The numbers prove that horrendous bullpen cost Tigers a comfortable playoff berth

Scott Harris is going to have some explaining to do this offseason if he doesn’t spend all the extra money he saved by dealing Tarik Skubal on upgrading the Tigers’ infuriating bullpen.

Not only was Detroit tied for fourth in all of baseball with 44 blown leads this season, but it was also seventh in the MLB with six blown leads in the 9th inning. It’d be easy to blame Kenley Jansen for a lot of those late losses, but the bullpen as a whole was a disaster this season, and the numbers prove it.

The one stat that sticks out as a real indicator of how bad the bullpen was for most of the year is the run differential following the season finale on Sunday.

Detroit actually finished with the best run differential in the AL Central (+71) by a fairly wide margin (next closest were the Chicago White Sox at +56). The division winner, the Cleveland Guardians, finished with only a +11, which has to infuriate every Detroit Tiger fan in existence because it feels like they just stumble their way to division titles every single year. Winning the division with a +11 should be impossible.

But it’s that +71 that stands out. That’s actually good for fourth-best in the American League and it should have locked up an easy playoff berth. Instead, the Tigers will be watching from home this October after finishing an astonishing eight (!) games out of a Wild Card spot.

No team in baseball that has a run differential of at least +30 is missing the playoffs this year. Heck, there are three teams with lower run differentials than that in this year’s hunt. The Guardians, as previously mentioned, have a +11, the Phillies are at +15, and the Houston Astros won the AL West with a playoff field-worst -32.

Want to hear something even crazier? The Oakland Athletics finished with just 12 fewer wins than the Tigers despite having a comically-terrible -238 run differential this year. The Cincinnati Reds had a -160 run differential and had just one less win than Detroit.

What does this all mean? The bullpen really blew it.

The Tigers were really just an average bullpen away

In terms of ERA and WHIP, the Tigers bullpen was smack-dab in the middle of the league. They had a 3.82 bullpen ERA and a 1.26 WHIP. This isn’t that bad when you really consider what teams like the Athletics, Royals, and Twins dealt with (4.70 ERA or worse), but it was not having the clutch gene that really killed the Tigers.

They lost over 20 games when leading after seven innings and had a 5-7 record in extra innings as well as a 17-27 record in one-run games.

The Tigers may not have had the worst bullpen in the league or even one of the worst in MLB history like some fans like to suggest, but it was the least clutch in the league and that almost single-handedly cost Detroit a playoff spot.

Even if they won half of the games that they were leading after seventh inning and lost, they would have won the division by at least a game and would be battling it out for a World Series (finally) in October. Sigh.

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