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August 14, 2008

Lies, Damned Lies

Tufte Takes on the Tigers

by Nate Silver

Having dropped 10 of their last 13 ballgames, the Tigers have gone from longshot to no shot, with now barely more than a three percent chance of reaching the playoffs. While the Tigers have not officially waved the white flag, I am going to do so for them, by unveiling our first "Tufte Takes On…" piece of the season.

For those of you who are new here, the ground rules are essentially unchanged from the original edition. We will evaluate a club's roster from top to bottom, analyzing the players that are under team control for each of the next seven seasons. Players are rated on a five-point scale from "Superstar" to "Non-Asset"; these ratings are designed to correspond to the equivalent categories on the PECOTA Stars & Scrubs Chart, but have been tweaked to reflect 2008 performance and my own guesses and intuitions. A 'P' indicates a protected contract—a player who has time remaining on his arbitration clock and is thereby under team control—whereas the dashed lines indicate a team option year:

Catching