27 February 2011

The Final Standings, As of Feb. 27


I present without prejudice the projected MLB standings from Baseball Prospectus. Remember that these projections are based on a million simulations of the season using their individual player projections.


         Team                             Win %          W             L          Div       WC     Playoffs
1 Boston Red Sox .575 93.5 68.5 56.7% 25.3% 82.0%
2 New York Yankees .566 91.4 70.6 36.4% 34.5% 70.8%
3 Tampa Bay Rays .521 83.3 78.7 4.8% 12.7% 17.5%
4 Baltimore Orioles .502 80.3 81.7 1.9% 6.3% 8.2%
5 Toronto Blue Jays .469 74.3 87.7 0.2% 0.8% 1.0%
Rnk American League Central
Expected
Win Pct

Sim Win

Sim Loss

Div Pct

WC Pct
Sorted Descending
Playoff Pct
1 Minnesota Twins .512 83.8 78.2 33.5% 4.0% 37.5%
2 Detroit Tigers .510 83.9 78.1 33.0% 4.2% 37.2%
3 Chicago White Sox .508 83.6 78.4 30.4% 4.5% 34.8%
4 Cleveland Indians .459 74.6 87.4 2.9% 0.5% 3.3%
5 Kansas City Royals .424 68.6 93.4 0.3% 0.1% 0.4%
Rnk American League West
Expected
Win Pct

Sim Win

Sim Loss

Div Pct

WC Pct
Sorted Descending
Playoff Pct
1 Texas Rangers .522 85.6 76.4 54.1% 2.9% 57.0%
2 Oakland Athletics .513 83.2 78.8 36.2% 3.3% 39.5%
3 Los Angeles Angels .477 77.2 84.8 9.0% 1.1% 10.1%
4 Seattle Mariners .430 69.0 93.0 0.7% 0.1% 0.7%
Rnk National League East
Expected
Win Pct

Sim Win

Sim Loss

Div Pct

WC Pct
Sorted Descending
Playoff Pct
1 Philadelphia Phillies .561 91.3 70.7 57.9% 13.1% 71.0%
2 Atlanta Braves .536 87.0 75.0 26.1% 15.8% 41.8%
3 Florida Marlins .519 83.9 78.1 12.9% 10.0% 22.9%
4 New York Mets .493 78.8 83.2 3.1% 3.1% 6.1%
5 Washington Nationals .435 69.3 92.7 0.1% 0.0% 0.1%
Rnk National League Central
Expected
Win Pct

Sim Win

Sim Loss

Div Pct

WC Pct
Sorted Descending
Playoff Pct
1 St. Louis Cardinals .522 85.8 76.2 37.9% 6.0% 43.8%
2 Milwaukee Brewers .524 85.2 76.8 32.6% 6.3% 38.9%
3 Cincinnati Reds .503 82.4 79.6 18.7% 4.3% 23.0%
4 Chicago Cubs .492 80.1 81.9 10.1% 2.9% 13.0%
5 Pittsburgh Pirates .439 71.5 90.5 0.7% 0.1% 0.8%
6 Houston Astros .420 67.5 94.5 0.1% 0.0% 0.2%
Rnk National League West
Expected
Win Pct

Sim Win

Sim Loss

Div Pct

WC Pct
Sorted Descending
Playoff Pct
1 San Francisco Giants .557 90.4 71.6 55.0% 11.7% 66.8%
2 Los Angeles Dodgers .537 87.3 74.7 28.7% 14.5% 43.2%
3 Colorado Rockies .516 83.1 78.9 11.7% 8.3% 20.0%
4 San Diego Padres .492 79.2 82.8 3.9% 3.4% 7.3%
5 Arizona Diamondbacks .461 73.6 88.4 0.7% 0.5% 1.1%


What you see here is that the Phillies, Red Sox, Giants and Rangers are all pegged at better than even odds to win their divisions. Including the Giants on that list surprises me.

The NL Central was pre-elbow implosion for Adam Wainwright; the updated projection leaves the Cards and Brewers in a statistical dead heat as co-favorites for the division, with Cincinnati a close third.

The Twins, Tigers and White Sox appear roughly equally likely to capture the AL Central (and then get obliterated in the ALDS), while the one-dimensional A's and Padres both score out around the .500 mark.

Finally, some good news projected for all you Baltimorons: BP can't decide whether you're mean projected winning total is just above or just below 81, but in any case, your favorite nine would cease to be the doormat of the division, much less the league.

Take all this for what's it's worth: slightly more than nothing. Statistical projections can't predict freak injuries or breakout seasons like Jose Bautista's 2010 power surge. Relief pitchers are notoriously unfathomable from one year to the next. Rookies are tough to project because of the apples-oranges comparisons to previous work. Mid-season trades muck around with pre-season prognostications. Finally, normal human psychology can play a big role in a team's 162-game performance (think a floundering squad just giving up, or a young group exploding out of the gate and feeding off that confidence.)

All that is what makes the game so much fun.

Still, food for thought...
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20 February 2011

Intriguing Teams of 2011, Part I


Teams that throw bombs on fourth-and-one are exciting, no matter whether they win or lose. That's this year's Milwaukee Brewers, who bet the farm -- literally -- on the 2011 and possibly 2012 seasons.

With Prince Fielder's impending free agency looming next year, GM Doug Melvin decided to swing for the fences now. Cashing in their minor league talent, Milwaukee brought in former Cy Young winner Zack Greinke and former Toronto ace Shaun Marcum to join Yovanni Gallardo and lefty Randy Wolf in a suddenly rejuvenated stating rotation.

They'll need it, because pitching was the soft white underbelly of 2010's 77-85 squad. The Brews combined the second best hitting in baseball with the fourth worst pitching last year. That's a volatile stew. Now the ingredients seem more complimentary.

In fact, it's better than it looks. Marcum sported a shiny 3.64 ERA last year just a year removed from TJ surgery and facing the Red Sox, Rays or Yankees and their DH-fueled lineups every other start. Greinke, coming off his All-World 2009 season didn't get a run of support from Royal teammates until approximately Flag Day. Not only are both likely to be improvements over last year's rotation fillers, they're likely to be improvements over themselves.

On the other hand, nothing's changed in the bullpen except the departure of 103-year-old Trevor Hoffman and his 5.86 ERA, and the seasoning of John Ashton and Kameron Loe. In the fickle world of relief pitching, Milwaukee's pen could swing anywhere from pale ale to stout.

There are some concerns, though. Five players -- Ryan Braun, OF; Rickie Weeks, 2B; Prince Fielder, 1B; Corey Hart, OF; and Casey McGehee, 3B comprised almost the entirety of the offense last year, with 140 of the team's 182 home runs. The rest of the lineup was so invisible that pitcher Gallardo, in 73 plate appearances, was the seventh most productive hitter on the team, after part-time senior citizen, Jim Edmonds. An injury and an off-year in that bunch could tumble the whole deck of cards.

Moreover, while the lineup produced was very Gouda at the plate, it was Swiss Cheese in the field, ranking 29th in the majors. The replacement of Carlos Gomez in center and Alcides Escobar at short with Lorenzo Cain and Yuniesky Betancourt threatens an even stinkier result. This might drive Wisconsin lawmakers to leave the state, but the whiff-happy new pitching staff relies less on its fielders than its predecessors.

In a year when the Reds appear to be poster children for regression, the Cardinals have brought the circus to town and the Astros keep forgetting to fire Ed Wade, the NL Central may be begging for some adult supervision. The Brewers appear poised to provide it. If they don't, it could be a long decade in Wisconsin.
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19 February 2011

The Kila Monster


The sabermetric cognoscenti are all agog about something called Kila Ka’aihue, a towering Hawaiian first-baseman/DH for the Kansas City Royals. It could be that he's the closest thing to gush-worthy in KC or it could be that they've tired of waiting for Matt Wieters, the Oriole catcher whose projected rookie batting average looked like a Dean's List GPA.

Baseball Prospectus's projection algorithm rates him the eighth best hitter in the AL in 2011 with a .262/.387/.473 line bolstered by 95 walks and 25 home runs. BP equates Kila with Ryan Howard both at the plate and in the field. They both sport nifty projected "true averages" of .302 (Kila on base more, Howard more power) and sub-nifty fielding projections.

Ka'aihue (pronounced: Good God, even if I knew how to pronounce it, I wouldn't know how to write it), sipped a cup'a Joe with the big club in '08 and retired his rookie status last year with 208 plate appearances. In that time, he did little to light the fires of conjecture, authoring a .224/.314/.398 resume with nine home runs.

These projections are based on the past three years and historic comparisons to those with similar experiences. Kila showed some Triple-A mettle, slugging .285/.424/.521 in 1,110 plate appearances from '08 to '10. There's no guarantee that will translate to the majors, or even to Kansas City, but it's not like there's no correlation between AAA performance and MLB performance. Add in that Kila's turns 27 this year and will be given regular playing time by a franchise not currently in danger of missing a playoff appearance because of one bad personnel decision.

Still, a .302 true average -- a kind of catch-all batting metric put in batting average form -- sounds like a best-case scenario. The Royals and Kila fantasy owners nationwide should be happy if he hits well enough to justify his at-bats and show some future promise. And that sounds like a lot more reasonable expectation. In any case, he'll be someone to keep an eye on in 2011. Maybe we'll even learn how to say his name.
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18 February 2011

Not Swinging the Wood


When Brandon Wood shuffles into Angels camp this month, his teammates should have one question: "Why did you bring your gear?" Wood will likely be the very last crumb at the bottom of the MLB cereal box.

Brandon Wood is a right-handed third baseman and occasional shortstop who hits likes a right-handed sofa salesman and occasional beer-leaguer. Selected in the first round of the '03 draft out of Scottsdale, AZ, Wood enters his age 26 season having compiled the kind of hitting resume that made Mario Mendoza famous. 

This is an exaggeration, of course. Wood makes Mendoza look like Honus Wagner.

Take last season, for example. Please. Wood came to the plate 243 times, an indictment of either skipper Mike Scoscia or the Angels' farm system. He delivered six walks and 33 hits, six of them of the extra base variety. He fanned 71 times. His .146/.174/.208 batting line scores out to a 5 OPS+, meaning that Brandon Wood is one-20th the quality of an average MLB hitter, or slightly better than the assistant equipment manager. His -2.0 WARP suggests that Anaheim could have won two more games had they just replaced those 243 at bats with a decent-hitting pitcher.

None of this should have been a shock to Angel fans. In 236 plate appearance during his three previous seasons, Wood stroked a sizzling .191/.220/.312 with seven walks and 73 whiffs, for an OPS+ of 39. 

The Mets' Rey Ordonez can find common cause with Wood, though Ordonez did manage a lifetime .246 batting average. But Ordonez won three Gold Gloves at shortstop. Wood is generally considered roughly an average third baseman and a nearly adequate shortstop if used sparingly.

No problem then, if he continues to suck wind with his back to the catcher. One more season of unmitigated fecklessness will render Brandon Wood's defensive ability utterly irrelevant ... except back in that beer league.
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17 February 2011

What Mozeliak Knows


Q. How much is your best player worth to your team if he's hurt all season?
A. Not zero. That wouldn't be so bad. He's worth zero minus whatever you're paying him.

There, in a nutshell, may be the reason the St. Louis Cardinals prefer to have $300 million over the next 10 years than to have the best baseball player in the universe.

In a world where Alex Rodriguez can command $27.5 million/year and Derek Jeter can even extract $18 million/year, Albert Pujols should be able to wrangle a $30 million per diem. Jeter's OPS could fall asleep in the left pants pocket of Pujols' OPS without causing a bulge.

In his first 10 seasons, Prince Albert has added roughly 92 wins to his St. Louis teams. At nine wins a season, Pujols is worth roughly $45 million/year. Moreover, for a borderline playoff franchise like St. Louis, the eight or nine marginal wins positively swells with import. A .500 Cards team without Albert is a  90-win Central division champ with him, adding attendance during the season, revenue from playoff games, spiked merchandise purchases and similar future expenditures.

Yet Cardinal management reportedly offered $25 million for eight years, far below Albert's marginal value, assuming he continues his Superman imitation.

Should we dial up the local looney bin for GM John Mozeliak? Nah, hold the phone. 

When teams balk at inking their own stars, it's worth considering what they know. Mozeliak may be seeing something in Pujols that concerns him, perhaps on the training table. His star has suffered in the past with a balky back, something to be especially concerned about as he ages. 

Mozeliak may also know more about Albert's true chronology than the rest of the league. If his age is understated by a mere two years, Pujols hits age 40 in the seventh year of the deal. The odds of breaking down increase logarithmically in ordinary humans at about age 38.

There's another consideration that has little to do with the player himself. If Mozeliak is realistic about the current squad, he may conclude that his stars-and-scrubs franchise with limited resources won't be able to afford a decent supporting cast after betting the farm on one player. Even a winning bet hamstrings the franchise; a losing bet consigns St. Louis to 10 years of paying the vigorish and watching Houston pass in the standings.

Research shows that free agents re-signed by their incumbent team fare significantly better on average than those lured away. It's worth assuming that management of the home team has good reason for re-upping or bypassing the player in question.
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14 February 2011

Happy V.D.


Pitchers and catchers report on Valentine's Day. Either Kennesaw Mountain Landis is a romantic or God is a baseball fan. 

I'm going with the Almighty. Someone get Him a box of chocolates and a catchers mitt.
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06 February 2011

The Bonfire of the Inanities


I love the novels of Tom Wolfe. They're unsparing in their insights of modern, nonsensical American life and filled with characters plucked off the streets of Real Life, U.S.A. 

But among the common threads in Wolfe's three novels -- The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man In Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons -- there is this: he weaves stories out of the minutest details of his characters' lives for 800 pages and then, realizing he is only halfway through the narrative, ties up the story in a neat bow over the last six pages, as if his editor is sitting in his office with a fat check, glancing conspicuously at her watch and drumming her fingers against the desk.

I thought of this while glancing through the sports section today. I noticed that, for some reason, they're still conducting an NBA season. I love basketball and the athleticism of NBA players is frankly beyond my conception, but it's very clear that all the necessary questions have been answered halfway through the season. At this point, they're really playing to decide which mediocre outfits with utterly no hope of making any noise in the playoffs slip into the post-season.

Take a look at the standings. There are three tiers of teams in the NBA: the elite, the mediocre and the godawful. The elite have been established -- Boston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, Lakers, Dallas and Atlanta -- and they comprise the complete list of teams with even a one-in-a-thousand chance of winning the championship. The dreadful long ago eliminated themselves and the middle dozen or so either soon will, or will be allowed into the playoffs only as fodder for the teams that matter in a first round that could be eliminated without consequence.

If they ended the season now, the NBA could start its playoffs with all the right teams. It might turn out that some sub-.500 squad now seeded 10th could catch either fire or a string of home games against the Clevelands and the New Jerseys, and snag that last playoff spot. And that today's seventh seed could stage a lottery pick rally, but honestly, what difference would it make?  A home game or two before being eliminated by Lebron or Kobe won't change the overall flavor of such a franchise's season.

Instead, there is the faux drama of seeding, as if it matters whether Boston plays Miami in the third round, or Miami plays Boston. In the meantime, the NBA season drags on and on and on, and then they start eleven rounds of playoffs that take two months and don't end until baseball's picking its All-Star team. It's a ruinous formula and it augurs poorly for baseball's playoff expansion plans.
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05 February 2011

Cy-onara


In five years, baseball writers will have the opportunity to consider Billy Wagner's Hall of Fame credentials. My guess is they will find him wanting, particularly having tossed just 900 innings in his 15-year career.

Take a look, though, at his swan song. Has anyone ever exited the game on such an upswing? 

In 69 innings, Billy Wagner allowed just 38 hits while fanning 104. That's domination. His K-rate was second in the NL. His 104/22 strikeout-walk ratio was second in the league. His 7-2, 1.43 with 37 saves was nothing to sneeze at either. He was worth 27 runs -- in just 69 innings! -- to the Braves.

Wagner called it a career at 38. The only practitioner of the twirling arts whom I can remember posting such an incredible valedictory season is Sandy Koufax (27-9, 1.73; 317 K in 323 innings, worth about 100 runs), but his departure, at 30, was transparently premature.

The closer is an over-rated position, but relief masters like Wagner can tilt the contest their team's way. The Braves made a lot of good moves in the off-season, but losing Wagner will be a blow.
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04 February 2011

The Stupor Bowl


Quick note on the Stupor Bowl:

I haven't the foggiest idea who will win or what the score will be of Sunday's game. I do know one thing: whatever the analysts say is going to happen, won't.

The guys who can explain dime packages and bubble screens, and who can remember in minute detail third quarter plays from the NFC title game 17 years ago, all own crystal balls made of lead. 

This is particularly true because they've failed to notice that the past isn't prologue. Each week is different. The best rushing team in the league gets held to 47 yards by the 28th best run defense. The quarterback who's passed 223 times without an interception gets picked off twice by a second-string cornerback. And so on.

When the experts tell you that Troy Polamalu or James Starks is the key to the game, or that the contest turns on how Pittsburgh's offensive line protects their quarterback, or on Aaron Rodgers' completion percentage on third down, just giggle. They're predicting the past.

Here's my prediction. Some guy I never heard of will make a key play. An unexpected turnover will loom large. Someone will do something he doesn't ordinarily do -- fumble, get sacked, commit pass interference. Most importantly, the game won't follow form.

None of this is suggested by what's happened before. But that's the point. We're talking about the future.
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