| The Detroit News
Go through the gallery to see The Detroit News’ progress report for the Detroit Tigers’ 2020 season, compiled by Chris McCosky. Click here if you have trouble viewing the gallery.
Detroit — How do you contextualize the performance of baseball players in a 58-game sample size?
Well, you don’t.
The structure of a Major League Baseball season is designed to reward perseverance, adaptation, adjustability and endurance. Fifty-eight games comprise just over a third of a regular season. It’s a snippet. And a snippet of games played under the most unusual and difficult conditions — spring training interrupted by pandemic and quarantine, accelerated three-week summer camp, isolation, empty ballparks, daily COVID-19 testing.
Still, the 58 games the Tigers played will officially constitute the 2020 season. Players’ stat lines will be placed on their permanent record, their achievements and failures logged and recorded without asterisks. So, back to the issue of contextualization.
In a normal season, a player who played in 58 games would be given an incomplete by those charged with evaluating them. That won’t suffice for Tigers general manager Al Avila and his staff. Somehow, they have to assess and find perspective for what they saw this year, at the big-league level and at the alternate site in Toledo, and use it to formulate plans for 2021 and beyond.
“The fact is, you still have to trust your eyes,” interim manager Lloyd McClendon said. “You respond to what you see, whether it’s 60 games or 162 games. What you see is what you see. You have to evaluate honestly and put it on paper.”
What you don’t do, McClendon said, is pay any heed to articles like this one.
“A lot of times we’re so dependent on you guys (media) trying to define what success is for a ballclub,” he said. “I just don’t think that’s how we should go about our business. We should define what success is for this club.
“For each and every one of these individuals and how they went about their business, my grades are A’s across the board for most of them.”
Teachers don’t assess grades on one-third of a semester, right? They give, if anything, progress reports. So, tasked with assessing the on-field performances of the 2020 Tigers, we will issue progress reports.
Players, judged against reasonable expectations entering the season, either took steps forward or backward, or they stayed the same. And in a few cases, they stepped out, as in out of the club’s plans.
chris.mccosky@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @cmccosky