City Bengals, we couldn’t be more excited. As always, we’re endeavoring to provide our readers with the best Detroit Tigers content possible. To that end, we’re taking a note from our friends at SB Nation’s Red Sox blog Over the Monster. Although the Tigers probably won’t be winning anything soon, it’s still worth examining each player on their 40-man roster. In this series, we’ll look at individual players through the lens of one big question they’ll face entering the 2020 season. If changes are made to the roster between now and Opening Day, we’ll cover the newly added players. Enjoy!

The Question: Are the improvements we saw from Buck Farmer in 2019 here to stay?

Picking up where I left up in the bullpen series in which we started with Joe Jimenez, today, I look at Buck Farmer. Farmer was one of the highlights in a beleaguered bullpen. He improved his numbers from 2018 across the board. Despite a bit of a health scare in September in which he missed a few games due to a rapid heart rate and dizziness issues in September, he bounce back from a rough August in which he posted an ERA of 6.75 to then just allow only two earned runs in 11 innings pitched in September, spotting a 1.54 ERA and WHIP of 0.85. This is a pivotal arm in the bullpen and looks to be slated in the setup role. Let’s take a deeper dive into his numbers from 2019, which showed progress from a good 2018 season.

Cut the Walks, Here Comes the “K’s”

Buck Farmer struck out 73 in 67.2 innings pitched last year, a good rise from his 2018 season in which he struck out 57 in 69 innings pitched. His walk rate went among the league leaders in 2018 of 13.3% to 8.3%. What factored into Farmer’s numbers last year? His four-seam fastball set up his secondary pitches better. He saw an uptick in velocity in all of his pitches. His fastball was sitting at 95 MPH, up from 94 in 2018, slider, 82.4, up from 80 and his changeup from 86.8 to 88.1. This allowed his fastball to be more effective in setting up his secondary pitches because the movement on his slider had improved. His swing and whiff % went up as a result.

• Swing % 2018: 44.8% 2019: 46.1
• Whiff% 2018: 26.8% 2019: 29.8%

His K% went up to 25.3% up from 18.5% in 2018. Farmer stopped nibbling and challenged hitters, which generated the increase in strikeouts and decrease in walks to put it in plain talk. While his barrel percentage went up as his fastball got hit hard, he still was able to get hitters out with his pitch mix.

For the Tigers, he was their best reliever last year outside of Shane Greene, who was traded to the Braves in late summer. He showed growth into his bullpen role last year, which is a welcome relief to Tigers fans who saw the road from Toledo to Detroit littered with relievers who came and went.  If he can continue to trend upwards and with the glimpses that Joe Jimenez showed last year in the closer’s role, the Tigers could potentially have one of the better backends in the AL Central. He is one of the few Tigers bullpen spots that is locked down, and they will need all the stability they can get.