Leyland by Half

So what we’ve got here is a chart which is going to tell you the nature of the fix we now find ourselves in.  What is revealed here is a simple fact: No Tigers team managed by Jim Leyland has ever won more games in the second half of a season than it did in the first half.

Somebody mentioned to me a while back that Leyland’s teams always seem to worse down the stretch than they do coming out of the gate and when I thought about it, I realized that the speaker was probably correct.  So, I did what the Old Professor Casey Stengel always said you could do.  I looked it up. 

Remember the way the Leyland’s Tigers blew their10-game lead in the division in ‘06 had to settle for the wild-card spot to make the playoffs?  That team was 76-36 (.679) on August 7.  The 2006 Tigers finished 95-67 (.586), which means it played .380 ball the rest of the way after hitting that 40-games-over-.500 plateau on a record of 19-31! (Play .380 ball over the course of a full season, and what you get is a team that finishes 61-101.)

How about ‘07, when Detroit had the best record in baseball at the all-star break, 52-34, and played sub-.500 ball after the break?  In fact, that 2007 club was 60-40 (.600) on July 25 and in first place by a game and a half and went 28-34 (.452) the rest of the way and finished 8 games out in the AL Central.

Here are the raw numbers for Jim Leyland’s Tigers teams, broken down by full-season results and by halves (Games 1-81 and Games 82-162*):

* Yes, we know.  The Tigers played 163 games last year cause they had to play that extra game against the Twins to see who’d make the playoffs.  The Tigers lost, most likely because the game was played during the second half of the season.

If Leyland’s teams performed at their first-half rate (.570) for the entire season, they’d win 92 games a year.  At their second-half clip (.479), they’d win 78.

And now the Tigers have opened the second half (technically not the halfway point as Detroit played 86 of their 162 games this season prior to the All Star break) by getting themselves swept in a 4-game series at Cleveland.  Yes, Cleveland:  The last-in-the-division Indians who were 20 games under .500 before the Tigers showed up. 

So, welcome to the second half.  History tells us that this is not going to go well. 

But there is this:  Look at the chart again.  You will notice one oddity.  The Tigers had the exact same record after 81 games this year that they had last year and while, yes, Detroit failed to make the playoffs last year, it was by the narrowest possible margin and still wound up being pretty exciting.  All in all. 

The Texas Rangers—recently themselves swept in a four game series against a last place team, except it happened to them at home against the team, Baltimore, with not just the worst record in their division but indeed the worst record in the entire American League (oops, I mean) Major League Baseball—come to town Monday night for the first of three. 

We’ll see you down at the ballpark.