The Detroit Tigers are making starting pitching obsolete!

This season, the Tigers are back in the postseason for the first time since 2014. As of August 11^th, 2024, FanGraphs gave them a 0.2% chance of making the playoffs. Their playoff odds were so low because they had a losing record, were hardly in contention for the Wild Card, and lost 4 of their 5 best starting pitchers. They were significantly further from playoff contention than the Red Sox, Rays, and Mariners – none of which made it this year.

A.J. Hinch and the Tigers turned their season around in the last 6 weeks of the season, going 31-13 in the last 44 games, for the best record in MLB over that time. How did they become the best team in baseball despite losing 80% of their starting pitching? The short answer is: “they changed the game!”, and specifically the management of pitchers.

They based their new strategy on a simple stat: batters fair worse against a pitcher the first time they face him in-game rather than the second and third times around. Logically enough, the more pitches a batter sees from one pitcher, the more they start picking up the various spins and velocities on their pitches and being able to hit them for base hits. Indeed, in 2015, USA Today found that the first time a batter faces a pitcher, their OPS is .702 on average. The second and third times that batter faces the same pitcher in the game, their OPS jumps up to .735 and then .770. This means that each additional time a batter faces a pitcher in a game, they perform 3.5% better. This may not sound like much, but over the course of a 162-game season, it is the difference between winning and losing dozens of games.

The Tigers are one of the youngest teams in MLB and have a group of guys that are not attached to their traditional roles of starting pitching or relieving, and for whom team glory is more important than individual accolades. Detroit’s coaching staff decided they would not have their pitchers face any hitter more than once per game (except for their healthy ace and Cy Young award candidate, Tarik Skubal). They proceeded to have most of their games start with an “opener”: a pitcher that pitches the first couple of innings before being relieved. For the remainder of the game, they would mix and match their pitchers based on hitters’ performance against them and other factors, ensuring that no pitcher goes more than 3 innings. This effectively allowed their pitchers to face each hitter once at most, and therefore maximize their performance against them.

With this strategy, the Tigers became the best team in MLB at the end of the season and made the playoffs despite being seemingly out of contention with a few weeks to go. Will other teams look at their performance and follow suit? If they do, it means that other than Cy Young candidates (the top 5 pitchers in MLB, perhaps), starting pitchers will become obsolete. This may be a rough pill to swallow for veteran pitchers that have made their careers from starting like Justin Verlander or Gerrit Cole.