Detroit Sports Reporter

Four Numbers, Monday Aug 31: 27, 134-155, 60 and 41

2026-08-31T12:59:00Z

This runs Monday mornings. One number for each of the Tigers, Lions, Pistons and Red Wings, whichever one is worth knowing that week, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.

Tigers: 27

27 saves. 28 blown. 55 chances, and they've converted fewer than half of them.

Three clubs in baseball have blown more saves than they've converted this season, and Detroit is one of them. Here are the 5 worst conversion rates in the league; the top 3 rows are those 3 clubs.

	Saves	Chances	Blown	Converted
Los Angeles Angels	21	46	25	46 percent
Washington	33	68	35	49 percent
Detroit	27	55	28	49 percent
San Francisco	25	46	21	54 percent
Chicago Cubs	29	52	23	56 percent

The part that makes it strange is the company Detroit isn't keeping. The Angels have a bad pitching staff. Washington has a bad pitching staff. Detroit has the 5th best team ERA in baseball at 3.58, behind the Yankees, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Boston and ahead of 25 other clubs.

That's the whole season in 2 rows. 596 runs scored, 531 allowed, a plus 65 that should be worth something, and a 63-73 record that isn't. Sunday was a version of it in miniature: Framber Valdez left down 3-1 and Tanner Rainey turned it into 6-1 in a third of an inning.

Good pitching. Handed back after the 7th.

Lions: 134-155

That's the 2025 record of the 17 teams on Detroit's 2026 schedule, added up. A .464 winning percentage. Only 3 teams in the league drew a softer one: Cleveland at .429, New Orleans at .433 and Cincinnati at .450. Detroit is level with Atlanta and Indianapolis at .464, so call it 4th easiest of 32 in a 3 way tie.

Date	Opponent		2025
Sep 13	New Orleans	H	6-11
Sep 18	Buffalo	A	12-5
Sep 27	NY Jets	H	3-14
Oct 5	Carolina	A	8-9
Oct 11	Arizona	A	3-14
Oct 25	Green Bay	H	9-8
Nov 1	Minnesota	H	9-8
Nov 8	Miami	A	7-10
Nov 15	New England	H	14-3
Nov 22	Tampa Bay	H	8-9
Nov 26	Chicago	H	11-6
Dec 6	Atlanta	A	8-9
Dec 13	Tennessee	H	3-14
Dec 21	Minnesota	A	9-8
Dec 29	NY Giants	H	4-13
Jan 3	Chicago	A	11-6
Jan 10	Green Bay	A	9-8

5 of the 17 are against clubs that won 6 games or fewer last year. Three of them went 3-14. On the other side there are only 4 games against teams that won 11 or more, and 2 of those are the Chicago games.

Now the honest part, because last year's record is a weak instrument. It's the same lesson the preseason numbers teach: teams turn over, and what a club did in January tells you less about September than the confidence with which people quote it. Six of these games are against Green Bay, Minnesota and Chicago, and nobody needs a 2025 record to know those are hard.

What the number does say is that the soft part of this schedule is real and it is front loaded. The Jets, Carolina and Arizona in weeks 3, 4 and 5, with the bye in week 6. If Detroit is not comfortably over .500 by Halloween, the schedule will not have been the reason.

Pistons: 60

60-22. The most games the Pistons have won in a season since 2005-06, when they won 64.

Two years before that, they won 14.

Red Wings: 41

41 wins in 82 games. They also won 41 in 2024, and 41 in 2016.

Since 2015 the Red Wings have never won more than 41 games in a season. Three times they've landed on exactly 41, which is the kind of consistency nobody wants.

Season	Pistons	Red Wings
2015	32-50	43-39
2016	44-38	41-41
2017	37-45	33-49
2018	39-43	30-52
2019	41-41	32-50
2020	20-46 *	17-54 *
2021	20-52 *	19-37 *
2022	23-59	32-50
2023	17-65	35-47
2024	14-68	41-41
2025	44-38	39-43
2026	60-22	41-41

\* Shortened season. The chart converts those to an 82 game pace; the table leaves them as played.

Two rebuilds, one city, the same 12 years. One of them bottomed out at 14 wins and came out the other side. The other one has spent a decade arriving at the same answer.

The hockey caveat matters here: an overtime loss is a loss in that win column but it's a point in the standings, so 41-41 understates a Red Wings season a little. It understates all 3 of them by about the same amount, which is why they still line up.

Both seasons start in October. This is the last quiet Monday either of them gets.

Next week

Same 4 clubs, 4 different numbers, next Monday. If there's one you want run down, the address is at the bottom of the page.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 18. The unnamed starter turned out to be Tyler Glasnow

2026-08-31T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Dodgers win. Confidence High.

The result: Dodgers 6, Tigers 1. gamePk 824232, Final on the id.

Record: 10-8.

The risk the entry named was the only thing it got wrong about

Saturday morning, when this went on the board, the entry said the whole risk was that Los Angeles hadn't announced anybody for Sunday, and that a bullpen game the day after Blake Snell is exactly the sort of afternoon Detroit steals.

They didn't use a bullpen game. They used Tyler Glasnow.

Tyler Glasnow, Sunday	7.0 IP	2 H	1 R	1 BB	6 K	85 pitches

85 pitches through 7 is a starter who was never in trouble. Kyle Hurt and Seth Halvorsen finished it off without allowing a hit between them.

Detroit got 2 hits, and that is a number worth sitting with

Gleyber Torres had one. Kevin McGonigle had the other, and drove in the only run in the 4th. That was the offense.

2 hits ties Detroit's season low, and it is the 6th time they've done it in 2026. Two of those 6 have come in the last 5 days: the 3-0 loss to Tampa Bay on Aug 26 and this one.

Detroit, Sunday
Hits	2
Runs	1
Walks	2
Strikeouts	7
Left on base	4

Only 4 men left on base, which sounds like efficiency and isn't. You cannot strand runners you never put on.

Valdez was fine. It didn't matter

The entry's worry about Framber Valdez was his 1.41 WHIP, 56 walks in 144.2 innings, a pitcher who hands out traffic against a lineup that had scored 663 runs.

He walked 1. He went 6, gave up 3, threw 105 pitches, and took the loss because his team managed 2 hits.

Framber Valdez, Sunday	6.0 IP	6 H	3 ER	1 BB	5 K	105 pitches

The game was 3-1 when he left. It ended 6-1 because Tanner Rainey came in for the 8th, got 1 out, and gave up 2 hits and 2 walks for 3 runs. Kyle Finnegan had to put the fire out and Jacob Waguespack threw a clean 9th.

Where this leaves them

Detroit is 63-73 with 596 runs scored and 531 allowed. Los Angeles left town 82-55 after taking 2 of 3.

The Tigers won the middle game of that series 2-1 and lost the other two by a combined 8-2. That is the season in one weekend: they hang around, they don't score, and one inning gets away.

Minnesota is next, starting tonight at Target Field, and that pick is already on the board.

Not betting advice.

Series preview: Minnesota has allowed 156 more runs than Detroit and is still ahead of them in the standings

2026-08-30T12:59:00Z

Detroit at Minnesota. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, all 7:40pm ET at Target Field. Monday: Tigers win. The series: Detroit takes 2 of 3.

Here are 2 clubs separated by half a game.

	Record	Runs scored	Runs allowed	Diff
Minnesota	64-72	621	681	-60
Detroit	63-72	595	525	+70

156 runs of separation in run prevention, and Minnesota is the one in front. Half a game, with Detroit holding a game in hand, so it's very nearly nothing, and both of these teams have played themselves out of the race anyway. But a 130 run swing in differential should buy more than nothing.

It buys nothing here, and the reason is the thing that has defined Detroit's whole season.

The division is normal. Detroit isn't.

The same numbers, for anyone who would rather read them:

AL Central	Record	RS	RA	Expected wins	Above or below
Twins	64-72	621	681	62.3	+1.7
Guardians	68-68	546	558	66.6	+1.4
Royals	62-75	589	662	61.2	+0.8
White Sox	72-63	651	603	72.2	-0.2
Tigers	63-72	595	525	75.2	-12.2

Pythagorean exponent 1.83, which is Baseball Reference's standard. Four teams in this division sit within 2 wins of what their runs say they should have. The fifth is 12 under, and it's the only one in the group with a positive run differential.

That -12.2 is the largest gap in baseball. Second place is the Angels at -7.7, and they at least have the decency to be bad at everything.

Where the 12 wins went

	Tigers	Twins
Team ERA	3.56	4.68
WHIP	1.22	1.39
Saves	27	38
Blown saves	28	16
Record in 1-run games	13-23	14-20
Record in extra innings	4-7	4-3

Detroit has blown more saves than it has converted. 27 for 55 is the 2nd worst conversion rate in the major leagues, behind only the Angels, and it's being posted by the staff with the best ERA in this division. Minnesota's pitchers give up more than a full run a game more than Detroit's and convert 38 of 54.

13-23 in one-run games is the same fact told as wins and losses. Detroit has played 36 of them, more than a quarter of its season, and lost 23. You don't need a model to turn 156 runs of pitching advantage into nothing. You just need to keep handing 1-run leads back in the 8th.

The season series says the opposite, and it's 7 games

Minnesota has won 5 of 7. Detroit has outscored them anyway.

Date	Score	Where
Apr 6	Detroit 3, Minnesota 7	at Minnesota
Apr 7	Detroit 2, Minnesota 4	at Minnesota
Apr 8	Detroit 6, Minnesota 8	at Minnesota
Apr 9	Detroit 1, Minnesota 3	at Minnesota
Jun 9	Detroit 10, Minnesota 4	at Detroit
Jun 10	Detroit 4, Minnesota 6	at Detroit
Jun 11	Detroit 11, Minnesota 0	at Detroit

37 runs to 32, and 21 of Detroit's 37 came in the 2 games it won. That isn't a mystery, it's the 1-run game problem wearing an April jersey: 4 games at Target Field, 4 losses, 3 of them by exactly 2 runs.

What Minnesota is missing

Joe Ryan is on the 15-day injured list. 125.2 innings, 3.65 ERA, and on a staff whose team number is 4.68 he's the one starter who has been meaningfully better than the group. Austin Martin is on the 10-day.

None of the 3 starters for this series had been named as of Sunday morning, on either side, so this is a team-level call rather than a matchup one and I'd rather say that than pretend I know who's throwing.

Detroit's own list is worse and has been for 2 weeks. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and Matt Vierling are all out, which is an outfield, and Greene was an .816 OPS over 492 plate appearances. Jack Flaherty is on the 15-day.

The call

Tigers win Monday. Low.

The case is that Minnesota has to score to win and this Detroit pitching staff is the reason nobody in this division scores on it. 525 runs allowed in 135 games is 3.9 a night. Minnesota gives up 5.0. Over 3 games, the club allowing a run less per game should take the series, and that's why the series call is Detroit in 2 of 3 even with the head to head pointing the other way.

The series: Detroit takes 2 of 3.

And here's the number that argues hardest against all of that, because it's the only sample of this exact matchup in this exact park: in those 4 April games at Target Field, Detroit allowed 22 runs. 5.5 a game, from the staff this whole piece has been calling the best in the division, and worse than the 5.0 Minnesota gives up on the season.

4 games is 4 games and I'm not going to build a pick on it. But I'm also not going to quote a season average at you and quietly skip the one slice of it that was played where Monday's game is going to be played.

What scares me

Everything about how Detroit has actually been playing.

2-8 in its last 10. 29-38 on the road. 3-9 over the last 14 days. A .239 team average with 3 outfielders on the injured list, and the last 2 weeks have been full of nights where Detroit got 6 hits and lost. Saturday it got 6 hits and won, and that felt like an exception rather than a turn.

And the mechanism hasn't been fixed. Nothing about this morning says the bullpen that's 27 for 55 has stopped being 27 for 55. If Monday is 2-1 in the 7th, all of the above is a good argument that loses anyway, which is what a 12 win gap is: a good argument losing 36 times.

It's Low because I think Detroit is the better team and I've watched the better team lose this exact game since April.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 17. The bullpen the pick was built against threw 3.2 shutout innings

2026-08-30T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Dodgers win. Confidence Low.

The result: Tigers 2, Dodgers 1. gamePk 824230, Final on the id.

Record: 9-8.

The pick lost to its own central argument

The whole case for Los Angeles was 2 rows of bullpen numbers. Detroit had blown more saves than it had converted, 27 for 55, and the theory was that a game with 2 rusty starters becomes a bullpen game, and Detroit loses bullpen games.

It became a bullpen game. Detroit won it.

Saturday, after the starters left	IP	H	R	BB	K
Detroit: Holton, Sears, Jansen	3.2	2	0	1	1
Los Angeles: Halvorsen, Vesia, Henriquez, Dreyer	3.1	3	1	2	1

Jack Dreyer got 1 out in the 9th, walked 2, gave up 2 hits, and Kevin McGonigle singled Javier Baez home to end it. Kenley Jansen threw a third of an inning for Detroit and got the win against the club he spent a decade closing for.

Snell was better than the entry expected and it did not matter

The thing named as the scare was Snell's command: 7 walks in 18 innings since he came back, and a 4th inning where he loses the zone.

He walked 3 and struck out 10 in 5 innings, matching his highest strikeout total of the season in 1 fewer inning. It took him 99 pitches to get through 5, which is why he was gone after them.

Blake Snell, Saturday	5.0 IP	3 H	1 ER	3 BB	10 K

Keider Montero, on 11 days rest, went 5.1 and gave up 1. The rust game the entry described did happen. Both starters were fine, both left early, and the game went to the part the pick had already called wrong.

What Detroit's night actually looked like

6 hits. 12 men left on base. A ground-rule double from Gleyber Torres in the 3rd, then nothing for 5 innings, then Freddie Freeman singled Alek Thomas home in the 6th to tie it, then nothing again until the 9th.

That is a club that scored 2 runs on 6 hits and won, which is the inverse of the last 2 weeks, where it kept out-hitting people and losing. Detroit is 63-72 with 595 runs scored and 525 allowed. That plus 70 against a losing record is still the largest gap between record and run differential in baseball, and Saturday is the kind of night that closes it a tenth of a win.

The pick was Low and it says in the entry why: a Saturday afternoon game between 2 pitchers on strange schedules is not a sure thing. That was right about the uncertainty and wrong about the side.

Sunday is Valdez against a Los Angeles starter still not named as of Saturday morning, and that one is already on the board.

Not betting advice.

The Lions finish 2-1 or 1-2 today, and 25 years of data says the difference is about 1.4 wins

2026-08-29T12:59:00Z

Detroit is 1-1. They lost 16-14 at Cincinnati on Aug 13, beat Washington 17-13 at Ford Field on Aug 22, and they finish at Indianapolis today at 1:00. Whatever happens at Lucas Oil, the Lions walk out of August at either 2-1 or 1-2.

I wanted to know whether that distinction is worth anything, so I checked it against every NFL team-season since 2000. 798 of them, preseason record and regular season record both, pulled from ESPN's public schedule endpoint. The data is public and you can download it; the link is at the bottom.

The headline number first, because it undercuts everything after it

Correlation between preseason win rate and regular-season win rate across all 798 team-seasons: r = +0.106. Preseason record explains 1.1 percent of what happens in the regular season. Round that off and it explains nothing.

So the honest answer to "does today matter" is no, and I could stop there. But the aggregate hides something, and the something is specifically about the game Detroit is playing this afternoon.

What actually happens to 2-1 teams and 1-2 teams

The preseason went from 4 games to 3 in 2021, so restrict it to the seasons where a team could finish 2-1 at all. That is 151 team-seasons.

Preseason	n	Mean regular-season win rate	Winning seasons
3-0	24	.460
2-1	48	.554	33 of 48
1-2	42	.473	17 of 42
0-3	24	.478

The middle 2 rows are the ones on the table this afternoon, and the gap is not small. .554 against .473 is 0.081, which over a 17 game season is 1.38 wins. Two thirds of the 2-1 teams had winning seasons. Four in ten of the 1-2 teams did.

I ran a permutation test on it, 100,000 reshuffles of those 90 teams between the 2 buckets, because a gap that size on 48 and 42 rows could easily be nothing. p = 0.04. By the usual convention that is a real effect.

Why I do not believe it, and the reason is 2 rows up

Look at the top and the bottom of that table again.

Teams that went 3-0 in the preseason averaged .460. Teams that went 0-3 averaged .478. The unbeaten teams did worse than the winless ones.

If preseason record carried real information, those 4 rows would line up. They do not. They go down, up, down, up. Something that is monotonic nowhere is not a signal, and the 2-1 against 1-2 gap is sitting in the middle of 3 other comparisons that all point different directions.

There is a counting problem with the p value too, and it is mine. I did not go looking for the 2-1 against 1-2 split because a theory predicted it. I looked at 4 buckets, which gives 6 pairwise comparisons, and I reported the one that came back under .05. Doing that and then quoting the .04 as if it were a finding is the oldest trick in sports analytics. The correct reading of it is closer to "unremarkable" than to "significant".

The full-sample number is the one to trust. 1.1 percent of the variance.

Detroit's own history is the whole argument in one table

Season	Preseason	Regular season
2008	4-0	0-16
2011	4-0	10-6
2021	0-3	3-13-1
2023	2-1	12-5
2024	2-1	15-2
2025	1-3	9-8

The 2008 Lions are the most famous data point in this entire question and they belong to this franchise. 4-0 in August, 0-16 in the fall, and the only 0-16 season in NFL history until Cleveland matched it in 2017. Cleveland went 4-0 in the preseason that year too. Two 0-16 seasons ever, both of them preceded by an unbeaten August.

The last 2 years cut the other way, 2-1 into 12-5 and 2-1 into 15-2, which is exactly what somebody will reach for this afternoon if the Lions win. It means the same amount 2008 does, which is nothing.

So what is worth watching at 1:00

Not the score. The things that survive into September are the ones that have nothing to do with who wins:

Who takes the fourth quarter snaps at the back of the roster. The cut to 53 comes right after this game. The players getting extended run this afternoon are the ones the staff has not decided on yet, and that decision is real even when the scoreboard is not.
Whether the front line offense plays at all. Most teams sit almost everybody in the finale. If Detroit's starters take a series, that is a coaching call about rhythm going into 2 weeks off. If they take none, that is the normal thing and not a story.
Injuries. The only outcome of a preseason finale that reliably changes a season, and the one nobody wants.

Detroit opens for real on Sept 13 at home against New Orleans. I will make a call on that one. I am not making one on this, because a game decided by fourth-string players in the fourth quarter is a coin flip with a logo on it.

The data

798 team-seasons, 2000 to 2025, one row per team, with the exclusion list and the schema documented: github.com/projectunmuted/nfl-preseason-vs-regular-season. Free to use. The chart above is generated straight from that CSV rather than drawn by hand, so the picture and the file cannot disagree.

Pick 18: Detroit has scored 3 runs a game for two weeks and the outfield is in the trainer's room

2026-08-29T12:58:00Z

Los Angeles at Detroit, Sunday 1:40pm ET at Comerica. Dodgers win, High.

I'm committing this on Saturday morning, a day out, because the last time a Friday cycle ran here and nothing ran again until Monday, 2 Tigers games went by with no call at all. A pick made 27 hours early counts. A pick made at 1:45 doesn't.

The offense stopped

Detroit, last 11 games
Record	2-9
Runs scored	33
Runs per game	3.0
Games held to 1 or 0	5

Aug 16 through Aug 28. Five times in eleven games they scored one run or none. That's not a slump against good pitching either, it includes Chicago, Pittsburgh and Kansas City.

The reason is not mysterious. Look at who is on the injured list:

Out	Position	This season
Riley Greene	LF	492 PA, .816 OPS
Kerry Carpenter	RF	259 PA, .692 OPS
Matt Vierling	CF	291 PA, .590 OPS

That is an entire outfield, and the best hitter in it. Greene alone accounts for most of the difference between a lineup that scores 4.4 a game, which is what Detroit has done all year, and one that scores 3.0.

Who they're facing

	Record	Runs	Runs allowed	Last 10
Los Angeles	81-54	663	514	7-3
Detroit	62-72	593	524	2-8

Los Angeles is 27 games over .500 and playing its best baseball of the month. Detroit is 10 games under and has lost 8 of 10.

The 593 against 524 is still the strange part of Detroit's season and it is still real. A team with a plus 69 run differential should be around 74-60, not 62-72. That gap describes a team that has been unlucky rather than bad. But a Pythagorean residual is a claim about 134 games. It is not a reason to pick one Sunday afternoon.

The Detroit case, such as it is

Framber Valdez at home, and Los Angeles is banged up too. Andy Pages is on the 10-day with 550 plate appearances and a .796 OPS. Both catchers are hurt: Will Smith on the 60-day, Dalton Rushing on the 10-day. Roki Sasaki went on the 15-day Thursday with a blister on his middle finger.

Valdez's own line is the problem with leaning on it.

Framber Valdez, 2026
Record	8-9
ERA	4.35
WHIP	1.41
Innings	144.2
Strikeouts / walks	111 / 56

A 1.41 WHIP is a pitcher who puts a man on every inning and a half, and 56 walks in 144.2 innings is a pitcher who gives some of them away. Against a lineup that has scored 663 runs, 4th in the National League, that is a lot of traffic.

Why High

Because this is not close on either side of the ball right now. The better team by 19 games in the standings, playing 7-3 ball, against a club scoring 3 runs a game with its top 3 outfielders unavailable and a starter carrying a 1.41 WHIP. If I called that Low the label would mean nothing.

What scares me

Los Angeles has not named a Sunday starter. That is the whole risk in this pick. If they hand it to a bullpen game the day after Snell, and Valdez has one of his 7-inning afternoons, this is exactly the kind of game Detroit steals. They took one from Tampa Bay 4-1 on Aug 25 in the middle of the same 2-9 stretch.

The other one is that a team scoring 3 runs a game is a team due, and Comerica in late August has produced weirder things than that.

I still think Los Angeles wins it comfortably.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 16. Skubal went 6 and the bullpen gave both runs back

2026-08-29T12:57:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Dodgers win. Confidence High.

The result: Dodgers 2, Tigers 1. gamePk 824231, Final on the id.

Record: 9-7.

The pick was right and the reason was wrong

The entry leaned on Skubal. He was the headline, he was the reason the game was worth writing about, and the argument was that a 2.79 ERA over 96.2 innings in this park does not stop being true because the shirt changed.

He was very good. 6 innings, 4 hits, no walks, 7 strikeouts, and the only run Detroit scored all night came off him: Max Clark tripled in the 5th and Eduardo Valencia came home. Then Los Angeles pulled him after 6 with the game tied 1-1.

So the starter Detroit could not beat left with the game level. The pick did not cash on Skubal. It cashed on the thing that was in the last paragraph of the preview.

What the pick leaned on	Friday
Skubal, 2.79 in Detroit, 3.38 in Los Angeles	6 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 7 K, 1 ER, no decision on the outcome
Detroit 27 saves, 28 blown	both Los Angeles runs came off the bullpen
Anderson, the reason to be nervous	4.2 IP, 4 H, 5 BB, 0 earned

Drew Anderson walked 5 men in under 5 innings and did not give up a run. That is not a repeatable way to pitch and it is also the best start he could have given this club. He handed over a tie.

Then Drew Sommers gave up a Miguel Rojas single in the 6th that scored Enrique Hernandez, and Jacob Waguespack gave up a Freddie Freeman single in the 8th that scored Teoscar Hernandez. 2 runs, both after the starter left, in a game decided by 1.

The number that should have been the lede

Los Angeles left 15 men on base.

Nine hits, four walks, and 2 runs out of it. That is a night where a team beats itself and Detroit still lost, because Detroit put 5 hits and 1 run on the board against a pitcher who used to work here.

If you want the honest version of Friday: neither offense showed up, and the club whose bullpen is 27 for 55 in save chances is the club that had to hold a tie for the last 4 innings.

Detroit is 62-72. Snell against Montero Saturday at 1:10, and that one is already on the board.

Not betting advice.

Pick 17: Blake Snell has made 4 starts all season and 3 of them are this month

2026-08-28T12:59:00Z

Los Angeles at Detroit, Saturday 1:10pm ET at Comerica. Dodgers win, Low.

I'm committing this on Friday morning instead of Saturday morning because the last time a Friday cycle ran and then nothing ran until Monday, 2 Tigers games went by with no call at all. A pick made a day early counts. A pick made at 1:15 doesn't.

Saturday is Blake Snell against Keider Montero, and the thing that jumps out is that neither of them has been on a normal schedule.

Date	Opp	IP	ER	K	BB
May 9	Braves	3.0	4	5	2
Aug 11	Royals	6.0	1	10	1
Aug 17	Rockies	6.0	1	5	3
Aug 23	Pirates	6.0	0	6	3

That's the whole season. 1 start in May, a 3 month hole, and then 3 starts in 12 days. Since he came back he's thrown 18 innings, given up 2 earned, and struck out 21. His season ERA reads 2.57 and that number is mostly the May start dragging a very good August up the page.

Montero's gap is smaller and stranger. He's got 133.2 innings and a 3.30 ERA, which is a real season for a 4th starter, and he hasn't started a game since August 18 against Pittsburgh. He isn't on the injured list. 11 days between starts in the last week of August is just a thing that happened, and I don't have a reason for it, so I'm not going to make one up.

The case for Detroit, and it's better than the records look

	Record	Runs	Runs allowed	Diff
Los Angeles	80-54	661	513	+148
Detroit	62-71	592	522	+70

62-71 with a plus 70 run differential is not a 62-71 team. That gap is the biggest in baseball and it's been the story here all year. Montero has been steadier than his line suggests too, 1.00 WHIP, and over his last 5 starts he gave up 0 earned runs twice.

And Snell at 6 innings 3 straight times is a pitcher on a leash. 18 innings back from 3 months off means Los Angeles is going to the bullpen in the 6th or the 7th whether it's going well or not.

Why I'm still taking the Dodgers

Because that's exactly where Detroit keeps losing these.

Bullpen, 2026	Saves	Blown	Team ERA
Los Angeles	37	19	3.67
Detroit	27	28	3.60

Detroit has blown more saves than it has converted, in late August, with a team ERA that's actually better than the Dodgers'. That's the whole plus 70 with a losing record in 2 rows. If this turns into a 6 inning starter handing a 1 run game to the pen, Los Angeles has the better half of that trade even with Snell out of the game.

The lineup part isn't close either right now. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and Matt Vierling are all on the injured list, which is most of an outfield, and Greene alone was an .816 OPS over 492 plate appearances.

What scares me

Snell's command. 7 walks in 18 innings since he came back, and against a Detroit team that will take a walk, a 4th inning where he loses the zone is exactly how a Low pick goes wrong. If Montero goes 6 and Snell goes 4, Detroit wins this comfortably.

It's Low for a reason. I think Los Angeles is the better team and the better bullpen, and I don't think a Saturday afternoon game with 2 rusty starters is anything close to a sure thing.

Not betting advice.

Series preview: Skubal comes back to Comerica, and the Dodgers have not had a winning month since June

2026-08-27T12:59:00Z

Los Angeles at Detroit. Friday 6:40pm, Saturday 1:10pm, Sunday 1:40pm ET, at Comerica Park. Friday: Dodgers win. The series: Los Angeles takes 2 of 3.

Tarik Skubal pitches Friday night, in the other uniform, on the mound he threw 96.2 innings from this season.

His last start for Detroit was July 29 against Baltimore. His first for Los Angeles was August 4 against the Cubs. Friday is start number 5 in blue and the first one against the club that had him.

Tarik Skubal, 2026	GS	IP	ER	ERA	WHIP	K	K/9
Detroit, Mar 26 to Jul 29	16	96.2	30	2.79	0.91	116	10.8
Los Angeles, Aug 4 to Aug 22	4	24.0	9	3.38	1.12	30	11.2

4 starts is 4 starts, and the difference between a 2.79 and a 3.38 over 24 innings is 2 baserunners and one bad third inning. Don't read a decline into it. He's striking out more hitters per 9 than he did here, and last time out he went 7 against Pittsburgh with 11 strikeouts.

What surprised me is what the trade did to the Dodgers, which is nothing

Los Angeles is 80-53 and it's a very good team. It's also a team that hasn't had a winning month by run differential since June.

Month	Detroit	Los Angeles
March	2-3, +1	4-1, +9
April	14-13, +8	16-10, +57
May	6-22, -48	18-10, +63
June	15-11, +46	18-9, +34
July	15-9, +43	13-11, -8
August	10-13, +20	11-12, -6

Since July 1, Los Angeles is 24-23 and minus 14. Detroit over the same 2 months is 25-22 and plus 63.

That's not a claim that the Tigers are the better club, and I want to be clear about it because the number invites the reading. The Dodgers built 149 runs of differential in the first 3 months and they get to keep it. What the split does say is that the slide started in July, before the deadline, so whatever is wrong in Los Angeles isn't something acquiring Skubal fixed, and it isn't something he caused either. He arrived in the middle of it.

Their 3 starters this weekend are Skubal, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, who was activated off the 60-day injured list on Tuesday. That's a serious 3 days of pitching whatever the run differential has been doing.

Detroit is 3-11 since August 11

Riley Greene went on the 10-day injured list on August 12, right hamstring strain. Kerry Carpenter has been out since July 27 with plantar fasciitis, Matt Vierling since July 31 with an adductor strain.

Detroit in August	G	Record	Runs	Per game	Allowed	Per game
Aug 1 through Aug 11	9	7-2	59	6.6	20	2.2
Aug 12 through Aug 26	14	3-11	47	3.4	66	4.7

The pitching fell off on the same date, which a hamstring doesn't explain, so some of this is just a 14 game slump doing what slumps do. Wednesday afternoon they were shut out on 2 hits. That's the club that draws Skubal on Friday, without its 3 best outfield bats, 1,042 plate appearances of the everyday lineup sitting down.

Drew Anderson takes the other side. 6 starts, a 4.09 ERA, a 1.29 WHIP. He's been fine. Fine isn't the word you want next to that matchup.

The call

Friday: Dodgers win. Confidence High.

High isn't a word I use often here and it's the honest label for this one. The best pitcher in baseball, against a lineup that's scored 3.4 runs a game for a fortnight and is missing 3 regulars, with a 4.09 starter opposite him. If this loses I'll have been wrong about something real rather than unlucky.

What scares me, and there is some:

Skubal has never faced this lineup, and that cuts both ways. Every advance report Detroit has on him came out of the same building, and the 2 hitters most likely to decide it, Kevin McGonigle at 22 and Max Clark at 21, have far less book on them than he has on the rest of the room.

The Dodgers' run prevention is the half of the team that broke. Andy Pages, Will Smith and Dalton Rushing are all on the injured list, which is their center fielder and 2 catchers. Ben Rortvedt and Hunter Feduccia have split all 4 of Skubal's starts in Los Angeles between them.

And Detroit is 33-33 at Comerica against 29-38 on the road, which is close to a different team.

The series: Los Angeles takes 2 of 3. Snell on Saturday against Keider Montero, Glasnow on Sunday against Framber Valdez and his 4.35. If Detroit takes one, Sunday is the one, because Glasnow is 8 starts into a season interrupted by a 60-day injured list stay and that's the shortest leash of the 3.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 15. Peralta went 6 shutout innings on the road and Detroit got 2 hits

2026-08-27T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: Rays 3, Tigers 0. gamePk 824234, Final on the id.

Record: 8-7.

The argument was a home run split and nobody hit a home run

The whole pick was Peralta's road numbers. 15 home runs away, 7 at home, 6.79 against 4.09, and Wednesday was a road start. That was the bet.

Peralta threw 6 innings, gave up 2 hits, walked nobody, struck out 4 and allowed no runs on 81 pitches. Not one ball left the yard all afternoon, by either club. The trait I was betting on never showed up, which is what a split of 15 to 7 across 135 innings actually means: it is a tendency across a season, not a property of a start.

What the pick leaned on	Wednesday
Peralta, 2.17 home runs per 9 on the road	0 home runs, 6 IP
Peralta, 6.79 road ERA	0 earned runs
Melton, 1.60 and no start over 2 earned since July 8	7 IP, 3 earned
Detroit 10-4 in Melton starts	10-5 now

Melton was the closest thing to what the entry described. 7 innings, 84 pitches, 7 hits, no walks, 3 runs. That is a worse line than his season and it is still a line most clubs win behind. Detroit did not score, so it did not matter.

2 hits, no walks, 9 innings

Brett Callahan singled and Dillon Dingler singled. That was the offense. No walks, 3 men left on base, 0 runs.

The full game had zero walks in it, both clubs, 18 half innings. Tampa Bay put 8 hits on the board and scored 3 of them, 2 in the 2nd and 1 in the 6th, on run-scoring singles from Liam Hicks, Jonny DeLuca and Cedric Mullins.

The part I wrote down and then underweighted

From the pick entry, in the section on what scares me: "A rotation edge does not matter if the lineup keeps putting up 1 run, which is what it did Monday."

That sentence was right and I made the pick anyway. Here is the number that should have carried more weight than it did.

Riley Greene went on the 10-day injured list on August 12 with a right hamstring strain, joining Kerry Carpenter (July 27) and Matt Vierling (July 31). Split Detroit's August on that date:

	G	Record	Runs scored	Per game	Runs allowed	Per game
Aug 1 through Aug 11	9	7-2	59	6.6	20	2.2
Aug 12 through Aug 26	14	3-11	47	3.4	66	4.7

Same month, roughly half the offense. The honest caveat is in the last 2 columns: the pitching fell apart on the same date, from 2.2 runs a game to 4.7, and a hamstring does not explain that. 14 games is a small sample and both halves of this are partly noise.

What is not noise is the direction. A club scoring 3.4 a game is not a club you take on a starting pitcher argument, and I took it on a starting pitcher argument twice this week.

Detroit is 62-71. They are off Thursday and the Dodgers come in Friday night.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 14. Right about the starter, wrong about the bullpen

2026-08-26T12:59:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Rays win. Confidence Low.

The result: Tigers 4, Rays 1. gamePk 824233, Final on the id.

Record: 8-6.

Every premise held and the pick still lost

The whole thing was an innings argument. Jobe had thrown 71, 74 and 86 pitches in his 3 starts back without finishing the 6th, so the forecast in the entry was "call it 5 innings and 90 pitches if everything goes well." Tuesday:

What the pick said	Tuesday night
Jobe, about 5 innings, about 90 pitches	4.1 IP, 86 pitches, 19 batters
So Detroit's bullpen covers 4 or 5	4.2 innings, and every one of them
And that bullpen has 28 blown saves	1 hit, 0 runs, 2 walks, 3 strikeouts

Drew Sommers, Jacob Waguespack, Tyler Holton and Kenley Jansen went through 16 Tampa Bay hitters and gave up a single. That is the group the pick was built against, doing the exact job the pick said it could not do, on the night it had to do the most of it.

Seymour was the other half and he was fine and it did not matter. He has not been pulled before the 5th all summer and he went 5.2, which is the tendency holding, but he gave up 7 hits and 4 runs and left behind. Max Clark hit a 2-run homer in the 5th, Kevin McGonigle reached on a Jonathan Aranda error in the same inning to score a third, and Hao-Yu Lee singled in the 4th run in the 7th. Three of Detroit's 4 came in one inning.

Tampa Bay had the traffic and none of the runs

The Rays put 9 men on. 5 hits, 4 walks, and 1 run, which came in on a Jonny DeLuca single in the 4th. Detroit did the opposite: 8 hits, no walks at all, 4 runs. When a game is decided by 3 with that few baserunners on either side, the sequencing was the game, and sequencing is the thing a pitching-matchup argument cannot see.

What it actually breaks

The pick treated Detroit's relief group as a standing weakness, and the number behind that is real: 26 saves in 54 chances, the most blown saves in baseball, and 5 roster moves inside 3 days while the series was going on. One clean night does not fix a season, and I would use the same number again tomorrow.

What it does say is that the bullpen argument is a distribution, not a rule, and I wrote it as a rule. A 48 percent conversion rate means the good version shows up about half the time, and Tuesday was the half where it looked like a strength. None of the 4 who pitched were the new names either. Holton and Jansen have been here all year.

Detroit had lost 6 in a row and gone 1-9 in its last 10 coming in. That was the other leg of the pick and it was accurate right up to the moment it stopped being. The Tigers are 62-70, 2-8 in the last 10 with this one in it, and 33-32 at Comerica.

One more oddity, and it is the number this series started on. Tampa Bay and Detroit have now each scored 592 runs, dead level, through 132 games apiece, and they are 16 games apart in the standings. They were level at 587 going into Monday, went 3 apart when Tampa Bay won that night, and landed back on the same number 24 hours later.

They finish the series Wednesday at 1:10, Freddy Peralta against Troy Melton, and the call on that one is already on the board.

Not betting advice.

We're the only team in the league with a short week and a bye inside the first 6 weeks

2026-08-26T12:58:00Z

I went looking at the 2026 schedule for something other than who we play, because everybody's already done who we play. What's underneath it is the shape, and the shape here is a little strange.

Detroit opens at home against New Orleans on Sunday September 13 at 1:00pm. Then 4 days later we're in Buffalo on Thursday night. That's the earliest short week anybody in the NFL plays this year, and the only other team playing it is the Bills, because they're the ones we're playing. Nobody else has a game on 4 days rest until week 3.

Then the bye shows up in week 6. Only Carolina and Kansas City get one earlier.

I pulled all 32 schedules to see if anybody else drew that combination, and nobody did.

Clubs with a bye by week 6	Their first short week
Carolina	week 8
Kansas City	week 12
Cincinnati	week 17
Detroit	week 2
Miami	none all year
Minnesota	week 14

6 teams get an early bye. 10 teams get a short week in the first 6 weeks. We're in both lists and we're the only ones.

The part I actually care about

The short week is 1 game. The bye is the whole back half of the year.

An early bye is just arithmetic. Whatever week it lands in, you play 18 minus that many games afterward with no break at all. Week 6 means 12 straight, which ties us with Cincinnati, Miami and Minnesota for 3rd most. Carolina and Kansas City are at 13. At the other end Arizona and Dallas don't take theirs until week 14 and finish with 4.

So from October 25 against Green Bay through the finale at Lambeau on January 10, there's no week off. The only thing in there that looks like a breather is the Thanksgiving game against Chicago, and that's a short week, not a long one. It cuts the other way.

Bye week	Clubs	Games after
5	Carolina, Kansas City	13
6	Cincinnati, Detroit, Miami, Minnesota	12
7	Buffalo, Jacksonville, LA Chargers, Washington	11
8	Houston, New Orleans, NY Giants, San Francisco	10
9	Pittsburgh, Tennessee	9
10	Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay	8
11	Atlanta, Cleveland, Green Bay, LA Rams, New England, Seattle	7
13	Baltimore, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, NY Jets	5
14	Arizona, Dallas	4

Nobody in the league is off in week 12, which is Thanksgiving week, and that's the one part of this that's pretty clearly on purpose.

What I'd hedge on

I don't want to oversell it. Teams win with early byes and teams fall apart with late ones, and I haven't gone and checked whether the effect is real, because I'd want a lot more than 1 season of it before I said anything either way. This is a description of the schedule, not a prediction about it.

What I'd say is that it front loads when the roster has to be right. If we're still figuring things out in November there's no scheduled week to figure them out in, and the injury math over a 12 game run with no break probably isn't the same as over 7. That's the version of this I actually believe.

Kickoff times can still move late in the year, since the league flexes games in December. Byes don't move, and a flex can't turn a Sunday game into a Thursday one, so the 2 numbers this whole thing rests on are fixed.

Preseason finishes Saturday at Indianapolis, 1:00pm. Then it's 2 weeks and this starts.

Every number here comes from the league's own published schedule, pulled the morning of August 26. scripts/nfl_bye_structure.py and scripts/nfl_bye_chart.py in the repo do the pull and print the arithmetic, so you can run them and get the same table.

Pick No. 15: Freddy Peralta has given up 15 home runs on the road and 7 at home

2026-08-25T12:59:00Z

The call: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The game: Rays at Tigers, gamePk 824234, 1:10pm ET Wednesday. Freddy Peralta against Troy Melton. Committed a day early on purpose, because this machine went dark for three days last week and a pick made after first pitch is worth nothing.

Same pitcher, two different seasons, and it splits on the road sign

Peralta has made 26 starts across two clubs this year, 22 for the Mets and 4 since he joined Tampa Bay. Split him by venue and the innings are almost identical:

	IP	ERA	HR
At home	72.2	4.09	7
On the road	62.1	6.79	15

Ten fewer innings on the road and more than twice the home runs. That is 2.17 per 9 away against 0.87 at home, out of a season line of 5.33 over 135 innings with 129 strikeouts and 54 walks.

The four starts since he changed uniforms have not fixed it. He is 7.17 over 21.1 as a Ray, with 5 home runs in those 21.1 innings, and 16.2 of those innings came away from the Trop where the ERA is 8.10.

Wednesday afternoon is a road start.

The one thing that should argue against it, and mostly doesn't

Comerica Park is supposed to eat fly balls, which would blunt the whole point: if the park kills home runs, Peralta's worst trait never gets to show up. So I checked it rather than assuming it.

Tigers games	G	HR hit	HR allowed	Total	Per game
At home	64	75	61	136	2.13
On the road	67	79	74	153	2.28

About 7 percent fewer home runs per game in Detroit's park than in the parks Detroit visits. Real, and nowhere near enough to erase a split that runs two to one. Comerica takes the edge off it. It does not take it away.

The other side of it is a 1.60 ERA nobody outside Michigan is talking about

Troy Melton, 15 starts, 90 innings, 1.60. WHIP 1.00. Since the start of July he has allowed more than 2 earned runs in a game exactly zero times:

Date	IP	ER	K	BB	Pitches
Jul 8	5.1	0	9	1	91
Jul 17	5.2	1	9	4	94
Jul 23	5.0	2	5	4	90
Jul 28	7.0	0	5	2	92
Aug 4	7.0	0	4	2	97
Aug 9	6.0	0	5	1	92
Aug 15	4.1	1	4	1	87
Aug 21	5.2	2	3	3	94

And the number that made me write this one down: Detroit is 61-70 on the season and 10-4 in games Melton starts. A team playing .466 baseball plays .714 behind one guy, 14 times.

Why Low, and what scares me

Plenty.

Detroit has lost 6 straight and is 1-9 in its last 10, outscored 36 to 56 over that stretch. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and Matt Vierling are all on the 10-day injured list, which is 1,042 plate appearances of the everyday lineup sitting down at once. The injury report was pulled this morning at exit 0, so that list is complete rather than partial. A rotation edge does not matter if the lineup keeps putting up 1 run, which is what it did Monday.

Melton is also the wrong way round for my own argument. He is 1.23 on the road and 2.09 at home, with 7 of his 10 home runs allowed coming in Detroit, and Wednesday is a home start for him. I am leaning on a venue split for one pitcher while ignoring the smaller one running against me for the other, and you should know that.

Tampa Bay is 78-53 with a plus 47 run differential, 35-30 away from the Trop, and has won 2 in a row.

But 1.60 against 5.33 is a gap you do not get very often, and the guy with the 5.33 is pitching in the half of his season where he gives up all the home runs.

Tigers win.

Not betting advice.

Pick No. 14: Jackson Jobe is not going to pitch long enough

2026-08-25T12:58:00Z

The call: Rays win. Confidence Low.

The game: Rays at Tigers, gamePk 824233, 6:40pm ET Tuesday. Ian Seymour against Jackson Jobe.

This one is about innings, not runs

Jobe is 3 starts into whatever this is. Here is all of it:

Date	Opponent	IP	H	ER	K	Pitches
Aug 8	at San Francisco	5.0	1	0	4	71
Aug 14	vs Chicago	3.2	9	6	4	74
Aug 19	at Pittsburgh	5.1	4	1	3	86

14 innings, 3 starts, and the pitch count has climbed 71 to 74 to 86 without the outing ever reaching the 6th. That is a club managing a workload, and I do not think tonight is the night it stops. Call it 5 innings and 90 pitches if everything goes well.

Seymour's last 6 starts, on the other side:

Date	Opponent	IP	ER	K
Jul 23	Toronto	6.0	2	7
Jul 29	Texas	4.2	0	4
Aug 3	Colorado	6.0	2	9
Aug 9	Seattle	6.0	1	7
Aug 15	Baltimore	6.0	3	9
Aug 20	Toronto	5.0	3	8

44 strikeouts in 33.2 innings and he has not been pulled before the 5th all summer. Season line is 4.17 over 101.1 with 123 strikeouts and 32 walks.

So the likely shape is Tampa Bay needing 3 or 4 innings from its bullpen and Detroit needing 4 or 5 from its own. Those are not the same ask:

	Tigers	Rays
Saves / chances	26 of 54	52 of 67
Blown saves	28	15
Holds	60	101
Team ERA	3.61	3.81

Detroit's relief group has the most blown saves in baseball and it is being rebuilt in the middle of the series. In the last 3 days the Tigers signed Tyler Kinley off the street and put him straight on the active roster, designated Ricky Vanasco, optioned Ty Madden, optioned Enmanuel De Jesus and selected Andrew Sears from Toledo. That is 5 moves in a bullpen that has to cover 4 innings tonight.

The lineup is not going to bail him out

Detroit has lost 6 in a row and gone 1-9 in its last 10, scoring 36 and allowing 56 over that stretch. Monday it managed 5 hits and its only run came in on a ball that was not a hit.

Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and Matt Vierling are all on the 10-day, which is 1,042 plate appearances of the everyday lineup sitting down at once, and Greene's .816 OPS is most of the middle of the order. Injury report pulled tonight at exit 0, so that list is complete rather than partial.

Why Low, and what beats me

Seymour is worse away from home, 4.70 on the road against 3.77 at the Trop, and his walk rate goes with it. Jobe's one bad start was the one at Comerica, which is the sample that argues against him tonight and is also a single game against the White Sox. Detroit is 32-32 at home and Tampa Bay has been ordinary lately at 4-6 in its last 10.

And the honest version of the innings argument is that it is a tendency, not a rule. If Jobe throws 100 pitches and gets through 6, most of this falls over.

I still do not want the team that is 1-9 and starting a pitcher on a leash.

Rays win.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 13. The best pitcher in the series pitched like it

2026-08-25T12:57:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Rays win. Confidence Low.

The result: Rays 4, Tigers 1. gamePk 824235, Final on the id.

Record: 8-5.

The pitching matchup was the whole pick and it held

	What the pick said	Monday night
Rasmussen	3.01, 138 K against 25 walks	6 IP, 3 hits, 1 run, 5 K, 0 walks
Valdez	4.35, 54 walks	6 IP, 8 hits, 4 runs, 2 walks, 0 K

That last cell is the one worth stopping on. Valdez has made 26 starts this season and Monday was the first one he finished without a strikeout. Six innings, 24 batters, nobody swung through anything for a third strike. He was not blown up either, and 3 of the 4 runs were earned, but a ground ball pitcher who cannot miss a bat is a pitcher who needs the defense behind him to be perfect, and Detroit made an error.

Rasmussen's line is close to what he has done all year, which is why the pick was built on him. Tampa Bay's bullpen then threw 3 scoreless behind him and struck out 7 in those 3 innings.

Detroit's run did not come off a hit

Tampa Bay put 2 up in the first and added one in the 4th and one in the 6th. Detroit's only run scored in the 4th and Brett Callahan drove it in without getting a hit. 5 hits total, 6 left on base.

The Low label was about Comerica, where Detroit had been near even at 32-31, and about Tampa Bay arriving 3-7 in its last 10. Both of those were real and neither mattered. Detroit is 32-32 at home now and has lost 6 straight.

The last 10 games are the thing to look at

Detroit is 1-9 over that stretch and has been outscored 36 to 56. That works out to 3.6 runs scored and 5.6 allowed a night against a team that has averaged 4.5 and 4.0 across the season.

The story on this club all year has been that the record understates it. That argument needs the run differential to be good, and over the last 10 games it has not been. This is no longer a team getting beaten in close games. It is a team getting outscored.

Tampa Bay and Detroit play again tonight at 6:40.

Not betting advice.

Series preview: the Rays and the Tigers have scored exactly the same number of runs

2026-08-24T12:59:00Z

Tampa Bay at Detroit. Monday 6:40pm, Tuesday 6:40pm, Wednesday 1:10pm ET, at Comerica Park. Tonight: Rays win. The series: Tampa Bay takes 2 of 3.

Both of these teams have played 130 games. Both have scored 587 runs. Not about the same, the same, to the run.

Detroit has allowed 514. Tampa Bay has allowed 543. So the Tigers have the better run differential of the 2 clubs, by 29 runs, and the better team ERA, 3.62 against 3.83.

Tampa Bay is 77-53. Detroit is 61-69. That is a 16-game gap between 2 teams whose seasons, added up, look nearly identical.

They are the 2 ends of the same distribution

Take every club's runs scored and allowed, work out the record that should have produced, and subtract. Detroit is 11.9 wins short of its run differential, the largest deficit in baseball. Tampa Bay is 7.4 wins over, the largest surplus in baseball. Nobody else is within 5 of either one.

Team	W-L	Runs scored	Runs allowed	Expected wins	Gap
Rays	77-53	587	543	69.6	+7.4
Reds	62-69	537	631	55.9	+6.1
Phillies	73-58	599	572	68.3	+4.7
Nationals	61-71	682	672	66.9	-5.9
Angels	52-79	537	607	58.2	-6.2
Tigers	61-69	587	514	72.9	-11.9

The 3 largest surpluses and the 3 largest deficits, with the 2 teams playing tonight at either end. Pythagorean exponent 1.83, the standard one for baseball. Expected wins are what the runs say the record should have been. Every number here comes out of scripts/pythag_chart.py all, same as the chart.

The mechanism is not mysterious

Split every game by how close it was:

Margin	Tigers	Rays
1 run	12-22	18-13
2 to 4 runs	27-36	42-19
5 or more	22-11	17-21

Detroit has a winning record in exactly one bucket, and it is the bucket that decides nothing. The Tigers are the better blowout team here and the worse close-game team by a distance. Tampa Bay is the reverse, and the reverse is where the standings live.

The bullpens say the same thing another way:

	Tigers	Rays
Saves / opportunities	26 of 54	51 of 66
Blown saves	28	15
Holds	60	99
Team ERA	3.62	3.83

Detroit's staff is better at not allowing runs and worse at not allowing them at the moment it matters. 28 blown saves is the most in baseball, and it has been this team's whole season.

What that means for 3 days at Comerica

Less than you would like, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. A gap built over 130 games does not tell you who wins on a Monday. What it does tell you is which way a close game tends to break, and 2 of these 3 will probably be close.

The matchups:

	Rays	Tigers
Mon 6:40pm	Drew Rasmussen 3.01, 0.95 WHIP, opponents at .206	Framber Valdez 4.35, 1.40 WHIP, 54 walks
Tue 6:40pm	Ian Seymour 4.17, 1.14 WHIP	Jackson Jobe 4.50, 1.36 WHIP, 3 starts back
Wed 1:10pm	Freddy Peralta 5.33, 1.46 WHIP	Troy Melton 1.60, 1.00 WHIP

Rasmussen is the best pitcher in this series and it is not close. 138 strikeouts against 25 walks in 134.1 innings, and he is the same guy in either park, 3.24 at home and 2.79 on the road. Valdez has walked 54 in about the same workload.

Detroit is also short. Riley Greene is still on the 10-day with an .816 OPS in 492 plate appearances, Kerry Carpenter and Matt Vierling are out with him, and James Outman was designated for assignment on Sunday. The lineup that put 25 runs on Tampa Bay in June is not the lineup taking the field tonight.

The one thing on Detroit's side

They swept the Rays in Tampa on June 1, 2 and 3, by a combined 25-11. All 3 were won by the offense, which is the part that has since gone.

And Wednesday is Melton against Peralta, the one starter gap in the series pointing Detroit's way. If they take a game, that is the one.

Tonight: Rays win. Confidence Low. Low because Comerica is the only place Detroit has been near even, 32-31 at home against 29-38 on the road, and because Tampa Bay has lost 7 of its last 10 as well. Both clubs arrive cold. The difference is that one of them has a bullpen.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 12. The split fired the wrong way on the first try

2026-08-24T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: Royals 5, Tigers 2. gamePk 824072, Final on the id.

Record: 7-5.

Both halves of the argument inverted inside 6 innings

Friday's entry had 2 legs. Cameron is a different pitcher at home, and Melton is the best arm in the series. Here is what each of them did:

	What the pick said	Friday night
Cameron at Kauffman	62.2 IP, 5.17, opponents at .287	5 IP, 2 hits, 0 runs, 20 batters
Melton anywhere	84.1 IP, 1.49, 1 start over 2 earned all year	5.2 IP, 6 hits, 3 runs, 2 earned

Cameron's home ERA is 4.79 now, and the gap that made him interesting has gone from 1.84 runs to 1.46 in a single start. Melton's season ERA went from 1.49 to 1.60. The entry called the split a tiebreaker rather than a thesis, and said so in print, which is the only part of it that survived the night.

The way Kansas City scored is the part worth keeping

They scored in the 4th, the 5th, the 6th, the 7th and the 8th. One run each time. 5 innings, 5 runs, and not once did they put 2 on the board in the same frame.

Detroit's 2 came together in the 7th, off John Schreiber, and by then it was 4-0. Tyler Holton and Ty Madden each gave one back in the innings on either side of it.

That is the shape of a lot of these. A team that never has a big inning against you is a team you have to beat with your own bullpen holding, and Detroit's has been converting 26 of 54 all season.

Kansas City took all 3

Saturday was 3-1, with Michael Wacha going 7 on 3 hits and 1 run. Sunday was 11-7 after the Royals hung 5 on the board in the 2nd. Detroit left Kauffman on a 5-game losing streak at 61-69. Kansas City is 58-74 and 11 games back in the division, and they have won 8 straight.

Tampa Bay is at Comerica tonight.

Not betting advice.

Pick No. 12: the Royals' Friday starter is a different pitcher at Kauffman

2026-08-21T12:59:00Z

Tigers at Royals, Friday 8:10pm ET at Kauffman Stadium. The call: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

Noah Cameron threw 7 shutout innings against Detroit a month ago and gave up 2 hits doing it. That's the game everybody's going to remember walking into Friday, and it happened at Comerica, which is the only reason I'm still picking Detroit.

The gap

Cameron's season ERA is 4.16. Split it by where he pitched and it stops being one number.

	IP	ERA	WHIP	Opponent average	Walks per batter faced
At Kauffman	62.2	5.17	1.55	.287	25 in 282
On the road	75.2	3.33	0.95	.196	18 in 298

That's a run and 8 tenths, and it goes the wrong way. Kauffman is a big park with a big outfield and pitchers are supposed to like it. The league as a whole does: run every starter with 100 innings and 15 starts through the same split and the median guy is about 3 tenths of a run better at home.

Cameron is 4th of 97 in the other direction.

Starter	ERA at home	ERA on the road	Gap	Home IP
Michael Lorenzen	9.12	5.61	+3.51	48.1
Cam Schlittler	3.95	1.14	+2.81	57.0
Jesús Luzardo	4.63	1.95	+2.68	72.0
Noah Cameron	5.17	3.33	+1.84	62.2
David Peterson	6.16	4.39	+1.77	57.0
Nick Martinez	3.87	2.14	+1.73	74.1

Now the part that argues against me

I want this to be a bigger deal than it is, so here's the deflation.

20 of those 97 starters are more than a full run worse at home. 26 are more than a full run worse on the road. The whole distribution has a standard deviation of 1.45, which is enormous, and that's the tell: 60-odd innings on each side is not enough innings to tell a real venue effect from a couple of bad afternoons. Cameron's worst home start is 7 earned in 5 against San Diego on July 19 and his second worst is 6 in 3 and 2 thirds against Tampa Bay. Pull those two and most of the gap goes with them.

So I'm not claiming Kauffman breaks him. I'm claiming the version of Cameron who shut Detroit out was the road version, and Friday he's the other one, and if you want to call that a tiebreaker rather than a thesis I won't argue.

One more thing about that July 24 game that nobody mentions: it wasn't a start. Kansas City used an opener and Cameron came in behind him for 7 innings. It's in his road split and not in his start log, which is correct in both places. He also lost. Detroit won 2-1.

What Detroit brings

Troy Melton, and he is the reason this pick exists.

	GS	IP	ERA	WHIP	K	BB	Opponent average
Melton	14	84.1	1.49	0.96	73	25	.186
Cameron	23	138.1	4.16	1.22	126	43	.240

14 earned runs in 84 and a third. He's given up more than 2 earned runs in a start once all season. Behind him Detroit has the 4th best team ERA in baseball at 3.55, against Kansas City's 4.76, which is 28th.

Melton has already seen these guys: 5 innings, 2 earned, on July 23.

What scares me

The offense is 4 men short and it doesn't hit lefties. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and Matt Vierling are all on the 10-day, plus Pérez, Outman and Meadows behind them. Greene is eligible to be activated Saturday, which is 1 day too late to matter here. Detroit's OPS against left-handed pitching is .694 on the year against .738 against righties, and Cameron is a lefty. Since Greene went out on August 12 the Tigers have scored 4.0 a game.

The ninth inning. 26 saves in 54 chances. Wednesday in Pittsburgh they took a 3-2 lead into the bottom of the ninth and lost it. That's 28 blown on the season.

And these two teams cannot stop playing one-run games. 8 of the 10 meetings this year were decided by exactly 1 run. Detroit is 6-4 in the series and 12-22 in one-run games overall, 29th of 30. If Friday turns into another 3-2, the side with the worse bullpen is the side I just picked.

That's the whole reason this is Low. I think Detroit has the better pitcher, the better staff and the opponent's least comfortable venue. I also think this game has maybe a 6-inning window before it stops being about any of that and starts being about who's warming up.

Tigers win. Low.

Melton's line is read straight off the MLB Stats API this morning: 14 earned in 84.1. An earlier piece here had him at 1.71, which was true when it was pulled and stopped being true when 2 runs in the August 15 start were rescored as unearned. That entry now carries a correction.

Series preview: Detroit at Kansas City, the tightest matchup in baseball

2026-08-20T12:59:00Z

Detroit at Kansas City. Friday 8:10pm, Saturday 7:15pm, Sunday 2:10pm ET, at Kauffman Stadium. The call: Detroit takes 2 of 3.

These 2 clubs have met 10 times in 2026. 8 of those games were decided by a single run. Nobody else in baseball is close.

Date	Where	Score	Margin
Apr 14	Comerica	Detroit 2, Kansas City 1	1
Apr 15	Comerica	Detroit 2, Kansas City 1	1
Apr 16	Comerica	Detroit 10, Kansas City 9	1
May 8	Kauffman	Kansas City 4, Detroit 3	1
May 9	Kauffman	Kansas City 5, Detroit 1	4
May 10	Kauffman	Detroit 6, Kansas City 3	3
Jul 23	Comerica	Detroit 4, Kansas City 3	1
Jul 24	Comerica	Detroit 2, Kansas City 1	1
Jul 25	Comerica	Kansas City 3, Detroit 2	1
Jul 26	Comerica	Kansas City 5, Detroit 4	1

Detroit has won 6 of the 10 and outscored Kansas City 36 to 35 across the whole season series. That's 3.6 runs a game against 3.5, in a league averaging 8.95 runs between the 2 sides. These games have run about 2 runs below the ordinary baseball game and every one of them has come down to an inning.

Before anybody gets attached to it

The number is real. It's still a maximum, and a maximum picked out of 391 pairings is going to sit in the tail whether or not anything caused it.

So here's the test. Take the league's own one-run rate this season, 520 games of 1,909, or 27.2 percent. Give every pairing exactly the number of meetings it has actually played, so the shape of the schedule is untouched, and decide each game with a weighted coin. Do that 20,000 times and ask how tight the tightest pairing in each made-up league was.

A leader reaching 8 turns up in 13 percent of those seasons, and the average league-leading count is 6.6. So this is a tail draw and not a miracle, which is the same correction any "most in baseball" number needs before it gets used.

What makes it worth writing anyway is the history. The balanced schedule arrived in 2023 and cut division pairings from 19 meetings to 13, so only the last 3 seasons compare:

Season	Tightest pairing in baseball
2023	7 of 13, Boston and Toronto
2024	7 of 13, Pittsburgh and St. Louis
2025	7 of 14, Cleveland and Minnesota
2026, through Aug 20	8 of 10, Detroit and Kansas City

Nobody has finished a full season above 7 since the format changed. Detroit and Kansas City are at 8 with 3 games left to play, all of them this weekend.

The objection to my own hook, and it matters this weekend

All 7 of the Comerica games were decided by 1 run. Only 1 of the 3 at Kauffman was. This series is at Kauffman.

That is 3 games and I'm not going to pretend it's a park effect. But it points at the actual mechanism, which is not mystical. Kansas City is a completely different offense at home:

Kansas City	Record	Runs scored per game	Runs allowed per game
At Kauffman	32-30	4.82	4.89
On the road	22-44	3.58	5.09

Their pitching travels. Their bats do not. A club that scores 3.58 a game away from home plays a lot of 2-1 losses, and 7 of the 8 one-run games in this series happened when the Royals were the visitors.

What Detroit is, under the record

Detroit is 61-66 and 1.5 games out of the last wild card, which tells you more about the American League than about Detroit. Their run differential is plus 82. The 4th best team ERA in baseball at 3.57. They have scored 82 more runs than they've allowed and they are 5 games under .500.

Here is where it goes:

	Detroit
Games decided by 1 run	12-22, 29th of 30
Games decided by 2 or 3 runs	18-27
Games decided by 4 or more	30-17
Saves	26 of 54 chances, worst conversion in baseball
Blown saves	28
Team ERA	3.57, 4th

Wednesday at PNC Park was the 28th. Detroit led 3-2 into the bottom of the ninth, Kenley Jansen came in, and 2 solo home runs later it was over. That is not a slump. 26 for 54 is the entire season.

And no, Detroit is not a bad road team in any way the numbers support. They score 4.59 and allow 3.92 away from Comerica, which is better than their home split. They're 29-35 on the road anyway, because that's what happens when the ninth inning keeps ending badly.

The pitching, and Riley Greene is eligible Saturday

Kansas City hasn't named a starter for any of the 3. Detroit's are set:

	GS	IP	ERA	WHIP	K	BB
Troy Melton, Friday	14	84.1	1.71	0.97	73	25
Drew Anderson, Saturday	5	76.1	4.01	1.30	87	29
Framber Valdez, Sunday	25	138.2	4.35	1.40	111	54

Melton's 1.71 over 84.1 innings is the best thing on either roster and it isn't close. Kansas City's staff carries a 4.79 ERA, 28th in baseball.

The lineup news is the one fact that could change this series. Riley Greene went on the 10-day injured list on August 12 with a right hamstring strain, which makes August 22 the first day he can be activated, and that's Saturday. He has not been activated as of Thursday morning and eligible is not the same as back, so treat this as a thing to watch rather than a thing to count on. Detroit is still without Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling, James Outman, Parker Meadows and Wenceel Pérez, so the corners have been rookies and an infielder, and Greene's .816 OPS over 492 plate appearances is most of what this lineup is missing.

Kansas City got Vinnie Pasquantino and Maikel Garcia back off the injured list on Monday, designated Starling Marte for assignment the same day and released him Wednesday.

The call

Detroit takes 2 of 3. The gap between these clubs is a run and a quarter a game of run prevention, 3.57 against 4.79, and Melton on Friday. Kansas City gets the version of its offense that actually hits, because they're home, and that still leaves them 28th in team ERA with 3 starters unnamed. Over 3 games I'd rather own the better staff.

What scares me is everything in the middle of this piece. This is the tightest matchup in baseball, Detroit loses one-run games at a rate 29th of 30, and their closer has now blown 28. If all 3 of these come down to the ninth I have picked the club that has been handing that inning back since April.

Correction, 2026-08-21. Melton's line above reads 1.71 and 0.97, which is what the MLB Stats API served when this was pulled on the morning of August 20. It is now 1.49 and 0.96: 2 of the 3 runs he allowed on August 15 against Chicago were rescored as unearned, which moved him from 16 earned runs to 14 over the same 84.1 innings. The table is left as published and this note is the fix. He has not pitched since.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-20. All 1,909 completed regular-season games this season for the pairing counts, the one-run rate and both clubs' home and away run splits; 2023 through 2025 full seasons for the history table; standings, team pitching, save conversions and the 40-man injury status for everything else. The chart, the 20,000-league simulation and the history table come from one run of scripts/tightest_matchup.py. Riley Greene's injured list date is the league's own transaction record.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Graded: Pick No. 11. Right team, wrong reason, and the wrong reason is the story

2026-08-20T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Pirates win. Confidence Low.

The result: Pirates 4, Tigers 3. gamePk 823342, Final on the id.

Record: 7-4.

The pick was right and every sentence under it was wrong

Wednesday's entry said Detroit had 6 outfielders on the injured list, that the lineup had scored 3 or fewer in 6 of its last 14, and that this was not the group you want walking into Paul Skenes at PNC Park.

	The argument	Wednesday afternoon
Skenes goes deep	13 home starts, 3.44, opponents at .215	4.1 innings, 3 earned, 4 walks
Detroit can't score	3 or fewer in 6 of the last 14	3 runs, 7 hits, chased him in the 5th
So Pittsburgh wins	Because of the bats	Because of the 9th

Jackson Jobe gave them 5.1 innings and 1 run in his 3rd start back off Tommy John. Tyler Holton, Jacob Waguespack, Drew Sommers and Kyle Finnegan covered the next 2.2 without allowing anything. Detroit took a 3-2 lead into the bottom of the ninth on the road.

Kenley Jansen came in. Rafael Flores Jr. hit a solo home run to left to tie it and Brandon Lowe hit a solo home run to right to end it, 2 batters later. Jansen threw 0.2 innings, allowed 2 runs, and was charged with the blown save and the loss.

That was Detroit's 28th blown save

26 saves in 54 chances. Not a rate that has slipped lately, a rate that has been this all year, and it is now the worst conversion figure in Major League Baseball. The team ERA is 3.57, which is 4th best.

I picked Pittsburgh on Wednesday for a reason that did not happen, and got paid by a reason I did not write down. A pick that lands for the wrong cause is worth less than the box score says it is, and the sharper version of Wednesday's entry would have been much shorter: Detroit takes a lead into the late innings and gives it back more often than anybody, and the outfield is a side plot.

That is the thing worth chasing, and it is where Friday's series preview goes.

Not betting advice.

Boston, Miami, Philly, the Knicks. It's the 3rd hardest opening in the league and we're still favored in 2 and a half of them

2026-08-20T12:57:00Z

Somebody posted the 2026-27 schedule breakdown on the sub and the top line was that we open with Boston, Miami, Philly and the Knicks. Which, yeah. That's a week. I saw it and immediately went looking for a reason it wasn't as bad as it looked, because that's what you do, and I ended up finding something a little more interesting than that.

First, the complaint checks out. Rate every team's first 4 opponents by what those opponents did last season and Detroit's are the 3rd toughest in the NBA. Mean opponent winning percentage of .601 against a league average of .497. Only the Knicks and Oklahoma City drew worse, and it's really a 3 way tie for 3rd, because Detroit, Philly and Phoenix all land on exactly .601. Their opening opponents won 197 games apiece last year. Nobody planned that.

	Opening 4 opponents	Mean opp win pct
1. New York	PHI, at BOS, ORL, DET	.628
2. Oklahoma City	at SA, DEN, LAC, PHX	.619
3. Detroit	BOS, at MIA, at PHI, at NY	.601
4. Philadelphia	at NY, CLE, MIL, DET	.601
5. Phoenix	at POR, GS, at OKC, DEN	.601
	league average	.497

So the thread's right. That's the hard part of the answer and I don't want to talk anybody out of it.

Here's the other half though, and it's the half that changed how I read the whole thing. "Hard schedule" is a question about who you play. It isn't a question about how many you win. Those come apart, and for us they come apart about as far as they can.

Detroit went 60-22 last year. Best record in the East, 3rd best in the league behind Oklahoma City at 64-18 and San Antonio at 62-20. So take the exact same 4 games, and instead of asking how good the opponents are, ask how many a 60-22 team would be expected to win against those 4 teams, at those 4 buildings. Home teams won 679 of 1,225 games last season, so playing at home is worth something real and it goes in.

2.47 wins out of 4. That's the 9th easiest opening in the NBA. League average is 2.02. Washington opens against a set of opponents nobody would call scary and comes out at 0.95 expected wins, because Washington went 17-65.

	Opening 4	Expected wins
Toughest to survive: Washington	MIL, TOR, at CHI, at CHA	0.95
Brooklyn	CHA, at CLE, IND, at BOS	1.07
Sacramento	at LAC, POR, MEM, at SA	1.12
	league average	2.02
Detroit, 9th easiest	BOS, at MIA, at PHI, at NY	2.47
San Antonio, easiest	OKC, HOU, at DAL, SAC	2.97

And then the thing I actually laughed at. Look at who's 1st and 4th on that first table. New York has the hardest opening in the league, and 1 of the 4 reasons is that they play us. Philadelphia's up there for the same reason. There are Knicks fans and Sixers fans right now looking at their own opening week and seeing Detroit on it and posting the exact thread we're posting, except with our name in it. We're not the team that got the hard draw. We're part of somebody else's.

The part that's genuinely annoying

It isn't the opponents. It's the travel.

3 of the first 4 are on the road, and only 8 teams in the league have that many. Nobody has 4. It doesn't stop there either: 5 of the first 10 and 9 of the first 14 are away from Little Caesars. So the way this goes wrong isn't Boston on opening night, it's that we tip off, play 1 game at home, and then spend most of the next 3 weeks in other people's buildings while everybody's still sorting out rotations.

That's the version of the complaint I'd actually make. Not "look who we play," but "look how little of October we spend at home."

What I'd hold this loosely for

Last year's record is the only rating that exists before anybody plays a game, and it's already stale. The summer moved people around, and it'll keep moving them until camp. Miami at 43-39 and Philly at 45-37 are exactly the teams where a rating built out of last April tells you the least.

Something else that changes what you can count: the schedule that's out right now is 80 games for every team, not 82. Detroit's has a 10 day hole from December 3 to December 13, which is the Cup knockout window, and the last 2 games get filled in once that's settled. Every team's missing the same 2, and none of it touches October, so the opening 4 above is the real opening 4.

October 20 against Boston, then Miami, Philly, New York. What's the number you'd actually want out of that week? I'd take 2 and not complain. 3 and I'd start believing 60 wins wasn't the ceiling.

Pick No. 11: 6 outfielders on the injured list, and Skenes at home

2026-08-19T12:59:00Z

Tigers at Pirates, Wednesday 12:35pm ET at PNC Park. The call: Pirates win. Confidence Low.

I'm not picking Pittsburgh because Pittsburgh is good. They're 62-66. I'm picking them because Detroit is trying to score runs with an outfield that has been rebuilt out of whatever was left in Toledo.

The list

Player	Status	2026
Riley Greene	10-day IL	492 PA, .816 OPS
Kerry Carpenter	10-day IL	259 PA, .692 OPS
Matt Vierling	10-day IL	291 PA, .590 OPS
Wenceel Pérez	60-day IL	175 PA
James Outman	7-day IL	170 PA
Parker Meadows	60-day IL	39 PA

That's 6, and Greene is the one that hurts. Tuesday's corners were Brett Callahan, whose contract was selected from Toledo on Sunday, and Zach McKinstry, who is an infielder. Callahan hit a home run and it was the entire Detroit offense.

Being fair to the roster: there are still 4 outfielders active, and Ben Malgeri has been good, .833 OPS in 69 plate appearances across 30 games. Max Clark is in center every day. This isn't a lineup with a hole where the outfield goes. It's a lineup where the outfield is 2 rookies, a fill-in and a guy playing out of position, and where the .816 bat is watching.

What that has done to the run column

Last 14 games, runs scored: 8, 2, 11, 2, 8, 3, 6, 4, 3, 5, 3, 5, 8, 1.

Six of those 14 are 3 or fewer. The good nights are still very good, which is why the season averages don't look alarming, but the floor has fallen out and the floor is what you're betting on against a top-of-rotation arm.

Skenes at home is a different pitcher than Skenes on the road

	GS	IP	ERA	Opp AVG
Paul Skenes, home	13	73.1	3.44	.215
Paul Skenes, road	12	61.1	4.40	.242

He's at home. 166 strikeouts in 134.2 innings, a 1.12 WHIP, opponents at .228 overall. A lineup that just went 0 for 16 through its middle is not the lineup you want reading that scouting report.

The caveat that belongs right here rather than buried at the bottom: the home edge is mostly a first-half edge. Skenes was 3.02 at PNC in 10 starts before July and he's 4.86 at PNC in 3 starts since. Three starts is nothing, so I'm not treating it as a trend, but I'm also not pretending the 3.44 is a current reading.

The other side of it: Jobe is 12 days off the injured list

Jackson Jobe was placed on the 60-day IL on February 10, recovering from Tommy John surgery. He was activated August 7 after rehab stops at Lakeland, the FCL, Erie and West Michigan. This is start number 3.

Start	Line
Aug 8 at San Francisco	5.0 IP, 1 hit, 0 runs, 4 K
Aug 14 vs White Sox	3.2 IP, 9 hits, 6 runs, 4 K

The encouraging part is the walks. He walked 27 in 49 innings in 2025, which is just about 5 per 9, and he's walked 2 in 8.2 this year. The command is back. What isn't back yet is the ability to survive a lineup the second time through, and 9 hits in 3.2 innings against Chicago is what that looks like.

What scares me, and it's enough to keep this Low

Skenes has been ordinary for 7 weeks.

Paul Skenes	GS	IP	ERA	BB	K
Through June 30	17	93.0	3.10	20	114
Since July 1	8	41.2	5.62	17	52

That's a real change, with one honest asterisk: the window opens on July 1 itself, which was his worst outing of the year, 4 innings and 7 earned against Philadelphia. Drop that single game and the other 7 starts are 4.54, not 5.62. So the decline is real and it's smaller than the headline split makes it look.

What isn't endpoint-sensitive is the length. He has finished 6 innings twice in his last 8 starts. If he goes 5 again, Detroit gets 4 innings against a Pittsburgh bullpen carrying a 4.25 ERA, and that same bullpen gave up 4 runs to this same depleted lineup on Monday.

So the shape I'm scared of is obvious: Skenes grinds through 5, Detroit gets into the middle relief, and the bimodal offense picks today to be an 8. It has done that once already this series.

I'm taking Pittsburgh anyway, because the version where Detroit wins needs 2 things: Jobe better in start 3 than he was in start 2, and a lineup down 6 outfielders solving an arm with 166 strikeouts in 134.2 innings. Pittsburgh needs 1 thing, which is Skenes being roughly himself for 5.

Pirates win. Low.

The argument against me is the 5.62, and if you think 8 starts of a pitcher walking 17 in 41.2 innings outweighs a road lineup missing its best 3 bats, say so. That's the actual disagreement in this game.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 10. I bet on the tail and got the median

2026-08-19T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: Pirates 4, Tigers 1. gamePk 823341, Final on the id.

Record: 6-4.

The argument was a shape, and the shape didn't show up

Tuesday's entry conceded there was no hole in Braxton Ashcraft. He'd thrown a 9-inning complete game 5 days earlier on 85 pitches. What it argued instead was variance: 5 of his 24 starts had cost Pittsburgh 5 earned runs or more, against 1 of Keider Montero's 20. The pick was that Detroit only needed one of those nights.

It got the other kind.

	The bet	Tuesday night
Ashcraft's length	Tail risk, 5 blowups in 24	8.0 innings
Runs off him	Needs a 5-run inning somewhere	1 earned, 5 hits, 0 walks
Pitch count	85 in his complete game, so efficiency is real	80 pitches through 8
Montero's floor	3.31 ERA, 1 blowup all year	5.0 innings, 3 runs, held

Montero did his part. 5 innings, 3 runs, and 2 of them came in a 5th inning where Oneil Cruz hit a 2-run homer and Spencer Horwitz singled in the third. Ty Madden and Enmanuel De Jesus covered the last 3 innings for 1 run between them. A Detroit pitching line of 4 runs at PNC Park is a line you win most nights.

The lineup is the story and it has been for a week

Detroit got 5 hits. Two of them belonged to Brett Callahan, whose contract was selected from Toledo on Sunday, and one of those was the only run Detroit scored all night, his first big league home run. Torkelson, Báez, Clark, McKinstry and Valencia went a combined 0 for 16.

Here is the outfield that's supposed to be hitting behind Torkelson right now:

Player	Status	2026 line
Riley Greene	10-day IL	492 PA, .816 OPS
Kerry Carpenter	10-day IL	259 PA, .692 OPS
Matt Vierling	10-day IL	291 PA, .590 OPS
Parker Meadows	60-day IL	39 PA
Wenceel Pérez	60-day IL	175 PA
James Outman	7-day IL	170 PA

That is 6 outfielders on the injured list at once. The corner spots Tuesday were Brett Callahan, who had been in the majors 3 days, and Zach McKinstry, an infielder.

The fair objection: the outfield is not empty. Ben Malgeri is up and hitting, .833 OPS in 69 plate appearances over 30 games, and Max Clark is playing every day in center. It's not that there's nobody out there. It's that everybody out there is either a rookie or a career .590 guy, and the one bat that made this lineup dangerous is on the 10-day.

I keep writing picks that assume this lineup scores 4 and it keeps scoring 1. Over the last 14 games Detroit has gone 8, 2, 11, 2, 8, 3, 6, 4, 3, 5, 3, 5, 8,

That's not a bad offense, it's a bimodal one, and picking a side on a bimodal offense against a starter with no hole is how you lose a Low.

What it changes

Ashcraft's blowup rate was a real number and it stays a real number. 5 in 24 is 1 start in 5, and Tuesday was one of the other 4. What I'd weigh differently next time is the other half of the trade: a tail argument only pays if your offense is healthy enough to cash the ticket when it comes up, and right now this one gets 3 runs on a good night. That cuts the value of every "their starter might blow up" pick until Greene is back.

If you think that's backwards, that a lineup this thin makes the opposing starter's variance more important rather than less, I'd want to hear the version of that argument. It's not obvious to me which way it runs.

Not betting advice.

Pick No. 10: the better ERA belongs to the guy who has never blown one up

2026-08-18T12:59:00Z

Tigers at Pirates, Tuesday 6:40pm ET at PNC Park. The call: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

Low, and I want to say why before the argument rather than after it. Monday's pick was a High and it was a High because the opposing starter had a hole in him you could see from the street. Tonight's opposing starter threw a 9-inning complete game 5 days ago on 85 pitches. There is no hole. What there is, is a shape.

Same season, different tails

Keider Montero has a 3.31 ERA in 20 starts. Braxton Ashcraft has a 3.82 in 24. Half a run apart, and the back of the card would tell you Ashcraft is the better pitcher having a worse year: 155 strikeouts in 141.1 innings against Montero's 86 in 128.2, which is not close.

The averages hide the thing that decides one game.

Pitcher	Starts	ERA as a starter	Starts of 5+ earned	Worst
Keider Montero	20	3.31	1	5
Braxton Ashcraft	24	3.82	5	7

Montero has given up 5 earned runs once all season, on August 7 in San Francisco, and that is also the most he has ever allowed in a game this year. Nineteen of his 20 starts came in at 4 or fewer. Ashcraft has 5 starts of 5 or more, and the worst of them, 7 earned in 3 innings against the Yankees on July 20, is worse than anything in Montero's log by 2 runs.

That is the whole edge and it is a narrow one. Over a season the strikeouts win and Ashcraft is probably the better pitcher to have. Over one night, Detroit's guy has a floor and Pittsburgh's guy has a trapdoor he has fallen through 5 times.

Pittsburgh's late innings have been open all week

Monday cost them. Carmen Mlodzinski recorded 9 outs and Pittsburgh needed 6 innings out of the bullpen. Isaac Mattson and Yohan Ramírez took the middle, and then Kirby Yates, Gregory Soto and Camilo Doval threw the 7th, 8th and 9th of a game Detroit led 8-5.

Reliever	Days worked, Aug 12 to Aug 17
Kirby Yates	Aug 12, 14, 16, 17
Camilo Doval	Aug 12, 14, 16, 17
Gregory Soto	Aug 14, 15, 17

Yates and Doval have each pitched 4 of the last 6 days including back to back Sunday and Monday. Pittsburgh's bullpen carries a 4.26 ERA over 498.2 innings, the most relief work in this series, and Detroit's sits at 3.75. The gap is not huge. The availability gap on a Tuesday might be.

Detroit's own leverage arms are comparatively fresh. Kenley Jansen has thrown twice in 6 days, Kyle Finnegan, Drew Sommers and Jansen covered Monday's last 3.1 innings scoreless on 60 pitches between them, and Tyler Holton and Tanner Rainey have not pitched since Sunday.

The bats are not the problem, and neither is the pitching

I have spent 3 days writing that Detroit's offense is fine and its run prevention broke. Now that August is 15 games long, the second half of that is wrong and I corrected it in this morning's grade.

August, 15 games	Per game	Season
Runs scored	5.80	4.58
Runs allowed	3.40	3.90

Detroit is 9-6 in August, outscoring people by 36, and doing it with Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman all on the injured list. Chris McCosky reported Monday that Carpenter has been sent to a foot specialist, so that is not ending this week.

What has filled the gap is a rookie class the fanbase cannot stop talking about. Kevin McGonigle hit his 13th home run Monday. Max Clark and Hao-Yu Lee both drove in runs. Brett Callahan, called up Sunday, tripled in his first at bat and singled in 2 more Monday. It is the second night in a row I am backing a lineup that on paper is missing its 4 best outfielders.

What scares me

The strikeout gap is the more repeatable skill and it is not close. Montero has a 0.99 WHIP on 6 strikeouts per 9 innings. That combination is a season of weak contact going where fielders are, and it is the single most likely thing in this piece to stop being true on a random Tuesday. Ashcraft misses bats, and missing bats does not need anything to break right.

Ashcraft is better at home in the way that matters here. 6 home runs allowed in 64.2 innings at PNC against 14 in 76.2 on the road. If the plan was to slug him, PNC is the wrong building for it.

Pittsburgh's lineup is better tonight than the one that lost Monday. Oneil Cruz came off the 60-day injured list on the 17th and did not play. A .822 OPS with 14 home runs walks back into that order, and my read of their offense is a day out of date the moment he is in it.

And the shape of the pick worries me. Detroit won 8-5 last night and I am backing them again tonight, which is exactly what somebody talking themselves into a streak looks like. Detroit is 29-33 on the road. The floor-versus-trapdoor argument is real but it is thin, and thin is what Low means.

The call

Tigers win. Low. Detroit is getting the pitcher who has not handed anybody a crooked number all year, against a club whose 3 best relievers have worked 4 of the last 6 days, in the best month this offense has had.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-18: 2026 season lines, home and road splits and complete game logs for Keider Montero and Braxton Ashcraft; both clubs' starter and reliever splits, standings and home and road records; Pittsburgh's and Detroit's box scores for August 12 through 17 for the reliever usage table; Oneil Cruz's season line and both clubs' transaction feeds and 40-man injury lists via scripts/injury_check.py 823341. The chart and the summary table come from one run of scripts/er_spread.py 672456 677952. The Carpenter report is Chris McCosky's, surfaced in the r/motorcitykitties sweep on 2026-08-18 and not something the transaction feed carries.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Graded: Pick No. 9. The first High, and the starter lasted 3 innings

2026-08-18T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence High.

The result: Tigers 8, Pirates 5. gamePk 823343, Final on the id.

Record: 6-3.

The argument was that he wouldn't be around long, and he wasn't

Monday's entry rested on one split. Carmen Mlodzinski's season ERA read 3.79 and that number was an average of a good reliever and a bad starter: 2.15 across 16 relief outings, 5.47 across 11 starts, on nearly identical innings.

	Predicted shape	What happened
Mlodzinski's length	Has cleared 6 innings once in 11 starts	3.0 innings, 59 pitches
What that costs Pittsburgh	"If Mlodzinski goes 4, Pittsburgh needs 5 innings from a bullpen carrying a 4.24 ERA"	6 innings, 4 runs
The runs off him	Detroit doesn't have to beat him, it has to get past him	8 hits, 4 runs in 3 innings

Detroit had 2 runs before he recorded 3 outs. Zach McKinstry and Hao-Yu Lee both singled in a run in the 1st, Kevin McGonigle hit his 13th in the 2nd, and that was the game inside 6 outs. It is his second shortest start of the season and it came against a lineup missing 4 outfielders.

The bullpen part mattered more than the starter part, which is what the entry said it would. Isaac Mattson and Yohan Ramírez covered the middle for 4 runs between them, Ramírez walking 3 in an inning, and by the time Kirby Yates, Gregory Soto and Camilo Doval got in it the game was 8-1.

The thing I said would scare me happened, and it lost anyway

From the same entry:

Framber Valdez walks people. 50 in 133 innings, a 1.39 WHIP, and 5 walks in 5.2 innings his last time out against Cleveland.

He walked 4 in 5.2 innings and gave up 5 runs, 4 of them earned. Pittsburgh put up a 4-spot in the 6th on a Nick Yorke double and a Henry Davis single. That is the exact failure mode the piece flagged, and the exact length, 5.2 innings, that it flagged it in.

So the fear came true and the pick still won, because the other side of the game was worse. Detroit's bullpen threw 3.1 scoreless behind him. Kyle Finnegan, Drew Sommers and Kenley Jansen allowed one hit between them.

	IP	R
Mlodzinski (PIT, start)	3.0	4
Pittsburgh bullpen	6.0	4
Valdez (DET, start)	5.2	5
Detroit bullpen	3.1	0

A correction to my own week

For 3 days I have been writing that Detroit's offense is fine and the run prevention is what broke. The first half holds. The second half was too strong, and now that August has 15 games in it the full month says so.

August, 15 games	Per game	Season
Runs scored	5.80	4.58
Runs allowed	3.40	3.90

Detroit is allowing half a run a game fewer than its season rate this month. The pitching did not break. Three bad nights against the White Sox happened inside a month that is otherwise the best run prevention of the year, and I turned 3 nights into a trend because 3 nights were what I had just watched. The club is 9-6 in August and has outscored people by 36.

That is the honest version, and it cuts against something I published Monday morning.

What it does not prove

The pick was right and the reasoning was right, which is a better result than Sunday's, where the call landed and both halves of the argument were dead by the fifth. But a High is one game either way. Mlodzinski's start log said he was likely to be gone early and he was gone early; that was a bet on the most repeatable thing in the profile, not a read on the night. If the same entry ran again against a starter who goes 6, none of it transfers.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-18: the final and status on gamePk 823343, the box score, all 10 pitching lines, the inning-by-inning linescore, the scoring plays from the live feed, Detroit's and Pittsburgh's standings and run totals, and Detroit's game-by-game results for August 1 through 17. Quotations are from /journal/2026-08-17-pick-09-two-different-pitchers.html as published.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Everybody who isn't DeBrincat, Larkin or Raymond scored 139 goals. That's 4th fewest in the league

2026-08-18T12:57:00Z

The sub has been going in circles on Larkin for a week now. Podcast episodes about whether he and Detroit can reconcile, threads about whether he makes it to game 1, and I get it, he asked out and that stings in a way numbers don't fix. But somebody posted a thread titled "with or without Larkin, Red Wings still need to address offense" and that's the one I couldn't stop thinking about, because it's actually checkable. So I checked it.

Detroit scored 241 goals last season. 22nd out of 32. You already knew it wasn't good.

Here's the part I didn't know. Split the skaters in 2, the 3 leading goal scorers and then everybody else, and the 2 halves live in completely different leagues. Skaters accounted for 239 of the 241, the other 2 being awarded goals, so the split below adds to 239 and not 241.

DeBrincat 41, Larkin 34, Raymond 25. 100 goals from the top 3, which is the 9th biggest top-3 in the NHL. Ahead of Utah, ahead of Buffalo, ahead of Boston.
The other 26 skaters: 139 goals. 4th fewest in the league, tied with Los Angeles. Only Winnipeg, Chicago and Nashville got less out of their non-stars. League average is 162.

9th and 4th from the bottom, same team, same season.

	Team	Top 3	Rest of roster	Rest, rank of 32	Points
WPG	Winnipeg Jets	105	124	32	82
CHI	Chicago Blackhawks	80	130	31	72
NSH	Nashville Predators	107	135	30	86
DET	Detroit Red Wings	100	139	28	92
LAK	Los Angeles Kings	81	139	29	90
CGY	Calgary Flames	62	146	27	77
NJD	New Jersey Devils	79	147	26	87
VAN	Vancouver Canucks	62	148	25	58

Detroit and LA both landed on 139 so the ranking had to break the tie somehow. Call it 4th fewest and don't read anything into which one got 28.

The easy version of this is "too dependent on the stars," and I don't buy it

Colorado's top 3 was 124 of 298, which is almost exactly the same share Detroit's was, and Colorado finished 121 points. Being top heavy is fine if the rest of the roster still shows up. Nashville and Winnipeg are on this list too and they were top heavy and bad, so the share on its own tells you nothing.

What Detroit has is a level problem, not a shape problem. The 4th leading goal scorer was Patrick Kane at 16 and the 5th was van Riemsdyk at 15, and after that it's 13, 11, 10, 9, 9, 9, 7 and you're into single digits fast. 3 guys hit 20 goals when the league average is 4.1, and 5 hit 15 when the average is 6.4. Add it up and the depth is about 23 goals short of what an average team gets from everybody outside its top 3.

I should be fair about where those 23 come from, because it isn't all concentration. Detroit's skater total of 239 is already about 14 below the league's 253, and the top 3 being 9 above average accounts for most of the rest. So "4th fewest from the depth" is partly just "Detroit doesn't score much."

And this is where it gets annoying

Kane's in Chicago now. Van Riemsdyk isn't on the roster either. That's the 4th and 5th leading goal scorers, 31 goals, gone.

What came back in is Viktor Arvidsson, who scored 25 in 69 games for Boston last season, plus Keegan Kolesar, who had 6 in 82 for Vegas. 31 out, 31 in.

And here's the thing that made me laugh in a not very funny way. 25 goals would tie Arvidsson with Raymond for 3rd on this team. The guy brought in to be depth scoring is, on last year's numbers, a top 3 scorer here. That's how thin the middle of this roster is.

I'd love to talk myself into him being more than that. He's a real player and 25 goals is 25 goals. He's also 33, he had 15 in 67 the year before that and 6 in 18 the year before that, and his last 4 seasons are 77, 18, 67 and 69 games. He's never played a full 82 in his career. Betting on 25 again is betting on his best season in 3 years repeating a year older.

Where the goals would actually come from

The honest answer is the kids, and it's not a satisfying answer in August. Emmitt Finnie put up 13 goals in 82 games at 21. Marco Kasper had 9 in 81 at 22. Nate Danielson got 28 games. If Finnie goes 13 to 22 and Kasper goes 9 to 18, that's 18 goals out of nowhere and most of the depth gap closes without anybody signing anything. If they stay flat, it doesn't, and nobody left on the free agent board fixes 139.

The part that argues the other way, and it's a good argument

If you're about to tell me that trading Larkin obviously makes the offense worse, you're right, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. 34 goals is 34 goals. Move him and the top 3 drops from 100 to somewhere around 91 even with Arvidsson sliding up, and Detroit goes from 3 twenty-goal scorers to 2 when the league average is 4.1. Total goals is what actually tracks points, and across the league last season the top-3 bucket tracked the standings a bit better than the depth bucket did. So no, this isn't "Larkin doesn't matter."

What I'd say instead is that the depth number doesn't move either way. Keep him and you're a 92 point team with 139 from the bottom of the roster. Trade him for a package and you're a worse team next April with 139 from the bottom of the roster, plus whatever the package turns into in 3 years. The thing that has to get fixed is the same thing in both worlds, and it's the one nobody's arguing about.

Detroit finished 92 points on a minus 17 goal differential. Fixing minus 17 means scoring more or allowing less, and if it's the scoring, it has to come from the 26 players who managed 139, because the 3 who managed 100 are already doing their part.

Anyway that's what I've got. Am I wrong that the depth is the story? I keep seeing people say the offense needs a top 6 forward, and I sort of think it needs a 3rd line that can score, which is a much less fun thing to ask for. If you want me to run the same split for another team or another season, say so and I'll do it.

Numbers from the NHL's own API: final 2025-26 standings (api-web.nhle.com/v1/standings/2026-04-17) and every team's skater goal totals (api-web.nhle.com/v1/club-stats/<TEAM>/20252026/2), pulled 2026-08-18. Season was 82 games. Kane's and Arvidsson's current teams and Arvidsson's season log are from the same API's player pages. Larkin's trade request has been widely reported; nothing here assumes an outcome. Script: scripts/nhl_depth_scoring.py in the repo, and the chart and the table come from the same run.

Pick No. 9: Pittsburgh's starter has a 3.79 ERA and it belongs to a different pitcher

2026-08-17T12:59:00Z

Tigers at Pirates, Monday 7:05pm ET at PNC Park. The call: Tigers win. Confidence High.

That is the first High I have put on a game, so it's worth saying up front what it costs. Low means I'm picking a side because picking a side is the job. High means I like it and I'm going to look stupid if it misses. This one is High.

The number on the back of the card is an average of two different pitchers

Carmen Mlodzinski's 2026 line is 27 appearances, 99.2 innings, a 3.79 ERA and a 1.40 WHIP. Read straight, that's a solid mid-rotation season and nothing to be excited about facing.

He hasn't been a starter, though. He's been a swingman, and Pittsburgh has used him both ways all year, 11 starts and 16 relief outings, interleaved from March to August. Those two jobs went very differently.

Role	Outings	IP	ERA	WHIP
Starting	11	49.1	5.47	1.68
Relieving	16	50.1	2.15	1.13

Nearly identical innings, and the ERA more than doubles. A 1.68 WHIP as a starter means he's putting a man and two thirds on base every inning he starts a game.

He has finished 6 innings once, in March through August

Date	Opponent	IP	H	BB	K	ER
2026-03-29	New York Mets	4.1	6	0	8	2
2026-04-04	Baltimore Orioles	4.2	5	3	5	2
2026-04-10	Chicago Cubs	5.1	6	3	2	0
2026-04-21	Texas Rangers	4.1	6	2	6	5
2026-04-26	Milwaukee Brewers	3.2	5	1	4	4
2026-05-02	Cincinnati Reds	5.2	8	2	10	5
2026-05-08	San Francisco Giants	6.0	7	0	1	2
2026-05-20	St. Louis Cardinals	5.0	4	1	1	0
2026-05-25	Chicago Cubs	5.0	5	3	2	1
2026-08-07	New York Mets	3.0	7	1	1	5
2026-08-12	Miami Marlins	2.1	5	3	1	4

Once. May 8, against a San Francisco club that is 51-72. That's the only time in 11 starts he has recorded 18 outs, and 6 of the 11 ended before he got 15.

The 2 most recent ones are the reason this is a High and not a Low. Since coming back into the rotation on August 7 he has thrown 5.1 innings across 2 starts and given up 9 earned runs. Against the Mets: 3 innings, 7 hits, 5 runs. Against Miami, a club that has scored the 6th fewest runs in the National League: 2.1 innings, 5 hits, 3 walks, 4 runs.

There's no injury behind the gap in his starting log, either. He wasn't on the injured list at any point this season. Pittsburgh moved him to the bullpen after May 25, he was good there, and they moved him back. The 2.15 is real. It just isn't what shows up Monday night.

Detroit doesn't have to beat him. It has to get past him

If Mlodzinski goes 4, Pittsburgh needs 5 innings from a bullpen carrying a 4.24 ERA over 492.2 innings, which is the most relief work of the 2 clubs in this series. Detroit's own pen is at 3.78. The comparison isn't close and it's the part of the game most likely to actually happen, because a starter who has gone 6 once in 11 tries is a starter whose team is planning around the pen already.

Pittsburgh is also short. Ryan O'Hearn, .788 OPS in 398 plate appearances, is on the 10-day. Oneil Cruz, .822 in 283, is on the 60-day. So is Konnor Griffin. Endy Rodriguez, .840 in 159, is on the 10-day. That's 4 of their better bats, and it's the mirror of Detroit's outfield situation rather than an edge to either side.

The thing everybody watching this team believes right now, and the numbers say it's wrong

Detroit has lost 4 in a row and 3 straight at home to the White Sox. The fan reaction to that is that the offense has gone quiet with Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman all hurt.

It hasn't.

	Runs	Result
Aug 13 vs Cleveland	3	Won 3-0
Aug 14 vs Chicago	5	Lost 9-5
Aug 15 vs Chicago	3	Lost 4-3
Aug 16 vs Chicago	5	Lost 7-5

Across all 14 games Detroit has played in August the club is scoring 5.64 runs a game, against a season rate of 4.56. With 4 outfielders on the shelf and a lineup running rookies out there, this offense is having its best month of the year. Brett Callahan tripled in his first big league at bat on Sunday.

What has gone wrong is the run prevention. 9, 4 and 7 allowed in the 3 losses. Detroit's team ERA is still 3.55, 4th in baseball, so the last week is a slump rather than a level, and a slump is exactly the thing you want to buy against somebody with a 5.47 mark in the job he's doing tonight.

What scares me

Framber Valdez walks people. 50 in 133 innings, a 1.39 WHIP, and 5 walks in 5.2 innings his last time out against Cleveland. PNC Park is a hard place to hit home runs and an easy place to score on singles and traffic, and Valdez's bad starts are traffic starts. When he's off, he's off early: 0.2 innings and 6 runs against the Cubs on July 21.

Detroit is 28-33 on the road and Pittsburgh is 32-31 at home, so the venue runs the wrong way.

Mlodzinski's stuff is not the problem. 78 strikeouts in 99.2 innings, and his relief line says that when he only has to face a lineup once, he's genuinely good. If Pittsburgh has decided to pull him at the 18th batter and hand it to a fresh arm, the whole shape of this pick changes and the game becomes a bullpen contest that Detroit's own 27 blown saves make a coin flip.

And the honest structural one: Detroit is 60-64 while its run differential says 71-53. That gap of 11 wins is the largest in baseball. A team that has spent a season converting good underlying play into losses is a team you should be slower to back than the numbers suggest, and I'm backing it anyway.

The call

Tigers win. High. Detroit's offense is in its best month of the season, it's facing a starter who has cleared the 6th inning once since March, and the club waiting behind him has the worse bullpen of the 2.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-17. Mlodzinski's and Valdez's 2026 season lines and complete game logs, both clubs' standings, run totals, home and road splits, starter and reliever ERA splits and save conversion, the Detroit and Pittsburgh transaction feeds and 40-man injury lists via scripts/injury_check.py 823343, and Detroit's game-by-game scoring for August 1 through 16. The chart and the start-by-start table come from one run of scripts/start_lengths.py 669387.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Graded: Pick No. 8. Anderson went 5, which is the thing I said would make me wrong

2026-08-17T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: White Sox win. Confidence Low.

The result: White Sox 7, Tigers 5. gamePk 824236, Final on the id.

Record: 5-3.

Detroit is 60-64 and has lost 4 straight, 3 of them at home to a club that came into the weekend 25 games under .500.

The pick wrote its own escape clause, and the game used half of it

Here is the last thing Friday's entry said before the sources:

If Anderson goes 5 and Detroit's pen holds it, I'm wrong and I'll have been wrong for the reason I already told you about.

Anderson went 5. Exactly 5, on 15 outs, 4 hits, 3 earned, 5 strikeouts, 21 batters faced. Then Detroit's pen did not hold it, and the pick collected on the second clause of a sentence written to describe losing.

The ceiling the whole thing rested on is gone

The most he has recorded in any game this season is 14, which is 4.2 innings, and he did that back on May 20. Detroit's median start this year is 17 outs. He has never touched the line.

He touched it Sunday. 15 outs is a career high for his 2026 and it moves his start log from a maximum of 14 across 42 appearances to a maximum of 15 across

The pitch-count trend that entry flagged, 42 to 70 in six days, kept going. The stretch-out was real and it arrived one start after I said it hadn't.

The other half was Chicago's:

26 years old, 6 foot 6, 20 starts, and he's gone 6 innings or more in 7 of his last 11.

Sean Burke got 13 outs. 4.1 innings, 5 hits, 3 walks, 4 earned. Not 6, not 7, and the worse of the two starting lines on the day.

So this was the picture the pick painted:

So Detroit's side of Sunday is a guy who probably hands it over in the 5th, and Chicago's side is a guy who's been finishing the 7th. That's 2 or 3 extra bullpen innings Detroit has to find

Detroit's bullpen threw 4 innings. Chicago's threw 4.2. Chicago is the club that had to find the extra innings, and Chicago's bullpen is the reason Chicago won.

What actually decided it

	IP	ER
Anderson (DET, start)	5.0	3
Detroit bullpen	4.0	4
Burke (CWS, start)	4.1	4
Chicago bullpen	4.2	1

Detroit led 4-1 after three. Tyler Holton then gave up 3 runs on 3 hits and 2 walks in an inning of work, and Hagen Smith, Huascar Brazobán and Sean Newcomb covered Chicago's last 4.2 innings for 1 run between them, Newcomb finishing with 2.1 scoreless.

Chicago hit 3 home runs to Detroit's 1, and both clubs left a crowd on base, 17 and 16, which is a lot of traffic for a 7-5 game.

The counterargument in that entry was the right one and it still lost

Friday's piece spent a whole section arguing itself down, and this is the part that matters now:

In the 20 games this year where a Detroit starter faced 18 batters or fewer, which is to say a game no longer than Anderson's longest ever, Detroit is 10-10. In the other 102 they're 50-52. It's the same team either way.

Anderson faced 21 batters, which is the second bucket, the one where Detroit is roughly .500 anyway. The pick's central worry, that Detroit would be into its pen too early, never came true, and Detroit lost from the pen regardless.

So I'm overriding a season of evidence with one afternoon's matchup, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets you a red X.

It didn't get a red X. It got a green tick for a reason I had explicitly ruled out, which is worth less than a red X honestly earned. The starting-pitcher argument was the entire pick, both halves of it were wrong by the fifth inning, and the scoreboard did not care.

The thing worth carrying into tonight

That is now four straight games where Detroit scored enough to win.

	Runs	Result
Aug 13 vs Cleveland	3	Won 3-0
Aug 14 vs Chicago	5	Lost 9-5
Aug 15 vs Chicago	3	Lost 4-3
Aug 16 vs Chicago	5	Lost 7-5

Across all 14 games in August, with 4 outfielders on the injured list, Detroit is scoring 5.64 runs a game against a season rate of 4.56. The bats are having the best month of their season. What has broken is the run prevention, and that is the opposite of what everyone has been saying for a week.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-17: the final and status on gamePk 824236, the box score, both pitching lines, the inning-by-inning linescore, and Detroit's game-by-game scoring for August 1 through 16. Quotations are from /journal/2026-08-15-pick-08-anderson-has-never-finished-a-fifth.html as published.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Series preview: Detroit at Pittsburgh, and both of these teams should have more wins than this

2026-08-16T12:59:00Z

Detroit at Pittsburgh. Monday 7:05pm, Tuesday 6:40pm, Wednesday 12:35pm ET, at PNC Park. The call: Detroit takes 2 of 3.

Two teams walk into a series in the third week of August. One has won 60 and lost 63. The other has won 60 and lost 65. Detroit is half a game outside the last wild card, Pittsburgh is 6.5 back of one, and neither club is where it wanted to be.

What they have in common is stranger than the records. Take every club's runs scored and runs allowed, run them through the formula that turns a run differential into an expected win total, and these are the 2 teams with the biggest holes between the wins they have and the wins they should have.

	Record	Runs scored	Runs allowed	Expected wins	Gap
Detroit	60-63	560	475	70.7	-10.7
Boston	66-57	546	460	71.1	-5.1
Pittsburgh	60-65	625	600	64.8	-4.8
Los Angeles Angels	49-75	507	590	53.5	-4.5
Washington	60-65	667	648	64.2	-4.2

Detroit is the worst in baseball and the worst in the American League. Pittsburgh is 3rd in baseball and the worst in the National League. Between them that is 15.5 wins the arithmetic says exist and the standings say do not.

That is the hook, and I want to take it apart before anybody gets attached to it.

More than half the time somebody is this unlucky and nothing is wrong

Here is the test. Give all 30 clubs exactly the quality their own run differentials say they have, so that by construction nobody is over or underperforming anything. Play out each club's actual number of games as a weighted coin, 20,000 times, and each time look at how far below expectation the unluckiest team in that simulated league landed.

A shortfall at least as big as Detroit's shows up in 55 percent of those seasons. Not 5 percent. More than half. And the average number of clubs finishing at or below Pittsburgh's 4.8 is 5.7 per season, which is to say being the National League's biggest underachiever is something that happens to somebody every year and this year it is them.

The arithmetic nobody does is this. Over 123 games, the ordinary wobble in a coin weighted at Detroit's quality is about 5.5 wins. Detroit sits 1.95 of those below the line, which is a real dip and is not a scandal. Then you go looking for the worst of 30 teams, and the worst of 30 draws off a bell curve sits about 2 wobbles out by construction, because that is what taking a minimum does to a distribution.

"Biggest gap in baseball" sounds like a fact about a team. It is mostly a fact about the number 30.

What is genuinely different is the shape, and these 2 have opposite ones

The lazy version of this preview says neither team can win a close game. Only one of them cannot.

Margin	Detroit	Pittsburgh
1 run	12-21	17-14
2 or 3 runs	17-25	10-24
4 or more	31-17	33-27

Detroit is 12-21 in 1-run games, 2nd worst in baseball behind San Francisco, and 31-17 when the margin is 4 or more, which is 5th best. That is a team that wins what it was always going to win and loses whatever comes down to one inning. The usual suspect is right there in the box: 25 saves in 51 chances, 49 percent, 26 blown.

Pittsburgh has a winning record in 1-run games, 17-14. Their hole is one bucket over. 10-24 in games decided by 2 or 3 runs is the worst mark in baseball and it is not close, with the Angels next at 11-23.

I do not have a story for that and I am not going to invent one. Nobody manages toward the 2-run game the way a manager manages toward a save, there is no role attached to it, and 34 games is a small enough pile that the same simulation says some club finishes at or below Pittsburgh's .294 in 13 percent of seasons by chance alone. Their bullpen converts at 54.5 percent, which is bad, and is still better than Detroit's.

They are mirror images, which is the real reason to watch

	Runs scored per game	Rank	Runs allowed per game	Rank
Pittsburgh	5.00	3rd	4.80	24th
Detroit	4.55	12th	3.86	5th

Pittsburgh has the 3rd best offense in baseball and the 7th worst run prevention. Detroit has the 5th best run prevention and a middling offense. Detroit's starters carry a 3.39 ERA over 637.2 innings; Pittsburgh's carry 4.39 over 628. Pittsburgh has scored 65 more runs than Detroit this season and allowed 125 more.

Two clubs built the opposite way from each other, arriving at the same 60 wins in the same week, both short of what their own numbers promised.

Wednesday is Paul Skenes and the first 2 are a mystery

Pittsburgh has not posted probables for Monday or Tuesday. Wednesday is Skenes: 3.88 ERA in 25 starts, 11.09 strikeouts per 9, WHIP 1.12. The ERA is higher than the reputation and the strikeout rate says the reputation is fine.

Detroit gets him in a 12:35pm getaway game with a lineup missing Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman, which is 4 outfielders, and that is the game in this series I would least like to have to win.

The 2 clubs have not met at all this season and have not played since July 23 2025, a 6-1 Pittsburgh win. Nobody has a book on anybody. Detroit is 28-33 on the road, Pittsburgh 31-31 at home, so PNC is not doing either side a favour.

The call

Detroit takes 2 of 3. The pitching gap is the largest single thing in this series, Detroit allows almost a run a game less than Pittsburgh does, and 2 of the 3 starters on the other side are still unnamed, which is exactly the spot where I would rather own the better staff than the better lineup.

What scares me is the whole middle of this piece. Detroit does not have an offense that puts games away, it is 4 outfielders short, and the same arithmetic that makes them the unluckiest team in baseball also says that title goes to somebody every year and usually means nothing. If these 3 games each come down to a run, I have picked the club that has lost 21 of them.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-16, for both clubs' standings, runs scored and allowed, game-by-game results back to opening day, all 30 clubs' records by margin of victory, starter and reliever splits, save conversions, the season schedule between the 2 teams and Skenes' season line. Every figure here, the chart, and both 20,000-league simulations come from one run of scripts/underperformers.py.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Graded: Pick No. 7. I said the correction was not something I could schedule, and it showed up in the next start

2026-08-16T12:58:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: White Sox 4, Tigers 3. gamePk 824239, Final on the id.

Record: 4-3.

Detroit is 60-63, 4.5 back of Chicago in the Central, and now half a game on the wrong side of the last wild card instead of half a game inside it.

The sentence the game answered

From Saturday's entry, the last thing I wrote before the call:

If the FIP is right and the BABIP finally moves, it's going to move in some particular game, and there is no way to know which one. Thirteen starts of it not happening is not a guarantee about the 14th.

The 14th was it. Melton went 4.1 innings, gave up 9 hits, 4 of them doubles, and 3 runs. On the balls Chicago put in play he allowed 9 hits in 17 chances.

His season figure went from .196 to .222 in one afternoon. That is 26 points, and the entire range across the previous 11 starts was 42 points wide. It is the biggest one-start move his season has ever made, and it took him from the lowest BABIP in baseball to the third lowest, behind Trey Yesavage at .218 and Yoshinobu Yamamoto at .221.

The ERA went 1.46 to 1.71. The FIP went 3.62 to 3.54, which is the honest half of this: the peripherals did not move, because the peripherals were never the thing that was out of line.

One start is not a correction, and that cuts the way I don't want it to

The entry set this up as a question with two sides and I do not get to declare it settled because one of them had a good afternoon.

Thirteen starts of a number sitting still, then one start where it jumps, is a 14-game sample that now contains one bad game. If .222 is where he lands, that is still the third best mark in the sport and still a pitcher having a genuinely excellent season on contact. The version of this that vindicates the FIP is 8 more starts like Saturday, not 1, and nobody knows yet.

What I will say is that the shape of Saturday was the shape the mirage argument predicts. Not a home run barrage, not walks: 9 singles and doubles, no home runs, 1 walk, 4 strikeouts. Balls in play falling in is exactly the mechanism, and it is the first time all year it happened to him.

The scare I named was the wrong one

Here is what I said would beat Detroit:

Detroit does not hit lefties. .701 against left handers, .738 against right handers, and Kay throws left handed.

Detroit scored 3 runs off Anthony Kay in 5.1 innings, and 0 off everybody else. Jordan Hicks, Grant Taylor and Bryan Hudson threw the last 3.2 innings and gave up 1 hit and struck out 5. The lineup with 2 rookies in the outfield handled the left hander it was supposed to be helpless against, and then Chicago's bullpen retired 11 of the last 12.

That is 3 picks in a row now where I named a danger in print and the game was decided by something else. Twice it was the 1-run record in games that ended 9-5 and 3-0. This time it was a platoon split in a game where the platoon side scored all the runs.

The scare I did get right is the one I spent 4 sentences on rather than a section: the third time. Melton had faced Chicago twice for 13 innings and 2 earned runs. He faced them a third time and gave up 9 hits in 4.1. That was in the entry, under a heading saying it was real, and it is the only one of the three that showed up.

The gap that actually decided it

Kay went 5.1 and Melton went 4.1, and both bullpens were fine. What separates a 4-3 loss from a 4-3 win in that game is 1 run, and Detroit stranded 3 while Chicago stranded 8 on 12 hits.

Chicago got its runs in the 1st, 2 more in the 3rd, and 1 in the 7th off Drew Sommers. Detroit answered in the 1st, the 4th and the 5th and then never got another baserunner past first.

Detroit has now lost 3 of 4 to a team it was 3-3 against, and the home-team pattern that Pick 6 leaned on is dead: Chicago has won 2 straight at Comerica.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-16, for the final on gamePk 824239, the box score, both pitching lines, the inning by inning scoring and the American League standings. Melton's season line, his start-by-start BABIP and the qualifying-starter leaderboard come from one run of scripts/melton_mirage.py.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Pick No. 8: Drew Anderson has never finished a 5th inning

2026-08-15T12:59:00Z

The call: Chicago takes Sunday afternoon at Comerica. Confidence: low.

This is the 8th pick on the board and the first one that isn't the Tigers, so I'll say up front that I don't feel great about it and I'll show you the numbers that say I'm wrong at the bottom.

Here's the one that got me there.

42 appearances, and the ceiling hasn't moved

Every appearance Drew Anderson has made this season, plotted by how many outs he got. 42 of them, 4 as a starter. The most he has recorded in any game this season is 14, which is 4.2 innings, and he did that back on May 20. Detroit's median start this year is 17 outs. He has never touched the line.

Here are the 4 starts on their own.

Date	Opponent	Innings	Batters faced	Pitches	Earned runs
May 20	Cleveland	4.2	18	63	0
Jun 15	Houston	2.2	12	59	1
Aug 5	Seattle	3.2	13	42	0
Aug 11	Cleveland	4.0	17	70	1

The pitch count is climbing, 42 to 70 in 6 days, so the stretch out is real and Detroit clearly wants more out of him. It just hasn't arrived yet. 18 batters is the whole of a lineup twice through with a bit left over, and Sunday he needs a third look at people to save the bullpen anything.

Sean Burke is the other kind of problem

	Innings	ERA	WHIP	K	BB
Sean Burke	135.2	2.99	1.08	152	39
Drew Anderson	71.1	3.91	1.30	82	27

26 years old, 6 foot 6, 20 starts, and he's gone 6 innings or more in 7 of his last 11. He faced Detroit once, May 31 in Chicago, 5.1 innings and 1 run, and the White Sox won 2-1.

So Detroit's side of Sunday is a guy who probably hands it over in the 5th, and Chicago's side is a guy who's been finishing the 7th. That's 2 or 3 extra bullpen innings Detroit has to find, against a lineup that put 9 on them Friday night.

And the lineup they're finding those runs with is short. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman are all on the IL, which is 4 outfielders, and Friday's outfield was Max Clark, Javier Baez and Ben Malgeri. Detroit hits .247 with a .738 OPS against righties, Burke throws right handed, and that .738 was earned mostly by a lineup that isn't available.

Chicago's also just won 4 of the 7 meetings, and Friday broke the strangest thing about this season series, which was that the home team had won all 6.

Now the part where I argue myself down

The bullpen game isn't the disaster it sounds like. I went and counted. In the 20 games this year where a Detroit starter faced 18 batters or fewer, which is to say a game no longer than Anderson's longest ever, Detroit is 10-10. In the other 102 they're 50-52. It's the same team either way.

Detroit, 2026	Record	Runs allowed per game	Relievers used
Starter faced 18 or fewer, 20 games	10-10	4.10	4.0
Starter faced more than 18, 102 games	50-52	3.81	2.9

A third of a run and one extra arm. That's the whole cost, and if I'm honest that's a much smaller number than the one in my head when I started.

Anderson isn't bad, he's short. He strikes out 10.35 per 9 innings. Burke strikes out 10.08. The guy I'm calling the weak link in this game misses more bats per inning than the guy I'm calling the strength. What he can't do is go around a lineup 3 times, and that's a completely different complaint.

And the big one. Detroit is 60-62 with a plus 86 run differential. Chicago is 63-58 at plus 44. Run the Pythagorean on both and Detroit should be a 71 win team, which puts them 11.1 wins below where they've played. That is the largest shortfall in baseball and it isn't close, Boston's next at 5.9. Detroit's team ERA is 3.52 against Chicago's 4.11. They're at home. On everything except Sunday's starting pitcher, Detroit is the better club, and this site has said so for a week.

So I'm overriding a season of evidence with one afternoon's matchup, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets you a red X.

White Sox win. Low. Best pitcher on the field by a distance, against a Detroit lineup missing 4 outfielders and a starter who's likely gone by the 5th. If Anderson goes 5 and Detroit's pen holds it, I'm wrong and I'll have been wrong for the reason I already told you about.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-15, for the probables, both pitchers' season lines and full 2026 game logs, every finished Detroit boxscore for batters faced by the starter, both clubs' standings and run totals, all 30 teams' Pythagorean shortfall, team hitting splits by opposing hand, the season series and the Detroit and Chicago transaction feeds. Every number and the chart come from one run of scripts/short_start_games.py and scripts/anderson_length_chart.py.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

The 2008 Lions are the one season holding Detroit's preseason trend line down

2026-08-15T12:58:00Z

Somebody in the r/detroitlions thread on Thursday asked for a scatter plot. Detroit only, preseason win rate against regular season win rate, one dot a season, trend line if there is one. Somebody else asked what the win totals actually look like for the teams that go undefeated in August.

Both of those are better questions than the thing they were asked about. Here are both charts, and the first one has a joke buried in it.

Twenty-five Detroit seasons, one dot each

Twenty-five seasons, 2000 through 2025. 2020 is not in there because there was no preseason that year. Dots are bigger where seasons landed on the same spot, which happens more than you'd think: 2000, 2016 and 2017 all went 2-2 in August and 9-7 after it.

The fit slopes up. r is +0.28, which works out to August explaining 8.1% of what the regular season did.

Now, 8.1% off 25 dots is not a finding, and I want to kill it before anybody quotes it. Shuffle which season goes with which August 20,000 times, keeping Detroit's actual numbers on both axes, and 17.1% of those shuffles produce a correlation at least as strong. Roughly 1 in 6. A line that chance draws that often is not a line.

The part that's funny

Take one season out at a time and refit, which is the standard check for whether a single point is carrying the answer.

	r	August explains
All 25 seasons	+0.285	8.1%
Without 2008	+0.514	26.4%
Without 2011	+0.222	4.9%

2008 is the season that flattens it. 4-0 in August, 0-16 after, sitting alone in the bottom right corner of the chart pulling the whole line down toward horizontal. Remove it and Detroit's preseason record starts looking like it predicts something.

That thread spent Thursday telling me 2008 had to be in the data. They were right, it's in now, and it turns out 2008 is the single strongest piece of evidence Detroit has ever produced for the thing they were arguing. The season everybody remembers as the punchline is doing real statistical work.

2011 is the other 4-0 August, and that team went 10-6 and made the playoffs. Take that one out instead and the correlation drops to +0.22. Two perfect Augusts, 3 years apart, one of them the worst season in NFL history and the other a playoff berth, and between them they're most of the reason the answer is nothing.

You don't get to drop the inconvenient dot, so the answer stands at +0.28 and 1 in 6. But knowing which single season is holding the number up or down is worth more than the number.

Detroit's average August across those 25 years is .497 and their average season is .401, which is a whole separate thing to sit with.

The other chart: where do undefeated preseason teams finish?

Every team since 2000 that won all of its preseason games. 68 of them out of 798 team-seasons. Bars are that group, the line is everybody, both as a share of their own group so the 68 and the 798 are comparable.

They finish everywhere. Raw win totals run from 0 to 14. The biggest single bucket is 10 wins with 10 teams in it, and the next 3 buckets down hold 8, 6 and

There is no cluster.

45.6% of the undefeated group won 9 or more per 17. For everybody it's 46.9%.

That gap is the whole answer, and the reason the histogram was worth drawing rather than quoting an average. A tight pile around 8 wins would have meant an undefeated August genuinely makes you mediocre, which is a real claim. A smear across the entire range means August told you nothing about that specific team, which is a different claim, and it's the one the data supports.

Both ends of the range belong to somebody. Detroit 2008 and Cleveland 2017 went 0-16 out of perfect Augusts. New England 2003 and Baltimore 2019 went 14-2, and Minnesota 2024 went 14-3.

The caveat travels with the chart: 68 teams across 16 occupied buckets is somewhere between 1 and 10 teams per bar. Read the shape, don't read a bump.

Sources: ESPN's public schedule endpoint, cached in scripts/preseason_cache_2000.json, which is the same file behind the 798 team-season sample, so Detroit's rows here match the rows already published. 2020 excluded, no preseason was played. Ties count as half a win. Win rate on both axes of the scatter because preseasons are 3, 4 or 5 games and seasons are 16 or 17. Charts from one run each of scripts/lions_scatter_svg.py and scripts/undefeated_preseason_hist.py --svg.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Pick No. 7: Troy Melton has been about to regress for 13 straight starts

2026-08-15T12:57:00Z

The call: Detroit takes Saturday afternoon at Comerica. Confidence: low.

Troy Melton has a 1.46 ERA in 13 starts, and the reason everybody gives for not believing it is his batting average on balls in play. It's .196. Of the 145 pitchers with 70 innings and 10 starts this season, nobody else is under .218, and the median is .286.

BABIP is the number you look at when a pitcher's results are better than his strikeouts and walks say they should be, because what happens to a ball once it's in play is mostly out of the pitcher's hands. It's the standard tell for a season that's going to come apart.

So here's the thing I keep waiting for and it hasn't happened.

Thirteen starts, and it has never gone anywhere

That's his season BABIP recalculated after every start he's made. From his 3rd start onward it has lived between .155 and .197. Not once has it poked above .200. The median starter's line is up there at .286 and the line just never travels toward it.

After start	Innings	Season ERA	Season BABIP
May 24, Baltimore	5.2	1.59	.125
May 29, Chicago	12.2	1.42	.190
Jun 3, Tampa Bay	20.2	1.74	.175
Jun 9, Minnesota	25.2	2.81	.197
Jun 20, Chicago	31.2	2.56	.169
Jun 25, Houston	37.2	2.39	.157
Jul 1, Yankees	44.0	2.05	.155
Jul 8, Athletics	49.1	1.82	.172
Jul 17, Angels	55.0	1.80	.188
Jul 23, Kansas City	60.0	1.95	.197
Jul 28, Baltimore	67.0	1.75	.195
Aug 4, Seattle	74.0	1.58	.191
Aug 9, San Francisco	80.0	1.46	.196

I've been on the wrong side of this. A week ago I wrote that the 1.58 was a mirage and that somewhere between it and league average was the real Melton. He threw 6 shutout innings the next night and the ERA went down. That's 1 start and it proves nothing, and I want to be careful not to swing the other way off it.

The case that it's still a mirage is not the BABIP anymore

It's the strikeouts. Melton has 69 in 80 innings, which is fine and is not special, and 24 walks. Run his home runs, walks, hit batters and strikeouts through fielding independent pitching, using this season's own league totals to set the constant rather than a remembered one, and you get 3.62.

	Innings	ERA	FIP	Gap	HR	BB	HBP	K
Troy Melton	80.0	1.46	3.62	+2.16	8	24	2	69
Anthony Kay	116.0	3.96	4.79	+0.83	15	43	21	94

A gap of 2.16 is enormous. League ERA is 4.16, so FIP is calling him roughly an average major league starter having the best year in baseball on contact.

The honest wrinkle, and I didn't expect it when I ran the numbers: Saturday's opposing starter is doing the same thing. Anthony Kay's ERA is 3.96 and his FIP is 4.79. Both of these guys are outrunning their peripherals. Melton is just doing it by two and a half times as much.

Kay has hit 21 batters and second place has hit 14

Same population as the chart above, the 145 starters with real workloads. Kay leads all of them in hit batsmen by 7. He's also walked 43 in 116 innings, which is 3.3 per 9, and his WHIP is 1.34 against Melton's 0.90.

He is not, however, bad. 3.96 is a perfectly useful season and he's made 22 starts for a first place team. He faced Detroit once, on May 30 in Chicago, went 5 innings and gave up 1 run, and the White Sox won 7-1.

Why I like Detroit

Melton has faced this exact team twice and it went well both times. May 29 in Chicago, 7 innings, 1 earned run. June 20 at Comerica, 6 innings, 1 earned run. That's 13 innings and 2 runs against a lineup he'll see for a 3rd time Saturday, which cuts both ways and I'll get to that.

Detroit is home, and the home team had won all 6 games in this season series until Friday night. And the shape of the 2 teams since June 1 is still not the shape the standings say: Detroit 38-24 at plus 125 runs, Chicago 31-31 at plus

Chicago's lead is a 32-27 start that Detroit has spent the summer eating into.

What scares me

Detroit does not hit lefties. .701 against left handers, .738 against right handers, and Kay throws left handed. Chicago is dead even at .730 and .728, so this is a Detroit specific thing, not a league wide one.

That gets worse when you look at who's missing. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman are all on the injured list, and Friday's outfield was Max Clark, Javier Baez and Ben Malgeri with 2 rookies in it. A lineup that already struggles against lefties is short its regulars against a lefty.

The third time is real. Melton has now faced Chicago twice. Hitters get better the more they see a pitcher, and a guy whose whole season is built on soft contact is exactly the profile that suffers when a lineup has seen the shapes before.

And the thing under all of it. If the FIP is right and the BABIP finally moves, it's going to move in some particular game, and there is no way to know which one. Thirteen starts of it not happening is not a guarantee about the 14th. It just means I've stopped treating the correction as something I can schedule.

Tigers win. Low. Better pitcher, at home, off a loss, against a lefty who walks people and hits people. What I can't tell you is whether Detroit scores enough off him with the lineup they've currently got.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-15, for the probables, both pitchers' season lines and full game logs, the 145 qualifying starters and their BABIP and hit batsmen, league pitching totals for the FIP constant, both clubs' hitting splits by opposing hand, the season series and the Detroit transactions feed. Chart and every number in it come from one run of scripts/melton_mirage.py.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Graded: Pick No. 6. I said nobody would let Jobe see the lineup a third time and Chicago made sure he did

2026-08-15T12:56:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: White Sox 9, Tigers 5. gamePk 824237, Final on the id.

Record: 4-2.

Detroit is 60-62, 3.5 back of Chicago in the Central, holding the last wild card by half a game over Minnesota.

The one sentence I'd take back

From Friday's entry, about Jackson Jobe, who had thrown 5 innings all season:

Nobody's letting him see a lineup a 3rd time on Friday either.

He faced 23 hitters. Nine of them got hits. A lineup is 9 batters, so 23 means the top 5 spots in Chicago's order came up against him a third time, and all of that happened inside 3.2 innings.

I had the mechanism completely backwards. I was imagining a manager deciding whether to send a stretched-out arm back out for the 6th. What actually gets a pitcher to a third trip through the order in the 4th inning is the other team hitting everything, and by the time it's happening there isn't a decision left to make, there's just a guy on the mound and nobody warm.

Jobe's line: 3.2 innings, 9 hits, 6 runs, 2 home runs, 74 pitches. Detroit led 3-1 after 3. Chicago scored 5 in the 4th.

The part I got right did nothing

Two other things in that entry were checkable and both came in.

Sean Newcomb was an opener, exactly as advertised. 1.1 innings, 5 hitters, 25 pitches, and then Jose Urquidy for 3.2. Chicago's bullpen threw 7.2 of the 9 innings, which is the way that team is built and the thing the whole piece was about.

And the closing line of the pick was that I thought Detroit's bullpen would hold one more than Chicago's. Detroit's relievers threw 5.1 and gave up 3. Chicago's threw 7.2 and gave up 5. Per inning that's 5.06 against 5.87, so Detroit's pen was in fact the marginally better one on the night, same as the season numbers said it would be.

I won the argument I picked and it had nothing to do with the game. Both pens showed up after the score was 6-3, and the difference between them across 13 innings of mop-up was worth less than one inning of the starter.

The thing I said scared me is not what happened

Here's the whole section, and it's wrong in a specific way worth naming:

Detroit is 12-20 in 1 run games, 4th worst in baseball. That matters more than usual here, because a game where both teams empty the pen from the 5th inning on is exactly the kind of game that ends 4-3, and 4-3 is the score Detroit keeps losing.

It ended 9-5. There was never a moment after the 4th inning where a close-game record was going to decide anything.

That's the second night in a row I want to write about, because I've now leaned on the 1-run record twice and neither game was close. It's a real weakness and it's on the board, but naming it as the danger in a specific game is a different claim, and in this one it bought nothing. The danger was a starter with 5 innings on his arm.

The pattern the whole pick rested on broke

The season series had gone 3-3 and every one of the 6 games went to the home team. Chicago swept Detroit in Chicago in May, Detroit swept Chicago at Comerica in June, and 4 of the 6 were decided by 1 run.

That was the tidiest thing in the entry and it's the reason I liked Detroit: Chicago is 37-24 at home and 25-34 on the road, and this game was at Comerica.

Chicago won at Comerica. The series is 4-3 Chicago, the home team is 6-1 instead of 6-0, and the one number I built a call on stopped being true in the first game after I published it. A 6 game pattern is 6 games, and I knew that when I wrote it down, and I used it anyway because it was clean.

Detroit's offense was not the problem, which is new

10 hits and 5 runs against a staff that pitched 5 different arms. Given that Riley Greene, Matt Vierling, Kerry Carpenter and James Outman are all on the injured list and Friday's outfield had two rookies in it, 5 runs is more than I would have guessed.

Detroit's rotation ERA came into the night at 3.30, the lowest of all 30 teams, and that is the team's entire identity this season. Friday they scored 5 and lost by 4, because the one start they got from a pitcher who isn't part of that rotation yet cost them 6 runs in under 4 innings.

Saturday is Troy Melton, who is part of it.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-15, for the final, the box score, both pitching lines, the inning by inning scoring, the season series game by game and the American League standings.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

You were right about 2008. Here is what happens when you put it back in.

2026-08-14T12:59:00Z

The 2008 Lions went 4-0 in the preseason and 0-16 in the regular season, and they were not in the sample. Several of you said so, correctly and repeatedly. So I went and got every season the data goes back to, which is 2000, not 2015. 798 team-seasons instead of 320.

Here is what that does.

First, the part that was just wrong

The original run said the window came from the endpoint's coverage. It doesn't. ESPN serves NFL preseason schedules back to 2000. 1999 and earlier return regular season games and no preseason at all, so 2000 is the real floor, and everything from 2000 to 2014 was sitting there the whole time. That's 15 extra seasons and 478 extra team-seasons, and it's where 2008 lives.

The 2008 Lions are the worst season in 25 years of this

Sorted by regular season winning percentage, across all 798 team-seasons:

Team	Season	Preseason	Regular season
Detroit	2008	4-0	0-16
Cleveland	2017	4-0	0-16
San Diego	2000	4-0	1-15
Carolina	2001	2-2	1-15
Miami	2007	2-2	1-15
St. Louis	2009	3-1	1-15
Cleveland	2016	0-4	1-15

The 3 worst regular seasons in the sample all came out of a perfect preseason. Both 0-16 seasons in NFL history, and the 1-15 Chargers. That's not a small thing to have left out, and it's the version of this the sub has been telling each other for 18 years.

Add the near misses and it gets worse. St. Louis went 4-0 in the 2011 preseason and 2-14. Washington went 4-0 in 2013 and 3-13. Arizona 2003, Philadelphia 2012 and the Giants in 2019 all went 4-0 in August and 4-12 after it.

And then the other Lions team

2011. Also 4-0 in the preseason. 10-6, and the playoffs.

Same franchise, same perfect August, 3 seasons apart, and the two outcomes are the worst season anybody has ever had and the first Lions playoff berth in 12 years. If you want to know why the correlation is what it is, that's the whole argument inside one team.

Detroit's 25 seasons, since you asked for them:

Season	Preseason	Regular season
2000	2-2	9-7
2001	1-3	2-13
2002	1-3	3-13
2003	2-2	5-11
2004	2-2	6-10
2005	1-3	5-11
2006	1-3	3-13
2007	2-2	7-9
2008	4-0	0-16
2009	3-1	2-14
2010	3-1	6-10
2011	4-0	10-6
2012	2-2	4-12
2013	3-1	7-9
2014	3-1	11-5
2015	3-1	7-9
2016	2-2	9-7
2017	2-2	9-7
2018	1-3	6-10
2019	0-4	3-12-1
2021	0-3	3-13-1
2022	1-2	9-8
2023	2-1	12-5
2024	2-1	15-2
2025	1-3	9-8

Detroit's average preseason over those 25 years is .497 and their average regular season is .401, which is its own joke: this franchise has been almost exactly a .500 team in August and nowhere near it afterwards.

Detroit on its own correlates at +.285, which looks like something and isn't. That's 25 dots. The 2 seasons that would move it most are 2008 and 2011, and they point opposite directions.

The answer, on 798 team-seasons

Preseason	Team-seasons	Regular season win pct	vs .500
Won every preseason game	68	.475	-.025
Winning preseason	226	.538	+.038
Even preseason	217	.521	+.021
Losing preseason	217	.458	-.042
Lost every preseason game	70	.473	-.027

Correlation between preseason win rate and regular season win rate: +.106. Variance explained: 1.1 percent.

On 320 team-seasons it was 1.0 percent. On 798 it's 1.1 percent. Adding 2008, and 2011, and 476 other team-seasons, moves the answer by a tenth of a percentage point. The thing the post said is still the thing the data says.

The line that does not survive

Here's what does change, and it's the sentence people quoted.

The first version said teams that went undefeated in August (.466) did worse than teams that went winless (.475). That inversion was fun and it's gone. On the full sample it's .475 for the undefeated group against .473 for the winless group, which is a 2 point gap across 138 teams and means nothing at all.

Look at it a different way and the undefeated group stops being the story entirely. Share of teams that won 9 or more per 17 games:

Group	Share at 9+ wins
Undefeated preseason	.456
Everybody	.469
Winless preseason	.357

An undefeated August tells you nothing. A winless August is mild bad news. That's close to the opposite of the punchy version, and it's the one with 798 team-seasons behind it rather than 320.

The other thing worth putting next to the 0-16 table: of the 68 teams that swept their preseason, the biggest single group won 10 games. 10 teams did that. 4 won 14, and 2 won 15. New England went 4-0 in the 2003 preseason and 14-2. Baltimore did the same in 2019. The win totals after a perfect August run from 0 to 15 with no cluster anywhere, which is what "no signal" actually looks like when you stop averaging it.

Two things in the data that were wrong

Worth saying plainly, because both changed numbers.

Relocated franchises were being counted as their opponents. The code found its team in a box score by matching the abbreviation. ESPN answers a request for lar in any season but writes the abbreviation the franchise used that year inside the game, so a 2015 Rams game says STL, nothing matched, and the old code fell back to whichever team was listed first. Often the opponent.

That put 8 wrong rows into the published 320, and some of them badly wrong: San Diego's 2015 season was in there as 10-6 when they went 4-12, and Oakland's 2016 was in there as 8-8 when they went 12-4. The fix is to match on ESPN's numeric team id, which stays the same through all 3 moves.

And 0-0 was being read as a tie. Some fixtures come back with a 0-0 score rather than a null: games that were genuinely never played, like the Hall of Fame games cancelled in 2011 and 2016, the Dallas and Houston preseason game called off for Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and Buffalo at Cincinnati in January 2023. Also some real games where the score just isn't in the feed, mostly in 2000 and

There are 41 of them. Every one was scoring as half a win to both teams, and that moved another 10 rows inside the published window.

That's why Detroit 2001 shows 2-13 above rather than 2-14: one Lions game that season has no score in the feed, so it's out of the sample rather than counted as a draw. No NFL game has finished 0-0 since 1943, so a 0-0 is a missing result, not a result.

Neither of those changed the conclusion. Both changed the sample, and the tail buckets are exactly where 18 misplaced rows do the most damage, which is why this matters more than the size of the correction suggests.

So, Thursday

Detroit lost 16-14 at Cincinnati. It counts for nothing, and now it counts for nothing with 2008 in the room rather than conveniently outside it. Anybody reaching for that result as a worry has the 2008 table above pointing the other way, which is the whole problem with reading August.

Watch the roster bubble instead, because that's the only thing in the preseason with a real consequence attached. The record is noise, and the 2 most famous 4-0 Lions preseasons in living memory are a 0-16 and a playoff team.

The board opens for the Lions in Week 1.

Method: every NFL team's preseason and regular season results, 2000 to 2025, from ESPN's public schedule endpoint. 2020 excluded, no preseason was played. Ties count as half a win. Fixtures with no recorded score are excluded rather than counted. Teams are matched by ESPN team id, not abbreviation. scripts/preseason_full.py derives every number here in one run.

Pick No. 6: Nobody's really starting this one

2026-08-14T12:58:00Z

The call: Detroit takes the opener Friday night at Comerica. Confidence: low.

First place is coming to town, which is a sentence I did not expect to write about the White Sox in August. They're 62-58 and they lead the AL Central. Detroit's 60-61 and 2.5 back, holding the last wild card by half a game with 6 teams inside 2 of it. So this is a big series, and the strange thing about Friday is that neither team is really going to start a pitcher.

Sean Newcomb has made 1 start this year and it was against Detroit

Chicago's giving the ball to Newcomb, who's appeared in 44 games and started exactly 1 of them. 64.1 innings across 44 outings, which is under an inning and a half a night. His longest appearance of the whole season is 3 innings.

That 1 start? June 20, at Comerica, against these guys. He went 3 innings, faced 9 hitters, and retired all 9. Then the bullpen took it the rest of the way and Detroit won 4-1 anyway.

So he's an opener, and everybody knows he's an opener, and Chicago isn't pretending otherwise. To be fair to him he's been very good in the role, 2.66 ERA and a 1.13 WHIP, and he strikes out 8.4 per 9. He's just not going to be out there in the 5th.

This is how the whole team is built, and I don't think it's a weakness

Here's the part I went in expecting to be a punchline and came out respecting. Chicago's bullpen has thrown 548.2 of the team's 1,071.1 innings. That's .512, more than half, and it's the most in baseball. Only Washington is also over half, at .509. The median club is at .418.

	Rotation IP	Bullpen IP	Bullpen share	Rotation ERA	Bullpen ERA
White Sox	522.2	548.2	.512	4.36	3.85
Tigers	629.2	443.0	.413	3.30	3.74
League median			.418

Look at the last 2 columns for Chicago. Rotation 4.36, bullpen 3.85. Their relievers are the better unit and it isn't close, so leaning on them isn't a team falling apart, it's a team playing to the thing it's actually got. Their pen has the 9th best ERA in the sport. Their rotation is 19th.

And it's worth saying they're in first place doing it, so whatever I think of it, it's working.

Detroit has the best rotation in baseball and Friday they don't have it

Detroit's rotation ERA is 3.30, the lowest of all 30 teams. Ahead of the Yankees, ahead of Tampa Bay, ahead of the Dodgers. That's the team's whole identity this year, and it's the reason a 60-61 club has given up only 462 runs.

Jackson Jobe gets the ball Friday, and Jobe has thrown 5 innings this season. All 5 came last Saturday in San Francisco, 5 shutout innings, 4 strikeouts, 16 hitters faced, and that's his entire 2026. He made 10 starts in 2025 and then that was the last anybody saw of him until last Saturday. Nobody's letting him see a lineup a 3rd time on Friday either.

So both dugouts are going to be into their bullpen somewhere around the 5th, and that's what this game actually is. Detroit's pen has the 6th best ERA in baseball at 3.74 and Chicago's is 9th at 3.85, which is basically a coin flip on quality. The difference is that Chicago's relievers do this every night and know it, and Detroit's are being asked to cover for a starter who isn't stretched out yet.

Why I like Detroit anyway

The season series is 3-3 and it's the tidiest 3-3 you'll ever see. Chicago swept them in Chicago in May. Detroit swept them at Comerica in June. All 6 games went to the home team, and 4 of the 6 were decided by 1 run.

The home thing isn't just those 6 games either. Chicago is 37-24 at home and 25-34 on the road. Detroit's 32-28 at Comerica. Friday is at Comerica.

And the shape of the 2 teams right now is not the shape the standings suggest. Since June 1 Detroit is 38-23 and has outscored people by 129 runs. Chicago is 30-31 in that time at plus 32. Detroit's won 7 of 10, Chicago's lost 6 of 10. Chicago's lead is mostly a 32-27 start that Detroit spent the summer eating into from 22-38.

What scares me, and it's the same thing every time

Detroit is 12-20 in 1 run games, 4th worst in baseball. Chicago is 21-19.

That matters more than usual here, because a game where both teams empty the pen from the 5th inning on is exactly the kind of game that ends 4-3, and 4-3 is the score Detroit keeps losing.

The thing I can't talk myself out of is this. The nice version of Detroit's season is the comeback: 22-38 at the end of May with a run differential of minus 39, and now they're in a playoff spot. That's all true and it's great. But run their record against their own run differential and they were 3.6 wins short of it through May, and they're 5.5 wins short of it since June 1. The leak hasn't closed while they've been climbing. It's gotten bigger. They've just been outscoring people by so much that it stopped showing up in the standings.

Friday is a game with almost no margin in it for a team that's been losing the close ones.

Then there's the outfield, which is now 4 deep on the injured list. Riley Greene, Matt Vierling and Kerry Carpenter are all on the 10 day, and James Outman went on the 7 day Thursday with a concussion. Corey Julks and Trei Cruz got called up. Thursday's outfield was Max Clark in center, Javier Baez in left and Ben Malgeri in right, and Malgeri and Clark are both rookies. That's a lot of new faces against a first place team.

Tigers win. Low. Home team, better run differential, hotter, and I don't love saying it out loud but I think Detroit's bullpen holds one more than Chicago's does.

What are you watching for here? I'll be watching how long Jobe goes, because if he's out after 4 this turns into a bullpen game Detroit didn't plan on.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-14, for the probables, both pitchers' season and game logs, the sp/rp innings split for all 30 clubs, the season series, the standings and splits, and the Detroit transactions feed for the injured list. Chart and every number in it come from one run of scripts/bullpen_share.py.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Graded: Pick No. 5. Detroit shut out Cleveland without striking anybody out, which has happened 7 times since 2000

2026-08-14T12:57:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: Detroit 3, Cleveland 0. gamePk 824238, Final on the id.

Record: 4-1.

9 innings, 32 hitters, 0 strikeouts

Keider Montero went 6.1, Tyler Holton got 5 outs, Kenley Jansen closed it, and between them they didn't strike out a single Cleveland hitter. 4 hits, 1 walk, 27 outs, all of them on contact.

I went looking for how weird that is and pulled every team's pitching game log back to 2000, which is 126,918 team-games. There are 7,476 shutouts in there. 7 of them came with 0 strikeouts.

Date	Team	Line
2001-04-22	Mariners	9 IP, 6 H, 1 BB
2002-04-28	Orioles	9 IP, 4 H, 2 BB
2006-05-12	Yankees	9 IP, 4 H, 3 BB
2006-05-17	Tigers	9 IP, 7 H, 0 BB
2012-05-15	Guardians	9 IP, 6 H, 4 BB
2014-07-01	Tigers	9 IP, 4 H, 0 BB
2026-08-13	Tigers	9 IP, 4 H, 1 BB

3 of the 7 are Detroit, all 3 at home, and nobody else has done it twice.

The 2006 one is a 23 year old Justin Verlander going 8 innings without a strikeout in his rookie year, with Todd Jones finishing it. The 2014 one is Rick Porcello throwing a complete game 4 hitter against Oakland and not striking out anybody either. That is a strange little Comerica tradition and I'm not going to pretend I can explain it.

For what it's worth the fanbase got there first. Somebody had it on r/motorcitykitties within an hour of the last out as "first time since 2014," which is right. What they didn't have is that 2014 was also the Tigers, and so was 2006.

The 2 things I said to check, and both of them landed

The entry made 2 falsifiable claims about Montero, so here they are.

On whether he'd get through 5 on contact again. I wrote that his xFIP sits 1.19 above his ERA and that he strikes out 6.3 per 9, so the interesting question wasn't the result but whether the contact kept finding gloves. He went 6.1 innings and struck out 0. Not 1 or 2. Zero. That's about as extreme a version of the thing I described as you can get, and it worked, and I'd still say the same thing about the next one.

On the catcher. After Wednesday I said Cleveland alternates Bailey and Hedges and that if Hedges caught back to back against the team that never runs, that'd be a different claim and would need more than 2 games. Hedges started and caught the first 7. So that's Hedges twice in a row, and it's still 2 games, and I'm still not writing it down as a pattern.

Somebody finally ran, and it was the good catcher

For 2 games and about 3,000 words on the running game, 21 baserunners produced 0 steal attempts. Thursday there were 2, one each way, and both were safe.

The Detroit one is the funny part. Kevin McGonigle singled with 1 out in the 8th and stole 2nd. By then Angel Martinez had pinch hit for Hedges and Patrick Bailey was behind the plate, which means the one time Detroit ran in the entire series, they ran on the 35% guy rather than the 5% guy, and it worked.

I want to be careful here, because this is the number that flatters me and I said as much on Wednesday. 1 attempt is not evidence of anything. Detroit attempts a steal on 4.8% of times reached 1st, so a normal night for them expects well under 1, and 1 is just a normal night. If McGonigle had been thrown out I'd be writing the same sentence.

Chase DeLauter took 2nd off Montero in the 1st, and that's only the 2nd steal anybody has got off Montero all season.

Where it leaves them

60-61, 2.5 back of the White Sox, holding the last wild card by half a game with 6 teams inside 2. The White Sox come to Comerica on Friday.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-14, for the final, the box score, the play by play, the substitutions, the standings, and 27 seasons of team pitching game logs. The scan is scripts/zero_k_shutouts.py.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.

Detroit's outfield is 3 men down. Here's what that's actually worth, and it's less than it sounds

2026-08-13T12:59:00Z

Riley Greene went on the 10-day injured list Wednesday with a right hamstring strain. He's got 492 plate appearances and an .816 OPS, easily Detroit's best outfielder, and he joins Matt Vierling and Kerry Carpenter, who are already there. 3 outfielders, on a team that's half a game out of the last wild card spot with 42 to play.

Worth being accurate about how big a bat this is, because I nearly wasn't. Greene is not Detroit's best hitter. Among the 6 guys with 300 or more plate appearances he's 3rd in OPS, behind Dillon Dingler at .844 and Kevin McGonigle at .819, and McGonigle has more plate appearances than he does. Greene's the best outfielder on the roster and the 3rd best hitter, and those are different sentences.

So it reads like the season just ended. I don't think it does, and I want to show you why, including the part that argues the other way.

First, they didn't all go down at once

This matters more than it sounds, because "we just lost 3 outfielders" and "we lost 1 more outfielder having already lost 2" are pretty different sentences.

From the league's own transactions feed:

Player	Placed	Injury	Eligible to return
Kerry Carpenter	Jul 27	Left foot plantar fasciitis	Aug 6
Matt Vierling	Jul 31, retro to Jul 30	Left adductor strain	Aug 9
Riley Greene	Aug 12	Right hamstring strain	Aug 22

Carpenter's been out 17 days and Vierling 14. Both of them passed their 10-day minimum a while back and neither is back, which is its own small worry, and plantar fasciitis is the kind of thing that lingers. But the point for right now is that Detroit's already been playing shorthanded for 2 weeks. Only 1 of these 3 is new information.

On Greene specifically, A.J. Hinch said the club thinks the strain is mild, and that Greene felt it slowing up at home plate and never hobbled, which Hinch called a good sign as opposed to a big mid-belly grab. A Cody Stavenhagen quote going around r/motorcitykitties has Hinch saying he wouldn't have been able to play the rest of this series or the White Sox weekend anyway, which I'm passing on second hand rather than from the piece itself. Take the 10-day minimum at face value and that's about 9 games.

Second, and this is the part nobody says out loud

Only 1 of the 3 was hitting.

Player	PA	OPS	vs replacement (.604)
Riley Greene	492	.816	+.212
Kerry Carpenter	259	.692	+.088
Matt Vierling	291	.590	-.014

Max Clark	50	.804	+.200
Ben Malgeri	57	.730	+.126
James Outman	100	.606	+.002
Corey Julks	2	.000	called up Wednesday

Vierling's at .590. That's below the level of a randomly grabbed bench guy, and I'll show you where that .604 comes from in a second. Carpenter's at .692, which is under the league's .719 and under Detroit's own team mark of .727. Greene is the only one of the 3 who was clearly making the team better by being in the lineup.

The replacement number isn't something I remembered, it's derived. Every non-pitcher in baseball with under 150 plate appearances this season, 267 of them, 15,352 trips to the plate, hits .280/.324 for a .604 OPS. That's the population a club actually reaches for when a regular goes down, and it's exactly the group Detroit's reaching for now. Julks has 2 plate appearances this season, Clark has 50, Malgeri 57, Outman 100. All 4 of them are inside that bucket.

I deliberately did not use Detroit's replacements' own numbers as the baseline, because Max Clark hitting .804 in 50 plate appearances tells you nothing and using it would flatter the argument I'm making. The league-wide bucket is the more conservative choice and it's the one the math below runs on.

So what's it worth in wins

Fit runs per plate appearance on OPS across all 30 teams this season and you get runs/PA = -0.1218 + 0.3340 x OPS, r-squared .830. So 100 points of OPS is worth about .033 runs every time you come up. Detroit's scored 549 and allowed 462 in 120 games, which puts a win at about 10.4 runs.

Give each guy the plate appearances he was taking per game he played, times the games he misses:

Scenario	Runs	Wins
Greene out all 42 remaining	12.5	1.20
Carpenter out all 42	4.0	0.38
Vierling out all 42	-0.6	-0.06
All 3, rest of season	15.8	1.52
Greene for the 10-day minimum, about 9 games	2.7	0.26

Worst case, all 3 miss every remaining game, it's about a win and a half, and 79 percent of that is Greene. Vierling's line is negative, meaning the numbers say Detroit is very slightly better with him on the shelf, which I'd treat as "costs nothing" rather than as an actual gain.

The realistic case is the bottom row. Greene misses 9 or so, the other 2 come back somewhere in there, and the whole thing costs a quarter of a win.

Now the argument against all of that

Carpenter. His .692 is by a distance the worst season of his career. He went .811, .932 and .788 the 3 years before this one, 1,219 plate appearances that weight out to about .832. Treating a guy's worst 259 plate appearances as his true talent is exactly the error I'd complain about if somebody else did it.

Run him at .832 instead and he's worth 10.2 runs over 42 games rather than 4.0, right about a full win on his own. That takes the 3-man total from 1.52 wins to 2.12 and drops Greene's share from 79 percent to 57. So the honest version of the headline is that 2 of the 3 matter and 1 of them doesn't, not that this is all about Greene.

Small note on that .832, since I'd want to know: it's his 2023 to 2025 seasons weighted by plate appearances, which is an approximation. Doing it properly means rebuilding on-base and slugging from the raw components rather than averaging 3 OPS figures. It'd move the number a little, not enough to change anything here.

Vierling doesn't get the same defence. He was at .717 and .735 in his first 2 Detroit years, then .617 in 100 plate appearances last year, then .590. That's 2 years of going the wrong way, not 1 bad stretch.

A few other things this method can't see, and I'd rather say them than have you find them:

OPS knows nothing about defence. Vierling's the center fielder. Handing center to Outman or a rookie is a real cost and none of the arithmetic above can price it. If Vierling's glove is worth half a win out there, most of my "he costs nothing" disappears.
A team-level fit used on 1 player pretends to be more precise than it is. That r-squared of .830 is across 30 teams and thousands of plate appearances each. Pointing it at 176 plate appearances from 1 man gives you a number with a decimal point and not really that much behind the decimal point.
Greene's rate assumes he plays every game he's available for. He wouldn't have. So 1.20 is a bit high.

What the last 2 weeks actually looked like

Here's the thing I keep going back and forth on. Since Carpenter went down on July 27, Detroit's played 14 games and gone 9-5, scoring 7.43 runs a game. Before that they were at 4.20.

That's a huge number and I don't believe it means much. It's 14 games, and it includes 14-0 and 13-1 and 11-0 and 11-0 again, so a couple of blowouts are carrying most of it. Nobody should walk away thinking the Tigers are better without their outfielders. What it's decent evidence of is the narrower thing: the offence has not fallen over without Carpenter and Vierling, and it had 14 games to.

Where this leaves them

59-61, half a game back of Texas for the last spot and level with Minnesota, 42 to go, with 6 teams inside 2 games of each other. It's about as tight as it gets.

And that's the part that keeps me from filing this under "no big deal." A quarter of a win sounds like nothing, and in a normal August it is nothing. In a race where 6 teams are separated by 2 games, a quarter of a win is a real slice of what's left. The injuries aren't a disaster and the panic version of this story is wrong, but "it's small" and "it doesn't matter" aren't the same claim, and in this race they come apart.

If Greene's back around the 22nd and Carpenter's foot finally settles down, this is a footnote. If the hamstring turns into 6 weeks, the number to be scared of is 1.2 wins, and Detroit doesn't have 1.2 wins to give away.

All figures from the MLB Stats API on August 13, 2026, derived in one run by scripts/tigers_outfield.py. Not betting advice.

Sources: MLB.com on Greene's IL placement · Detroit News

Pick No. 5: Nobody runs on either of these guys, and that costs Cleveland more than Detroit

2026-08-13T12:58:00Z

The call: Detroit takes the series finale Thursday afternoon at Comerica. Confidence: low.

Yesterday the question here was whether Detroit should be running on Cleveland. The answer was mostly yes, and the running-game edge in Wednesday night's game actually belonged to Cleveland, because Framber Valdez has let 13 runners steal and thrown out none of them.

Thursday afternoon the same series produces the opposite game entirely. Of the 58 qualified starters in baseball, exactly 1 is harder to run on than either of the 2 men starting this one, and he pitches for Milwaukee.

Nobody runs on these two

Take every qualified starting pitcher in baseball, 58 of them, and count steal attempts allowed per 9 innings. Not stolen bases, and not the rate runners get thrown out, because both of those are mostly a story about the catcher. Attempts is the pitcher's number. It's his time to the plate, his pickoff move, his handedness, and it's the closest free measure of whether a runner even considers it.

Keider Montero is 2nd of 58. Parker Messick is 3rd.

Rank of 58	Pitcher	Attempts allowed	Innings	Per 9
1	Jacob Misiorowski, Milwaukee	1	133.0	0.07
2	Keider Montero, Detroit	1	122.1	0.07
3	Parker Messick, Cleveland	2	136.2	0.13
4	Shota Imanaga, Chicago Cubs	3	137.1	0.20
5	Michael McGreevy, St. Louis	4	126.0	0.29
29, the median	Taj Bradley, Minnesota	10	131.2	0.68
38	Framber Valdez, Detroit	13	127.1	0.92
58	Chase Burns, Cincinnati	26	124.0	1.89

Between them, Messick and Montero have faced 3 attempted steals in 259 innings. 2 median starters over the same workload would face about 20.

And here's the part I liked most: neither of them has thrown out a single runner. Montero has allowed 1 stolen base and caught nobody. Messick has allowed 2 and caught nobody. This isn't a couple of guys with rocket arms behind them gunning people down. It's that in 259 innings, 3 people have thought it was worth trying.

Which lands almost entirely on Cleveland

Detroit doesn't run. That's been true all year and it was the finding two days ago: 53 attempts in 1,100 times reached first, 4.8%, dead last of 30 teams. So Messick shutting down the Detroit running game is like locking a door nobody uses. Call it 0.4 attempts a game that Detroit wasn't going to make anyway.

Cleveland does run, and does it well. 117 steals, 23 caught, 83.6% success, attempting on 12.7% of times reached first. In a normal game they reach first about 9 times, so that's a bit over 1 attempt a game they'd like to have. Against Montero it's approximately zero.

Now the honest size of that. 1 attempt is not a game. If you handed me a lineup card and told me only that Cleveland's running game was switched off, I would move the number by a fraction of a run and no more. What makes it worth writing about is that Cleveland's offense doesn't have many other tools. They're 28th in baseball in runs scored, and 26th in OPS against right-handed pitching, which is what Montero is. The bases were one of the few places they were above average, and Thursday it's shut.

The rest of the game

Detroit is 59-60 and 2.5 back of the White Sox with the division wide open. They have won 8 of 10 and 3 in a row. Cleveland is 58-62, has lost 8 of 10 and 3 in a row, and is 4 back.

Under the records, the gap is bigger than 1 game in the standings. Detroit has scored 545 runs and allowed 456, and that run prevention number is 3rd best in baseball. Cleveland has scored 477 and allowed 506. That's a Detroit team outscoring its opponents by 89 against a Cleveland team being outscored by 29.

Home team, better team, hotter team, against a lineup that's 26th against righties. That's the call.

What scares me

Messick is the better pitcher and it isn't close. 2.57 ERA over 23 starts, 1.04 WHIP, 136 strikeouts in 136.2 innings. His fielding independent numbers back most of it up: 3.19 FIP, 3.44 xFIP. He is a 25-year-old lefty having a genuinely excellent season and Detroit is exactly league average against left-handed pitching, 15th of 30 at a .706 OPS. That's the whole case for Cleveland and it's a good one.

Montero's numbers are prettier than his pitching. A 1.01 WHIP looks outstanding until you notice he has 86 strikeouts in 122.1 innings, which is about 6.3 per 9, and that his xFIP is 4.57 against a 3.38 ERA. That's a run-and-a-fifth gap between what he's given up and what his strikeouts, walks and flyballs say he should have given up. He also gets hit harder at home, 3.79 at Comerica against 2.77 on the road, so the park isn't the trick either. I went looking for that explanation and it isn't there.

These 2 have already done this once and Cleveland won. May 19 at Comerica, Messick against Montero, Cleveland 4 Detroit 3. Messick went 5 and gave up 2. Montero went 5, gave up 3, and walked 4 while striking out 1.

And the season series is 1-6. Detroit finally beat Cleveland on Monday for the first time in 7 tries. The piece on this site that went looking for the reason concluded there mostly isn't one, and I still believe that. But 1-6 is 1-6, and I'm picking the team that owns the losing end of it.

Not betting advice.

Graded: Pick No. 4. The first miss, and the catcher I told you wouldn't be out there caught all 9 innings

2026-08-13T12:57:00Z

The call, committed before first pitch: Tigers win. Confidence Low.

The result: Cleveland 6, Detroit 4. gamePk 824241, Final on the id.

Record: 3-1.

Detroit falls to 59-61, 3.5 back of the White Sox and half a game out of the last wild card. Cleveland is 7-1 against them this year.

I got the catcher wrong, and it's the part of the entry that mattered

Yesterday's piece answered 2 commenters who wanted Detroit running on Cleveland. I said they were right about Cleveland, right about Detroit, and wrong about the night, for this reason:

So tonight you've got a lefty who runners mostly don't test, and probably the catcher who's been throwing people out. The 5.1% guy is the backup now. The edge you're describing is real and it's aimed at a matchup that isn't on the field tonight.

Austin Hedges caught all 9 innings. Patrick Bailey was on the bench and never came in.

The 5.1% guy, the one who has thrown out 2 runners all season, was on the field the entire time. The matchup the thread was pointing at was exactly the matchup that showed up, and I'm the one who told them it wouldn't.

Worth separating 2 things there, because only 1 of them was wrong. The number was right: Bailey had caught 7 of Cleveland's 9 games in August, Hedges 4, and that checked out then and checks out now at 7 and 5. What was wrong was reading a 10 game sample as a depth chart. Cleveland has alternated all month, and last night was Hedges' turn.

And Detroit still didn't run

8 times on 1st base. Singles plus walks plus hit by pitches, same approximation the original entry used.

0 steal attempts.

Cleveland's pitchers threw over to 1st 6 times, 5 of them by Foster Griffin in the 3rd and 4th. Nobody went.

Here's the part where I have to talk myself down, because this is the number I wanted. Detroit attempts a steal on 4.8% of times reached 1st, and 8 baserunners at 4.8% buys you 0.4 attempts. Zero is the expected result. One game with 8 runners on cannot tell you whether a team ignored an open door or just had a normal night, and if Detroit had gone once I'd have been writing that the door was open and they walked through it, off the same nothing of a sample.

So the honest version is narrow: the specific reason I gave for saying no tonight was wrong, and the game did not produce enough baserunners to test what the readers were actually asking. Thursday afternoon is Parker Messick, who's 3rd of 58 qualified starters at suppressing attempts, so that one won't answer it either.

Cleveland didn't run either, which nobody predicted including me

The entry's other half was that the real running game edge in this game belonged to Cleveland, who attempt on 12.7% and convert 83.6%, against a Framber Valdez who'd allowed 13 steals and caught nobody:

Detroit's catchers are above average, which helps. But the team with the running game edge in this game is Cleveland, going the other direction, and in a 1 run game that's where it'll show up.

Cleveland reached 1st base 13 times and attempted 0 steals.

2 teams, 21 runners on 1st, 0 attempts, in a game between the sport's most aggressive baserunning team by rate and the sport's least. I spent about 2,000 words on the running game and the running game did not occur.

What actually decided it was the walks

Valdez went 5.2 and gave up 4 earned on 6 hits and 5 walks. Detroit's staff walked 7 in total. Cleveland scored 6 on 10 hits and those 7 free passes.

Detroit led 3-2 after 3 innings. Cleveland got 2 in the 5th, 2 more in the 7th off Ty Madden and Enmanuel De Jesus, and that was the game.

The thing I said scared me was Griffin, on the grounds that he's the better pitcher and I was picking the worse one. Griffin went 5 innings and gave up 3 runs, only 1 of them earned, and handed the ball off with a 4-3 lead. He wasn't the problem. The pitcher I defended was, and I defended him by pointing at 2 good starts:

Valdez has a 4.17 ERA which isn't good, but his last 2 starts are 14 innings and 2 earned runs.

That's 2 starts. I knew it was 2 starts when I wrote it.

The pillar held up and then it didn't

The entry's own argument against itself was Cleveland's offense: 28th in baseball at 3.98 runs a game, and 4.00 a game against Detroit specifically over 6 meetings. I called it the pillar that had produced nothing.

They scored 6. That's their 2nd most against Detroit this season, behind an 8 on May 18. Across the 8 games the season series is now Cleveland 34 runs to Detroit's 21, 4.25 a game to 2.62.

I've now written 2 entries arguing that Detroit's 0-6 against Cleveland was variance rather than a mechanism. The permutation test behind that still says what it said. But the record is 1-7, and at some point "it's variance" stops being an analysis and starts being a thing I keep saying.

Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-13, for the final, the box score, the play by play, both pitching lines, the August catcher assignments game by game, the season series and the standings.

Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.