Tigers Talk: Stats that explain the struggles for each Detroit hitter

Nope, things aren’t getting any better.

Sunday’s 5-0 Tigers loss — featuring a grand total of one Detroit hit — completed a four-game sweep by the Astros in Houston. The Tigers have scored more than three runs only once in their past 11 games. The Tigers rank 29th in runs scored, 30th in slugging percentage and on and on it goes.

Making sense of the gloomy offense, though, isn’t the easiest task in the world. Hitters seem to be struggling for a variety of reasons. The only common theme that sticks out is overall poor production.

While players such as Jonathan Schoop, Spencer Torkelson and others try to get going, it’s worth taking a deeper look at why so many players are slumping at once.

Here are some ideas based on one telling advanced stat for each player:

Derek Hill: -1.4. Hill entered Sunday with only 29 at-bats, so it’s still a small sample. But his average launch angle of -1.4 degrees tells you about his style at the plate. Hill already has multiple bunt base hits, which contribute to this negative launch angle in a big way. But 57.1 percent of Hill’s batted balls have been on the ground. Hill tends to contribute when he’s putting the ball in play and letting his speed show. He’s a throwback style player in that regard — fun to watch but not exactly a guy who’s going to be a basher.

Javier Báez: 48.4. This one is no surprise. Báez’s free-swinging approach has been his weak point for his entire career. His 48.4 chase rate and 47 percent whiff rate rank in the bottom 1 percent of the league. Báez is great when he connects, but he’s chasing and/or swinging and missing on almost every other swing he takes.

Robbie Grossman: 84.7. Grossman is the opposite of Báez at the plate. His chase stats and walk rate rank toward the top of the league. But Grossman has yet to hit for power this season. His average exit velocity of 84.7 mph ranks in the bottom 6 percent of the league, and he’s still looking for his first home run. He hit a career-high 23 home runs last season but has yet to tap into that power in 2022.

Miguel Cabrera: 93. The idea that Cabrera is still a productive hitter is a nice thought but a half-truth at best. Although he entered Sunday hitting a respectable .268, his wRC+ of 93 indicates that his overall offensive production is 7 percent worse than the league average. Cabrera has only one home run and an OPS of .664, not exactly ideal numbers for a player who occupies the DH spot almost daily.

Jeimer Candelario: .185. Candelario actually has two home runs against breaking balls this season, but his batting average of only .185 against breaking pitches (compared with .240 against fastballs) tells you a bit about why he got off to a slow start. Breaking balls have been Candelario’s kryptonite for his entire MLB career, and so far this year, he’s seeing them more than 31 percent of the time, the highest rate of his career. Pitchers have found ways to keep him off balance.

Jonathan Schoop: 1. Schoop’s awful start — his double Sunday raised his average to .134 — is tough to explain based on the numbers alone. He’s never had a patient plate approach, but he’s not chasing or whiffing any more than he did last year. Opponents are throwing him a similar proportion of breaking balls. He’s seeing a lot of pitches low and away, but that’s not exactly new, either. The reality is Schoop has only one barrel (find the definition of a “barrel” here) this season. Perhaps for a variety of reasons, he simply hasn’t hit the ball with any authority. If there’s any silver lining, Schoop’s .151 BABIP indicates he’s been a victim of tough luck to some degree this season.

Spencer Torkelson: -7. Sometimes it seems like Torkelson takes an excessive number of called strikes, and the statistics largely support that notion. Torkelson has a run value of -7 for pitches in what Statcast defines as the “shadow” zone, meaning pitches that aren’t over the heart of the plate but are still strikes or just outside the strike zone. Torkelson takes shadow pitches 61 percent of the time. The league average take rate for shadow pitches is 47 percent. Pitchers attack Torkelson in this region pretty often, and he hasn’t done much damage. His patience at the plate is one of his greatest strengths but can also come with drawbacks.

(Baseball Savant)

Eric Haase: .196. This one is kind of crazy. Haase is striking out less often and walking more often compared with a year ago. He is swinging and missing less. He is chasing pitches at about the same rate. But what he’s not done much of is drive the ball. The numbers don’t present a clear explanation, but this much is true: Haase hit only .208 over the final two months of the season in 2021. So since Aug. 1, 2021, Haase is 36-for-187, good for a batting average of .196 over his past three months of play.

Akil Baddoo: .000. Baddoo has had a real rough time getting going, and his struggles against the slider are not helping. Baddoo hit an adequate .242 against sliders last season, but so far in 2022, he has yet to record a hit against a slider. He’s seeing them slightly more often (16.6 percent of the time compared with 14.4) and he has whiffed on 43.8 percent of the sliders he has seen this season. Opponents have been attacking Baddoo with breaking stuff low and in, and it’s giving him a difficult time.

Tucker Barnhart: 64.5. Barnhart was actually hitting .259 entering Sunday, but his expected slugging percentage of .248 ranks in the bottom 1 percent of the league. A big reason: Barnhart’s strikeout rate is high, and when he does connect, he has been hitting a ton of stuff on the ground. His 64.5 percent groundball rate is up big from 42.6 percent last year. He’s had some seeing-eye hits, but his average launch angle of 2 degrees shows he’s been beating the ball into the ground.

Austin Meadows: .438. With a wRC+ of 128, Meadows has been the Tigers’ best hitter so far. And he’s the one player for whom the metrics still paint a pretty strong portrait. If there’s any knock on Meadows, it’s that he has yet to homer and has a slugging percentage of only .370. The good news: Meadows has an expected slugging percentage of .438 based on the exit velocity and launch angle with which he has hit the ball. That’s a sign that more power could be coming soon.

Harold Castro: 13.5. Hittin’ Harold entered Sunday batting .333 in 45 at-bats, so he’s doing what he does best. And one interesting trend to keep an eye on: Castro’s average launch angle is up about 3 degrees from last year, now at 13.5 degrees. Lifting the ball more hasn’t exactly translated to an increase in power, but Castro’s expected slugging percentage of .519 is higher than Meadows’. He’s hitting a lower percentage of groundballs (34.3 percent compared with 42.9 percent last year) and a bit more fly balls and line drives.

Willi Castro: 44. Castro had a pretty high chase rate of 39.9 percent, and he’s been even more undisciplined at the plate so far this season. Castro is chasing 44 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, and that makes it tough for any hitter to thrive. His 18.5 strikeout rate is actually reasonable, but he’s seeing more breaking stuff than ever before and having a hard time against those chase pitches.

Slider or cutter? Michael Fulmer discusses

Last week in the Tigers’ clubhouse, Michael Fulmer was asked a question about his slider when a couple of fellow relief pitchers started interjecting from a few lockers over.

“Yeah, Michael, tell us about your slider,” one player joked.

“Cutter, cutter,” another player said.

Turns out there might be some disagreement on whether Fulmer’s go-to breaking pitch profiles best as a cutter or slider. Fulmer is sticking with slider — but with a catch. He’s throwing two iterations of the pitch.

“I’ve tweaked grips a little bit and I’m able to have it be more ‘cutterish’ if I want to throw it for a strike,” Fulmer said. “Early in the count I’ll try to stay behind it a little more and get more side to side, make it look like a fastball and just miss barrels with it, early contact. Late, if I need a chase pitch, I’ll try to get a little more depth on it.”

Fulmer used the harder, horizontal version of the pitch to help induce a double play in the Tigers’ April 30 win against the Dodgers.

Whatever you want to call it, Fulmer’s slider has become a serious weapon. Back in his days as a starter, Fulmer had a great slider but used it only about 20-25 percent of the time. Now as a reliever, he throws it more than he throws his fastball. Fulmer threw 40 percent sliders last year and is up to 60 percent so far this year. The slider also averages 91.2 mph, up from the mid-to-upper 80s when Fulmer was a starter.

“After I came back from injury last year we kind of sat down and talked with (pitching coach Chris Fetter),” Fulmer said. “He told me, ‘You get roughly three outs an outing. You do whatever it takes to get those three outs, no matter what happens. You’re not facing those guys again. Doesn’t matter if the slider is the way to go from eight straight pitches or three out of every four pitches, then that’s the way we’re going to do it.’”

So far this season, opponents are hitting .143 against the slider, and it has become a great putaway pitch. Fulmer had thrown 21 consecutive outings without a run, dating to last season. That streak ended when Fulmer finally yanked a few pitches, walked in a run and took the loss Saturday against the Astros.

Fulmer still has a 1.59 ERA and has been a terrific asset for the bullpen.

“It’s just one of those things where you go with your strengths and try to get the needed outs before you give up any runs,” Fulmer said. “That’s what I settled on and felt good about. Fetter has been very communicative about throwing it more and more, and we’re seeing where it leads.”

Is hope already lost?

Despite an offseason full of optimism, Detroit’s 8-19 start is lining up to mirror last season’s 8-24 beginning to the season. We all know the Tigers played great baseball from that point on, but because of the poor start, they won only 77 games.

So do the Tigers have any hope of digging themselves out of this hole?

Here are a couple of ways to look at it. Let’s say the Tigers would need to win 88 games to earn a spot in MLB’s new expanded playoffs. That’s just a guess. To get 88 wins, the Tigers would need to finish 80-55. That’s a .592 clip. A tall order, no doubt. Last year’s Tigers played at a .531 clip from May 8 on.

Another way to look at it: FanGraphs gives the Tigers a 1.4 percent chance of making the playoffs and projects the Tigers to finish with 71 wins.

Chances are the Tigers begin playing better baseball at some point. But these numbers? They offer a cold dose of reality.

Worth noting

• Matt Manning (shoulder discomfort) pitched three scoreless innings with one hit and four strikeouts Sunday in a rehab outing with Triple-A Toledo. Manning is likely to do one or two more rehab starts before rejoining the Tigers.

• Casey Mize (elbow sprain) is not far behind Manning in the rehab process. He threw a live batting session in Lakeland this weekend and is likely to go through another similar throwing session this week before beginning a rehab assignment in Toledo.

(Top photo of Miguel Cabrera: Leslie Plaza Johnson / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)