Detroit Tigers High Leverage Relievers

We are in the midst of watching an improbable run for our beloved Detroit Tigers. Everything seems to be going their way. 25-10 in their last 35 games, on the verge of claiming a wild card spot, exciting games every single night. A good part of that has been the relievers in high leverage situations.

Team

FanGraphs has something called the Leverage Index, or LI, that they can use to determine whether a situation is low, medium, or high. They give a great explanation of it here: https://library.fangraphs.com/misc/li/. To give you a quick overview of how he’s broken down:

Low leverage is LI below 0.85
Average/medium leverage is LI at 1
High leverage is LI above 2

Luckily, we don’t have to worry too much about this to gather data since their Splits leaderboard lets us select specifically high leverage situations. Let’s see how the team looks this year:

102.2 IP, tied for most
ERA of 5.61, 8th best
FIP of 4.10, 15th
K% of 21.3%, 8th lowest
BB% of 8.7%, 4th lowest

Great walk rates, lots of batters face, average or better everywhere but K%. Some really good numbers, some OK numbers, one not so fun number. However, they’ve been in lots of situations where the leverage is high. But let’s dig a little deeper, specifically into some players.

Players

The Tigers have had 16 different relievers in high leverage innings. A lot of them aren’t entirely relevant to this particular piece, as they’ve had so few. Seven of the 16 have had fewer than 3 IP. And I think that’s the same way across the league. It makes sense. Sometimes guys get the chances to show what they can do, some guys get thrusted because no one else is available. I wanted to eliminate some noise from here and try to get at least a decent sample size for players.

Season numbers

So I went to the leaderboard and grabbed only players who have faced at least 50 batters in high leverage. Of the 74 relievers who have, 4 of them were Tigers. Here’s a table with the  above metrics for them and where they rank amongst the 74 relievers:

That’s not much of a surprise. Shelby Miller is the only one who has met this threshold and been well below average amongst those 74 pitchers. And has contributed significantly to the higher ERA, FIP, and lower K%. Let’s take a look at a smaller sample size though. One that starts on 8/10, when the miraculous 25-10 stretch began:

Recent 35 game stretch

These, other than Shelby Miller again, are extremely good numbers. A significant jump in his share of IP for Tyler Holton, who has allowed as many hits as he has runs in that 7.2 IP, as well as an insane jump in strikeouts when the game matters the most. Jason Foley and Will Vest also increased their strikeouts, but also dropped their walks. All three of these guys doing so has significantly boost their FIP totals in this small amount of time — and helps with their success. Foley, Holton and Vest have combined to give up 2 ER and just 1 XBH in these 15.1 high leveraged IP, which is nearly half of the teams high leverage innings in that time.

Conclusion

There have been plenty of reasons why this team has been on fire lately. Key hits, pitching as a whole being some of the best, managing of the team. But I really like what the high leverage guys have been doing. The team has needed them to step up and for the most part they have. As they play these final games to make that important push for the wildcard, they’ll be even more important and needed.