Revisiting 2022 preseason Detroit Tigers betting odds

Heading into 2022, the staff gave their predictions on several Detroit Tigers numbers for the season

Baseball, more than any other major sport, is unpredictable. The season is a marathon and with injuries and regression always remaining a possibility, the crystal ball stays cloudy most of the time. This was especially true for the Detroit Tigers, who brought in some veteran help like Javier Baez, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Tucker Barnhart, but they were also relying heavily on rookies Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson along with their young pitching to sustain them.

To be clear, I’m not a sports bettor. Nothing against those that do, I just allow the lines between fan and logic to get blurred at times, which doesn’t bode well when trying to make picks that make money. That said, the staff and I gave our best stab at some Detroit Tigers categories back in April. Here are the results:

Conclusively, most of the staff expected more out of this team, but it didn’t come without cause for optimism. The group last year, which was objectively worse on paper, had three 20+ home run players: Robbie Grossman, Eric Haase, and Jonathan Schoop. They had one 20+ stolen base player (Grossman) with Akil Baddoo lurking at 18.

Their RBI leader last year was Schoop with 84, but with the additions of Baez, Greene, Meadows, and Torkelson, it’s totally fair to assume there would be more ducks on the pond for Tigers hitters. The last Detroit Tigers team that had a 100+ RBI guy was in 2017 when Nick Castellanos posted 101.

Speaking of Schoop, he himself crossed the 170 mark in the hits department last year, but in 2022, the leader was Javier Baez and it wasn’t particularly close. Baez put up a 132-hit campaign this season.

The win totals proved to be aggressive, particularly with Eduardo Rodriguez–but forget the whole hiatus that had him away from the team for some time. There were only

14 pitchers in 2022

that had 15+ wins on the season, and all of those pitchers belonged to playoff teams except Shohei Ohtani and Logan Webb, who each had exactly 15 pitching wins.

Likewise, only 14 pitchers had over 195 strikeouts on the year, and while Skubal does rack up the strikeouts, it takes a combination of performance and health to make that number happen. The last time the Detroit Tigers had a pitcher post over 195 strikeouts was in 2019 when Matthew Boyd did so (238).

Each writer nailed the Greene under on games played; this came thanks to the fact we knew he’d be out due to injury a good part of the season. Still, he appeared in 93 games and came closer to that number than I imagined.

As expected, picking the ‘under’ for this team would have proved profitable thanks to a slew of injuries and lack of progress in ownership’s eyes. In the same article where we gave our picks, we also gave our best guess at a record, with most of the staff floating around the .500 mark and nowhere near their actual 66-96 record.

The club now has the sixth-best odds at the top pick in next year’s draft and is well-positioned for a very active offseason heading into another year with critical question marks that deserve answers if the team is serious about their playoff aspirations.