DETROIT – I spent the back half of last night’s Detroit Tigers game trying to explain to frustrated fans why I supported an unpopular move made by manager A.J. Hinch.
It’s hard to have an in-depth baseball conversation on social media, so I thought this would be a better place to expand on my reasoning.
All I ask is that you hear me out.
What happened
The move in question came in the bottom of the fifth inning. The Tigers had runners at the corners and two outs in a 3-3 game.
With Kerry Carpenter coming to the plate, the Marlins elected to go to the bullpen and bring in left-hander Andrew Nardi.
Hinch countered by pinch hitting Andy Ibanez for Carpenter, and Ibanez flew out harmlessly to left field to end the inning.
I knew what was coming, and sure enough, Twitter was flooded with fans who wanted to know why Hinch had replaced one of the team’s more reliable hitters.
But I believe it was the right move.
Splits for all players involved
While Carpenter might be a better overall hitter than Ibanez, there’s no disputing that Ibanez is much better against left-handed pitchers.
Last season, Carpenter hit 17 doubles, two triples, and 18 homers while posting an .841 OPS in 381 plate appearances against righties. That’s an extra-base hit about every 10 trips to the plate.
In 78 plate appearances against lefties, he had a .657 OPS with two homers -- an extra-base hit every 39 trips.
If you go back to 2022, Carpenter had a .598 OPS in 24 plate appearances against lefties. He’s 1-for-10 with a single in those matchups this season.
Conversely, Ibanez posted an .819 OPS against lefties last year and is 12-for-27 with a ridiculous 1.118 OPS this season.
In his MLB career, Ibanez bats .300 with an .828 OPS against lefties.
I understand why fans want to see more of Carpenter in these situations. He’s such a valuable asset against righties, and he hit left-handed pitchers fairly well in the minors.
But all the numbers suggest that Ibanez was more likely to come through in that situation. Would you rather Hinch risk losing Monday’s game just to give Carpenter some experience?
You also have to consider Nardi’s splits. This year, righties have a .999 OPS against him, while lefties are at just .708. For his career, lefties hit .236 with a .741 OPS while righties are at .277 and .839.
No, the move didn’t work this time because Ibanez flew out, but that doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision.
Hinch and the Tigers have a philosophy that they’re going to stick to for 162 games, and it’s obviously a strategy they believe in.
If Ibanez gets 150 plate appearances against lefties this season, I’m very confident he will be more productive in those plate appearances than Carpenter would be in those same 150 trips.
Statistics normalize over larger sample sizes. You could easily roll a dice six times and never land on a one, but if you roll it a million times, you’re going to get each number about one-sixth of the time.
So if the Tigers believe Ibanez is better than Carpenter against lefties, they’re going to use him in those spots as much as they can. As you can see from the stats through 41 games, it’s working so far.
Why do it in the fifth inning?
Some fans had an issue with Hinch taking out Carpenter because it was so early in the game, but again, I didn’t have a problem with his timing.
The Tigers had runners at first and third with two outs -- that’s about as good of a scoring chance as they’re ever going to get. Would anybody who’s watched this offense have been surprised if the Tigers didn’t get another runner in scoring position over the final four innings? I surely wouldn’t have been.
There’s no way to know whether Carpenter’s spot in the lineup was going to come up in another important situation. But you know for sure that it came up in a big spot in the fifth inning.
Hinch would have looked foolish if he’d passed up that scoring chance and the Tigers never got another runner to third base.
Hinch can’t afford to manage games thinking about what might happen. He knew the Tigers had a prime scoring chance in the fifth, so he chose that moment to insert the player who gave them the best chance to capitalize on that opportunity.
As it turns out, Ibanez came up later in the game and picked up a crucial hit against a right-hander. Does that mean the Tigers should use him instead of Carpenter against righties? Of course not. But that’s baseball -- sometimes you win bad matchups; that doesn’t mean you chase them.
Platoon players
It’s a difficult and frustrating adjustment for many longtime baseball fans to accept platoon players. We want to see guys who can play every single night and define them as “the starters.”
But that’s not the reality of baseball anymore. In fact, most teams are doing some version of how the Tigers use their offensive players.
Baseball owners don’t like spending money, and it’s much cheaper to use a player like Ibanez -- who specializes against one type of pitcher -- than it is to find one of the select few who can still thrive against both.
With the combination of Carpenter, who mashes against righties, and Ibanez or Matt Vierling, who crush lefties, the Tigers believe they can replicate the production of a player with an .850 OPS across a full season.
And they can do it while paying both of them the league minimum.
Like it or not, this is the way most owners operate nowadays.
Final thoughts
Like I said earlier, I understand the frustration of fans who are sick of seeing some of the team’s best hitters placed on the bench. After all, I’m the one who wrote a story about how frustrating this team is less than 24 hours ago.
But part of the reason players like Carpenter, Vierling, and Ibanez are so productive with the Tigers is because Hinch puts them in positions where they’re most likely to succeed. If they were playing 150 full games, I guarantee their ratios would not be nearly as strong.
The Tigers don’t have a great offense, but maximizing these lefty-righty matchups is one way to squeeze as much production as possible out of more-or-less average hitters.
That’s why I think Hinch made the right call yesterday, even though it didn’t work out until a few innings later.