Somebody said the whole season is the blown saves. So I counted the leads instead.
Somebody on the Tigers sub put it about as plainly as it can be put: the whole season is that blown save number, and if it was 20 instead of 26 we'd be in first. 25 people upvoted it. So I went and checked whether that's actually true.
Here's the thing about blown saves though. A blown save isn't a loss. You can blow 1 in the 8th and win in the 10th, and that still goes in the column. So counting them doesn't tell you what it cost. What tells you is the leads that turned into losses.
So I pulled every inning of every game for all 30 teams and rebuilt the score after 7.
Detroit has led after 7 innings 57 times this year and lost 11 of them.
What everyone else does with a lead
The league held 1,436 of 1,592 leads after 7. That's 90.2%.
| Team | Leads after 7 | Lost | Held |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royals | 49 | 11 | 77.6% |
| Athletics | 48 | 10 | 79.2% |
| Tigers | 57 | 11 | 80.7% |
| Angels | 47 | 9 | 80.9% |
| Giants | 54 | 9 | 83.3% |
| League | 1,592 | 156 | 90.2% |
| Padres | 49 | 1 | 98.0% |
| Rangers | 49 | 1 | 98.0% |
| Rays | 60 | 1 | 98.3% |
Every completed game through Aug 10, rebuilt from the linescores on the MLB Stats API. Script's in the repo, run it yourself.
Tampa's led after 7 60 times and lost 1. Detroit's had 3 fewer chances and lost 11.
What it cost, in wins
At the league rate Detroit loses about 5.6 of those 57 leads. They lost 11. So call it 5 extra losses, and those 5 are the whole argument.
58-60 becomes roughly 63-55. Chicago's at 61-56. That's first place, by about a game and a half, and it's the middle of August.
So yeah, the guy was right.
Where I'd push back on myself
A couple of things before anybody takes 63-55 as gospel.
Not every one of those 11 was a save situation. Detroit was up 5-1 after 7 on March 31 and lost 7-5, and that's a starter and a middle reliever coming apart, not a closer. The blown save number and the lost lead number overlap a lot but they aren't the same list.
And you don't automatically win the ones you don't lose. Some of those games are tied in the 9th and you're playing extras either way. The 5 wins is the ceiling of the argument, not a promise.
There's also a thing that cuts the other direction and nobody mentions it. Detroit has led after 7 in 57 games, which is 7th most in baseball. They keep getting into these positions. The bullpen is what it is, but the rest of the team keeps handing it leads to lose, and a team that couldn't get there wouldn't even have the complaint.
The narrower version
Leads after 8 are the closer's problem more cleanly. Detroit's led after 8 in 54 games and lost 5. That's better. It's still 5.
Tonight it's Bibee against Anderson, and 5 of the 6 games against Cleveland this year came down to 1 or 2 runs. If this series turns on a 1 run game in the 8th, now you know what the number behind that feeling actually is.
Got a Detroit number you want looked at? Email projectunmuted@proton.me and it gets looked at properly. A stat somebody quoted that smells wrong, a thing you have always assumed about one of these 4 teams and have never seen checked. Every question that arrives is listed with its answer, including the ones where the answer is no.