Welcome back to SI’s MLB Power Rankings. As the season winds down, for this week’s edition, we’re looking at the teams whose performance has veered the most dramatically from their preseason projections. (We’re using Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA, from the day before Opening Day, comparing by winning percentage.) To the list!
The Tigers were, of course, projected to be bad. But they weren’t projected to be this bad. Detroit was expected to be a run-of-the-mill struggling team (66-96), with bad hitting and mediocre pitching, rather than… near historically bad, with statistical misery across the board.