Over- and under-achieving teams in April
Posted by Andy on May 2, 2011
This is just a quick rundown of teams who have overperformed or underperformed in April. I am referring to teams whose W-L record doesn't match up all that well with their runs allowed and runs scored profile or who have unusually good or bad luck in 1-run games.
Overachievers:
- Dodgers - they are giving up almost a full run more than they are scoring and yet have a 14-15 record. They've also played 20 of 29 games against teams with losing records. Look for them to start losing more often as the season goes on.
- Rockies - they are a good team, but not quite as good as 17-9. They are about 2 wins ahead of where they should be based on their run differential plus they are 5-2 in 1-run games, a margin that is difficult (but not impossible) to maintain for a whole season. They have also played 23 out of 26 games against losing teams.
- Kansas City Royals - their record is perfect relative to their runs scored and allowed (both a little better than even) but they have won 7 out of 10 1-run games, which, like the Rockies, will be tough to maintain for an entire season. I would expect the Royals to hang around .500 for most of the season and maybe post their most wins since 2003.
Underachievers:
- Braves - they are outscoring opponents by a wide margin but have a losing record. Their 2-5 record in 1-run games is a part of that. Look for them to right the ship and at least make it a race with the Marlins and the Phillies.
- Red Sox - their record matches their run differential, but their pitching has been much better of late so I expect their run differential will continue to improve. They've also lost 5 of 7 1-run games and have only played 7 games against teams under .500.
Doing just as expected:
- Indians - these guys might be for real. They have the top run-scoring differential in all of baseball and their record is smack dab where it should be. Plus they are 4-4 in 1-run games and have played the same number of teams above and below .500.
- Cardinals - yes they have the 3rd-best run-scoring differential in the league and should have more wins in theory, but they have only played THREE games against a team with a winning record! They are a good but probably not great (thanks in large part to injuries.)
May 2nd, 2011 at 9:52 am
I noticed a week or two ago that there were a lot of negative numbers in the "luck" column of the B-R standings pages. I added them up and the totals were both about -7 for each league as a whole. At the time I just assumed that this was attributable to roundoff error since there are no decimals being shown. However, I have been keeping an eye on the numbers and the leagues have remained consistently "unlucky" as a whole. Currently looking at the numbers the AL is at -7 and the NL -8. It strikes me that this has persisted too long to simply be attributed to roundoff error.
I understand how the formula works, but these numbers start to look a bit strange after awhile if they aren't attributable to rounding.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:12 am
Wait, the Cardinals are both underachieving and doing just as expected. I suppose it might be better to say the bullpen is underachieving and the rest of the team is doing just as expected.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:12 am
How are the Cardinals both underachieving AND doing as expected?
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:12 am
25-30 games is not a sufficient sample size for the Pythagorean theorem.
I am willing to bet (but don;t have the time to verify), that if you remove each teams best and worst games (by margin of victory), the numbers would center much closer to 0.0.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:14 am
I accidentally started to write about the Cardinals for underacheiving, but forgot to remove it.
#4 is a valid point.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:29 am
Evan at #1, you have discovered a bug that I just made the powers-that-be aware of. Good eye and thanks.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:30 am
Okay Seriously? Whether or not the Indians had the "Tools" to do well this year. NOBODY, except for maybe an uneducated and optimistic fan in Cleveland, expected this, maybe 10 wins, but certainly not 18. And Secondly, How are the White Sox not on the "Underachieving' list. Many analysts picked them to win their division, as well as they have the top 5 highest paid team in the league. No one expected them to have 18 losses in the month of may. My opinion may be biased, on account of i am a Sox fan, but they are the most underachieving team in the league right now.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:31 am
month of April*
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:31 am
#7 as I wrote in the original post, I am only going by run scoring and 1-run games. I am not going by reputation, expectations, etc.
May 2nd, 2011 at 10:40 am
Should pythagorean records be calculated separately for a team's home and road games? I'm thinking particularly of situations where there is a significant park factor for the home park. If runs are of different value in different environments then it should be more accurate to split them up.
I realize that this would be even more likely to produce non-zero total luck numbers for the league as a whole (because home and visiting teams would be valuing games differently in extreme park factor stadiums).
As I thought about this I looked at the runs scoring Home/Road splits for the Rockies this year; Home 58 RS/ 54 RA; Road 65 RS / 50 RA. Both of these are for 13 games. This seems to fairly well illustrate the point that it is too early to put much importance on run totals.
May 2nd, 2011 at 11:14 am
@10
I don't see much difference in the Rockies Pythag numbers whether I split H/R or not. Pythag isn't linear so the results aren't identical but the difference is less than a tenth of a win. There's likely a lot of small sample size issues in Pythag right now but I don't think home/road splits are a problem. Park factors aren't a part of Pythag.
May 2nd, 2011 at 11:41 am
Semi-tangent: My unresearched sense is that there have been fewer blowouts so far than there last year at this same stage.
As a rough check -- since I can't make the Play Index filter by margin of victory -- I looked at wins while scoring 10+ runs, through the team's first 28 games:
2011 -- 48 wins scoring 10+ runs.
2010 -- 59 wins scoring 10+ runs.
The average margin of victory in these games is similar, as is the distribution of various specific margins.
May 2nd, 2011 at 11:46 am
@11,
My post @10 was poorly composed and not very clear in the sense that the final paragraph wasn't related to the first 2 paragraphs except that thinking about them caused me to look up the numbers for the Rockies this year, which tied back into the earlier discussion about small sample sizes throwing these numbers off. I'd be shocked if the Rockies continued to score more runs on the road than at home.
Getting back to the point I made at the start of post 10, I recalculated the pythagorean record for the Rockies, splitting home and road numbers for 2010 and came up with the following (using an exponent of 1.83):
Home: 479 RS/ 379 RA = 0.6055 winning rate, which translates to 49 wins over 81 games
Road: 291 RS/ 338 RA = 0.4319 winning rate and 35 wins over 81 games
Combining these, I get an expected record of 84-78
If you treat the Home/Road data together you come up with an expected record of 86-76.
May 2nd, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Brewers at 13-13 finished as I expected (.500 team without some key players). Now add Hart and Greinke and I hope they can get to 87-88 wins on the year and manage first in the NL Central.
May 2nd, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Speaking of the underachieving Red Sox, just wanted to point a couple of interesting notes from their weekend series with the Mariners.
In Saturday's game, the Red Sox had 6 walks and 5 doubles, yet failed to score a single run in their 2-0 loss. That sounded extraordinary to me so I searched for that in the PI and discovered that is the first time a team had that many walks and doubles. I did find 1 other game where a team had 5 walks and 5 doubles and there have been 10 other games where a team had 5 doubles and no runs, but not 6 walks on top of that. It really was a miracle the Mariners held the Red Sox from scoring with all those free passes and doubles.
In Sunday's game, Bobby Jenks walked Jack Cust and Luis Rodriguez with the bases loaded. As someone who follows the Mariners, they have had a LOT of bases loaded walks already this year. I looked it up using the Event Finder for walks in 2011 and narrowed it down to bases loaded walks. (http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/event_finder.cgi?type=b#gotresults&year=2011&year_to=2011&divisory=1&from=button&type=b&team_id=ANY&event=modBB&out_type=&criteria1=runners_on_bases---111---With_runners_on_123---robcount&ajax=1&submitter=1)
Jack Cust had FIVE bases loaded walks already this season (he has just 10 RBIs) and the M's have 9. The REALLY crazy thing about Jack Cust is he only had 5 plate appearances with the bases loaded and he has been walked in every single one of them. Cust has struggled this year (.200/.364/.247, 0 HR, 10 RBI). So his bases loaded line is "0 for 0 with 5 BB, 5 RBI."
The rest of the league has 45 combined. The Reds are second with 6. On April 11th, the Mariners had 3 consecutive bases loaded walks against the Blue Jays in the 8th that helped them overcome a 7-0 deficit. I'm kind of surprised I haven't read this anywhere. Its been pretty surreal as a fan.
May 2nd, 2011 at 1:44 pm
I also noticed a large # of players who seemed to be underachieving. There seemed to be more than the usual low april #'s. Quite a few guys were well below their normal power and average #'s. I don't know if it is just something I happened to notice this year, or a trend in the lower overall offense of last year.
Here are a list of some guys who are at or below the Mendoza line. AVG then PA.
Jorge Posada-.130/78
Brad Hawpe --.143/68
Alexis Rios-.158/106
Carlos Pena -.159/77
Carl Crawford.160/100
Adam Dunn ----.162/82
Austin Jackson-.167/107
Raul Ibanez ---.169/92
Jorge Cantu ---.169/72
Brett Gardner---.169/72
Mark Reynolds---.171/86
Maggilio Ordonez .172/64
Jack Cust--------.177/95
Vernon Wells-----.178/107
Dan Uggla -------.180/107
Marco Scutaro-----.189/60
Chone Figgins-----.191/102
Hanley Ramirez-----.197/87
Mark Ellis---------.200/96
Andrew McCutchen---.202/104
James Loney----\----.206/107
Kevin Youklis------.208/94
Miguel Tejada------.210/88
Tori Hunter---------.210/111
Nick Markakis--------.211/99
Aubrey Huff----------.211/101
Carlos Gonzalez------.214/93
Scott Rolenn---------.217/65
May 2nd, 2011 at 2:41 pm
The Brewers I think are overachieving in starting pitching, especially when you consider Greinke hasn't pitched yet.
http://pinetarandbrickbats.blogspot.com/2011/05/baseball-mets-and-bin-laden.html
May 2nd, 2011 at 2:56 pm
@16:
Just a guess, but a lot of those guys are old. Now post steroids, older players are going to regress closer to players historically. Unfortunately, the players in MLB making the most money are usually guys on long FA contracts that are nearing the end. But clubs aren't going to eat their huge remaing salaries to sit them or platoon them. Couple with it that a lot of those guys are 'name' guys and clubs may feel fan/owner pressure to not sit them, etc. I could be wrong, I could be right, dunno.
Also, Uggla, Crawford, Cargo are either new FA's or on extensions so may have tried a little too hard to begin with. Once they settle I'm sure they will be fine. As for Hanley, no excuse really. He's the Marlin's 'man' and he's not getting it done.
May 2nd, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Using team's 2011 records in trying to adjust for their schedule strength is not very useful. For instance, you say that the Indians have faced the same number of teams above and below .500, but they've played seven games against the Royals, who count as being above .500 now, but nobody seriously expects them to be a winning team at the end of the season. Only eight of the Indians' 27 games so far have been against teams that were above .500 last year.
May 2nd, 2011 at 3:29 pm
#19, even moreso, team records are highly dependent at this point. For example, the Red Sox have lost a lot of games, and therefore their opponents have won a lot of games, so it makes it look as if the Red Sox have faced more difficult teams, perhaps, than they actually have. Later in the year when teams have played a lot of other games, it becomes somewhat more meaningful.