Tigers development
A couple of weeks ago, I embarked on a very simple, easy task: how good or bad were the Detroit Tigers at developing prospects and minor league players into major league players? The thought had come to me when I saw a tweet mention how well the Dodgers do at developing homegrown talent. They are consistently having top prospects despite the fact that they are promoting and trading that talent away.
I had a pretty good feeling I knew how well this was going to go.
I knew first I needed to set my timeframe. That was going to be Al Avila’s tenure. He took over and shortly after the rebuild would begin. Now at the time I had done this, Avila had been at the helm for 7 years. Plenty of time to rebuild a barren farm system and start to see some of the results. I wanted to also split the data up between hitters and pitchers. I believe that would be key because it’s possible that teams are good at one and not so good at the other — which isn’t necessarily bad. They could at least see where their deficiencies are and either correct them or use their strengths to fix whole they themselves cannot fix.
Like I mentioned previous as well, this was simple. I grabbed all rookie season from 2016–2022 in FanGraphs, grouped the players by their teams, and got a sum of their WAR. And I did this twice; once for hitters, once for pitchers.
First up! Hitters:
Oof. Literally in the negatives for my beloved Tigers. Rookie hitters A large chunk of the negative number comes from Spencer Torkelson’s really, really bad -1.0 WAR this year, but even still… they are really terrible at developing hitters.
But, what about pitchers? Surely they can’t be as bad there.
Whew. They weren’t. Thankfully. Up near the top, actually. And that seems correct. A good chunk of their bullpen consists of rookies as has their starting rotation this year which hasn’t been all bad. And we can factor in Michael Fulmer, who owned a 3.1 fWAR in his rookie year, into this as well.
So how does it look combined?
Being 11th in pitching doesn’t save them much from being the bottom in hitting… negative value in hitting. Even having a 0.0 WAR in hitting would move them up 5–6 spots.
As a side note: we knew the Dodgers were extremely good at churning out talent. As I mentioned before, they are promoting, trading, and continually having a top farm system. The Rays are another team who is really good at that. They maintain a low payroll and keep winning. We all knew that. But how about the Cardinals? 1st in hitters, 3rd in pitchers, 1st overall. I knew they were good, I assumed they would be top 10 in both and overall. I was not expecting that good of results though.
What has made this more interesting for me since I’ve created this is that Avila has since been relieved of his duties. Perhaps the Tigers should be looking at the three clubs above to pick their next GM. Clearly they know how to develop the players, something the Tigers should be focusing much more on.
