Let’s Put Tarik Skubal Back on the Tigers

The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.

The key to answering this question is to build a tool that can take hypothetical rosters (the Tigers with their two top pitchers back) and plug them into today’s actual standings and schedules. Luckily, I have one of those. I told my computer to undo the Skubal and Mize trades while leaving the rest of the deals from the deadline intact. Obviously that’s not a perfect assumption – the Dodgers probably would have landed on a separate starter if they didn’t get Skubal – but it does a good enough job for my purposes, which is to analyze how different Detroit’s path in particular would look if the team had held its course at the deadline instead of pivoting to the future.

The Tigers have backfilled their rotation thanks to some spot starts by Drew Anderson and Jackson Jobe’s return from injury. That’s meaningfully better than nothing; it’s surely part of why the Tigers made the trade in the first place. Even with two remaining starters (Jack Flaherty and Justin Verlander) on the shelf, they still have a functioning rotation. Here’s what it looks like today, with each pitcher’s rest-of-season Depth Charts projections:

Our system has that as the 19th-best rotation in baseball, though my own outlook is slightly rosier; I think that Melton and Jobe are better than their projections imply. The Tigers are in a position to compete for a playoff spot thanks to their pitching, undoubtedly so, but that’s largely because Skubal and Mize each made 16 starts and each notched ERAs around 2.75. After that, it’s been Melton and Montero picking up the slack that Valdez, Flaherty, and Verlander have left; Skubal and Mize recorded nearly as much WAR as the rest of the rotation combined before they departed.

You Aren’t a FanGraphs Member

It looks like you aren’t yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren’t logged in). We aren’t mad, just disappointed.

We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.

1. Ad Free viewing! We won’t bug you with this ad, or any other.

2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.

3. Dark mode and Classic mode!

4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.

5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.

6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn’t sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)

7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.

8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don’t be a victim of FOMO.

9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.

10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!

We hope you’ll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we’ve also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn’t want to overdo it.

The Detroit bullpen has been poor so far this year. How poor? Well, we give Tigers relievers credit for 1.4 WAR. Half of that comes from Anderson and Montero’s relief work, though; Montero flexed to the ‘pen when everyone was healthy, and Anderson has spent most of this year as a short-stint reliever. With those two now assuming starting responsibilities, we think the group that’s left is abysmal, a bottom-five unit. Put all of that together, and it’s no wonder that we project Detroit to allow 4.62 runs per game the rest of the way, far more than it has surrendered so far.

OK, then: Let’s bring back the two aces and shift some arms into the bullpen. I swapped in Skubal and Mize for Anderson and Jobe, then bumped those two up to priority bullpen arms to give the relief corps some extra oomph. The new rotation (same as the old, pre-trade rotation) naturally looks a lot better:

Tigers Rotation, With Takebacks

Pitcher	ROS Proj IP	ROS Proj ERA	ROS Proj WAR
Tarik Skubal	48	2.90	1.5
Casey Mize	40	3.76	0.7
Framber Valdez	38	3.81	0.6
Troy Melton	24	4.13	0.3
Keider Montero	28	4.46	0.3

The real question, though, is what that does to their Playoff Odds. We consider the true talent of the Tigers as currently constituted to be slightly worse than a .500 team. With their two best pitchers back in the fold, that true-talent winning percentage goes up 27 points, from .497 to .524. And while that doesn’t sound like a huge move, the Tigers are in the perfect position for that boost in talent to matter most. The AL Central is ripe for the taking. The top four teams are within four games of each other, and while the three clubs that Detroit is competing with all made deadline moves, none was earth-shattering.

It’s not just about a division title, either. Winning the Central comes with a decent chance of a first-round bye, because the AL West has been even worse this year. With the three best records in the American League all residing in the East, whichever team finishes best out of the other divisions is going to get a relatively easy draw considering its final record. That means that adding expected wins is about as valuable as it could get for any of the teams on the AL Central and AL West bubble; more wins doesn’t only make you more likely to win your division or the last Wild Card slot, it makes it more likely that a division title will come with a bye.

Reverting to the old rotation would make the Tigers narrow favorites to earn that bye. That’s a really big deal; winning three playoff series is a lot easier than winning four. It more or less doubles your odds of winning the World Series, because it removes a 50% chance of losing before the tournament really gets going. My model sees it this way, with or without Skubal and Mize:

Tigers Playoff Odds, Two Scenarios

Team	E(Wins)	Playoff%	Div%	Bye%	WS%
Current Tigers	80.1	29.0%	18.1%	9.9%	1.4%
With Skubal/Mize	81.4	41.8%	28.0%	17.2%	3.3%

Like I said, that’s a big bump. Adding two percentage points to your odds of winning the World Series is no joke. Even when we projected the Tigers as clear division favorites before the season, we only gave them a 4% shot at winning it all. Why can adding just two players increase their odds by so much? It’s because they’re in the perfect spot for those wins to apply with leverage; most teams don’t hit August in a position where one win could make the difference between staying home or playing in October, or between a bye and a Wild Card round berth.

I promised that I’d answer whether the Tigers “should” have traded Skubal and Mize, and I came up with a rough framework for that assessment. I took the same tool I’m using to build hypothetical alternate lineups, rewound it to the start of the season, then figured out how much adding a win’s worth of projections at various projected records would affect World Series odds. Here’s a rough distribution of how much an extra win matters, from various starting points:

World Series Odds, Sensitivity To Changes in True Talent

Proj Wins	WS Odds From +1W
78	0.34
82	0.43
86	0.55
90	0.49
94	0.36

Next, I got even more theoretical. I took some distributional studies that got left on the cutting room floor when I updated prospect valuations and worked out, more or less, the odds that prospects of the caliber traded for Skubal and Mize would turn into average regulars or better, plus the average WAR per year delivered in those outcomes. I also looked at the last six years of Tigers teams to figure out how many extra wins adding players like that to replace weak links would be worth (limiting those weak links to the rotation and the outfield, to match the prospects). I worked out that the guys traded to the Tigers project to boost their average projected wins by around 1.2 per year.

At this point, I’ll stop and point out that I’m doing a lot of approximating, so the error bars are large here. But with that caveat, we can do the math. Say that the Tigers bounce around between 78 and 90 projected wins for the next six years, and take the average of those World Series-odds-per-win sensitivities. Multiply that by the 1.2 wins per year I think the extra prospects are “worth.” Multiply that by six years of team control. You get an added 3.3 percentage points of World Series odds, comfortably more than the boost they’d receive from having Skubal and Mize the rest of the way this year. That might understate it, too. If the Tigers didn’t sell, they likely would have bought, but probably only on the margin, considering where they were in the standings and their underperformance over the first four months of the season. The risk of going all-in would have been too high. While we don’t know the counterfactual there, it’s reasonable to think that it would’ve made their future teams even a little worse, for small present benefit, amplifying the effect I’ve already measured here.

That’s an unsatisfying answer for me, but that doesn’t make it less true. The Tigers stand to benefit a lot from raising their floor in future years. Even though they’re in a place of maximum leverage right now, making the playoffs is not the same as winning the World Series, and even with Skubal, Mize, and a few marginal upgrades, this year’s squad would’ve faced a huge uphill battle, likely underdogs in nearly every round of the playoffs (against various AL East squads and then the ~~Dodgers~~ NL champions). Getting a little better in many future years doesn’t sound as fun as being a lot better right now, but my math suggests that it’s pretty clearly the right move, even taking into account their recent performance.

I doubt the Tigers made this exact calculation when they opted to deal their two best pitchers. But I assume their motivation was at least similar in spirit. I’m all for trying to compete, and I generally dislike teams perpetually playing for the future. But this was an extreme case. The Tigers haven’t been amazing this year, Skubal and Mize were rentals, and they fetched enough return that it looks likely to change the trajectory of future teams enough to matter, given how many weak roster spots they’ve tended to carry and the competitive window they’re in. Not the most exciting conclusion, perhaps, but hopefully a salve to observers who, like me, saw the Tigers start winning and thought, “Boy, Skubal would make this team look better, huh?” They may yet go on a run. Heck, they might win it all anyway, despite making these deals. But even taking into account their winnable division, and even cheating a little and taking into account how well they’ve played after the deadline, I think they made the right decision by the numbers.

Source link

Hands-on report: Marvel’s Wolverine – PlayStation.Blog

b7cefde486f02afa6e023a85a5688501d99bc660

It’s been a big week for fans of Marvel’s Wolverine, starting with the announcement of sharp-looking PS5 hardware and accessories. Now, with just over a month away until its September 15 launch, Insomniac is sharing a deep dive on the game’s story, combat, and exploration thanks to an extensive hands-on session with the game.

Our two-hour session kicked off with the game’s opening mission in the wilds of Telambang, where Wolverine has reunited with Team X to carry out a critical mission infiltrating the facility of anti-mutant industrialist Bolivar Trask. After slicing our way to a daring rescue, we jumped ahead in the game to a bombastic boss fight and a taste of Madripoor’s Lowtown. Between brutal barrages, stealthy scouting, and a range of rage-filled takedowns, we got to cut to the bone of the game’s story, flesh out Wolverine’s allies and foes, and uncover a piece of his buried past.

Taking on Trask

From the game’s opening moments flashing back to a feral, mangy-haired, and memory-wiped Wolverine, every sequence tested the balance between his rage and humanity. The first mission reunites him with Team X, a mutant task force formed by Nathaniel Essex to help protect mutants. Wolverine had stepped away from the group, something that has rankled his teammates, a wry Mystique and ever-savage Sabretooth.

Their mission takes them from the hidden facility of billionaire Bolivar Trask to the seedy backstreets of Madripoor, presenting Wolverine with the grim reality of what mutants in this world are facing. With mutants largely unknown by society, Trask has been spending his billions abducting, studying, and cruelly disposing of mutants with little regard for his victims in a quest to maintain human superiority. As the nefarious reality of the facility’s purpose becomes clearer, the horror Wolverine feels quickly pools into an unbridled rage. That rage drives him forward through throngs of Reaver enemies and a run in with Omega Red to eventually free Essex, who has been held captive by Trask.

Essex is the one who found Wolverine years before in that feral state, and formed Team X to protect mutants and build a world where mutants can be open. Between Essex and Trask, Wolverine is faced with the lengths some will go to protect the future of their kind, and will challenge him to face what kind of person he wants to be in this future.

Sink your claws in

Between storylines and set pieces, my biggest takeaway from my time with Marvel’s Wolverine was that it feels dang good to sink those claws in. Wolverine doesn’t just attack enemies, he catapults himself at them, targeting and launching himself from across the room to stun or barrage. Every combat encounter becomes a furious flurry, where my adrenaline feels directly tied to Wolverine’s increasing rage.

While a simple parry and barrage can get the job done, Wolverine can unlock a number of Special Techniques, skills that can be upgraded and mapped to the directional buttons for an extra flair in a fight. In my playthrough, I could cleave through a group surrounding me with Tornado Spin, or interrupt enemy attacks with Knee Breaker. Players can also unlock Adaptations, which upgrade long-term effects and skills like Logan’s health and rage meter.

That rage will come in handy. Successful combos build up Wolverine’s rage meter, which rises through three Rage Tiers to dramatically alter his fighting style. As Wolverine enters Rage Tier 2, his combos become more powerful and he unlocks Last Stand, which allows him to use his rage to heal his body if fully downed. But things really go over the edge when Wolverine’s meter fills to Rage Tier 3. His attacks become significantly more powerful, while brutal critical strikes become available. His vision seems to close in, his breathing getting louder and more primal as he darts between enemies, slicing and dicing with ease. Those critical strikes can lead to some dangerously fun takedowns, like snatching a member of The Hand’s katana or bow to slam back into them.

Sometimes, Wolverine needs a more methodical approach. He can use his Enhanced Senses to track and takedown enemies more stealthily. Trask also has Ability Inhibitors at his disposal that block Wolverine and his teammates from using their abilities. In these moments, he must work past the pain and fight without healing, focusing on taking enemies down with classic combat moves and destroying the Inhibitors before it’s too late.

It took all the skills I had gathered so far to take on the looming Sentinel Prototype towards the end of my preview. Built by Trask to detect and destroy mutants, this fight took all of Wolverine’s patience and strategy, dodging or parrying the Sentinel’s powerful attacks, while waiting for the perfect moments to strike. This sequence was thrilling both to use Wolverine’s abilities to their fullest potential, and to watch as he worked in tandem with Mystique and Sabretooth. By the time I was busting through the Sentinel’s head victorious, I had a wild grin on my face and felt amped and ready to take on anyone.

More to explore

Luckily after that fight, there was still more to explore. In Madripoor, surrounded by allies new and old, we took a moment of respite in Princess Bar (run by Tyger). Here we got to interact with newly acquired ally Jean Grey, and the mutant teens she has been protecting. Though they are still a mystery to one another, Jean and Wolverine’s connection is immediate. It’s with her that he can admit that his anger sometimes scares him and that he wants to be better.

I enjoyed that Wolverine also makes time here for his teammates Mystique and Sabretooth. Mystique stays focused and on mission during combat, shifting through identities when needed. Here in Princess Bar, she can just be herself, and encourages Wolverine to do the same through a friendly but vulnerable game of Never Have I Ever. Sabretooth spends most of the game’s opening antagonizing Wolverine and calling him a runt, which is fair enough given he stands about as tall as Sabretooth’s navel. But it’s clear their relationship runs deeper, and Sabretooth feels spurned by Wolverine’s original exit from the group.

While exploring the streets of Lowtown, I could take the time to check out some of Wolverine’s other looks and claw types, which ranged from a classic undershirt and jeans outfit to a Weapon X helmeted style. While walking around the Princess Bar, Wolverine’s Enhanced Senses could pick up on conversation or music that could guide him to specific rooms, or trail a teammate’s scent to find where they’ve run off to. Exploring each room sometimes led to a conversation, or finding easter eggs, like Mystique’s wedding pictures, or an IOU written on an ace of spades card from one Remy LeBeau.

Take the time to explore each new location, as Wolverine can discover hidden crates with raw upgrade materials or collectable whisky bottles. Logan can also stumble across Nightmare Doors, which transport him to a dreamlike cabin to take part in a Nightmare Trial. These timed speed trials reimagine different locations from the game into a vertical fever dream, where he can race to the end to unlock a forgotten memory from his past.

Players can sink their claws into Wolverine’s story and tap into his rage when Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15 on PS5 consoles.

Source link

Injuries Reported After Two-Vehicle Crash at Franklin Blvd and Florin Road in Sacramento – Sacramento Injury Attorneys Blog

Injuries Reported After Two-Vehicle Crash at Franklin Blvd and Florin Road in Sacramento

An injury crash at Franklin Blvd and Florin Road in Sacramento involving two vehicles was reported on Thursday, August 6, 2026, at the intersection, according to California Highway Patrol dispatch information.

Two Vehicles Involved in Sacramento Crash

The collision occurred in the roadway and involved a white Chevrolet Trax and a gray Dodge Dart.

Emergency units were requested to respond to the scene and assist those involved. Both vehicles were later moved into a nearby McDonald’s parking lot as crews worked to clear the roadway.

The crash was subsequently updated to indicate that injuries had been reported.

Investigation Ongoing

The identities of those involved have not been released, and authorities have not provided information regarding the nature or severity of the reported injuries.

The circumstances leading to the collision remain under review as investigators continue gathering information.

Intersection Crashes Can Cause Serious Injuries

Busy intersections can be particularly dangerous when drivers fail to obey traffic signals, make unexpected maneuvers, or become distracted. Even crashes initially described as minor can result in injuries requiring medical attention. Drivers should remain alert, obey traffic signals, and watch carefully for surrounding vehicles and pedestrians.

Check out this video with accident attorney Ed Smith to discover how to select the best injury lawyer for your claim:

Why Understanding Your Legal Rights Is Important

People injured in motor vehicle collisions may face medical expenses, lost wages, vehicle damage, and other unexpected costs. If another driver’s negligence contributed to the crash, injured victims may have legal options to pursue compensation for their losses. An experienced personal injury attorney can investigate the collision, preserve important evidence, and help protect an injured person’s legal rights.

Contact the Law Offices of Ed Smith

If you or a loved one has been injured in a traffic collision in Sacramento or elsewhere in Sacramento County, the Law Offices of Ed Smith is here to help. Our legal team has represented Northern California accident victims for decades and accepts personal injury cases throughout Sacramento, Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Folsom, Carmichael, Citrus Heights, and surrounding Sacramento County communities.

For free, friendly advice, call (916) 921-6400 or (800) 404-5400. You can also visit AutoAccident.com to learn more about your legal rights and schedule a free, no-obligation consultation.

Source link