A brief look at the catastrophe that has been Red Sox September

Peter Abraham:

It’s not difficult to determine why the Sox have lost 14 of their last 18 games. Their starting pitchers are 3-9 with a 6.75 earned run average and 1.63 WHIP in those 18 games.

...

Beckett, Jon Lester, John Lackey, Tim Wakefield, Andrew Miller, and Kyle Weiland have produced two quality starts since Sept. 3. One was by Lester Sept. 6 against Toronto, the other by Beckett Sept. 16 against Tampa Bay. Those are two of the four games the Sox have won.

Yeah, it's not quite that easy, Peter. Yes, the starters have been bad. But Boston is now 5-16 in the month of September, and their lead in the Wild Card race is down to two games with six to play. If they were 10-11 in September, they'd already have clinched a playoff spot, and they are still likely to do so. So, is it just a matter of the starters performing badly?

The short answer: No. Yes, they've been pretty poor. No, they aren't solely to blame for the swoon, not even close to it.

1. The bullpen. There certainly has been some overuse in the middle innings caused by starters not getting deep enough. But consider this - the whole game plan for the Sox, all year, is to try to get an 8th inning lead for Daniel Bard and Jonathan Papelbon to finish off.
   
   • On September 1, Aceves and Bard combined to give up three in the seventh to turn a 2-1 lead into a 4-2 deficit. Loss.
   • On September 7, Bard blew a lead in the 8th, giving up 5 runs to turn a 2 run lead into a 3 run deficit. Loss.
   • Bard lost another one on the 10th, giving up a run in the 11th inning of a tie game after facing just three batters. Loss.
   • Bard gave up 3 with a 2-run lead in the 8th inning on the 14th. Loss.
   • Bard and Papelbon combined to give up 3 with a one-run lead on the 20th. Loss.
   Turn two of those losses into wins, and their magic number is three with six to play, and there's significantly less hyperventilating.
   
   I don't care for Wins and Losses as a metric for pitcher effectiveness, but I think this is telling. The Red Sox starters are 4-10 in September. The bullpen is 1-6. And a couple of those starter losses came when the starter left the game with a lead or at least tied and the bullpen allowed the winning, or tying and winning, run(s) to score.
   
   They've been almost as bad at the end of the game as they've been at the beginning.
   

   Red Sox bullpen - 9/2011

   ERA for 7-11th innings:	5.22
   ERA in losses for 7-11th innings:	5.93

   
   Have the starters been bad? Yep. Has the bullpen been any better? Not against established standards of performance, no they haven't.



2. The offense. (The cry rises from the peanut gallery: "The offense? Are you nuts? They're averaging 5.8 runs per game in September! This is not an offensive problem!") Well, yes, they are averaging 5.8 runs per game in September. But remember that old saw about the man with his feet in the freezer and his head in the oven being, on average, at a pretty comfortable temperature? Ladies and Gentlemen, I present your September 2011 Boston Red Sox offense.
   
   Five times in their 21 September games, they've scored in double digits (10, 12, 14, 18, 18). In those five games, they're 4-1. In the other 16, they scored five or fewer. In the double-digit games, they averaged 14.4 runs/game. In the other 16, they averaged 3.125. If you're failing to score 6 or more runs in 76% of your games, you're putting up a very bad offensive performance.
   
   

   Red Sox offense - 9/2011

   	AB	Runs	Hits	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	K	BA	OBA	SPct	OPS	Runs/Game	RC	RC/25
   September	746	122	209	57	4	24	118	71	154	.280	.343	.464	.807	5.81	116.9	5.2
   Double-digit games	206	72	88	26	0	13	69	26	37	.427	.496	.743	1.239	14.40	65.9	13.3
   The other 16	540	50	121	31	4	11	49	45	117	.224	.282	.357	.639	3.13	52.4	3.0

   
   They've had five strong offensive games, and then they've been awful. In more than three quarters of their games, they got performances like David Ortiz (.231/.333/.250/.583) and Dustin Pedroia (.194/.219/.339/.557) and Jacoby Ellsbury (.265/.292/.426/.718) and Jarrod Saltalamacchia (.139/.162/.333/.495) and Jason Varitek (.050/.136/.200/.336) and Jed Lowrie (.000/.048/.000/.048) and Josh Reddick (.209/.244/.279/.524) and Kevin Youkilis (.150/.261/.200/.461). They've lost 5-4, 4-3, 3-2 and 1-0. Shut out twice, one of which took 11 innings.
   
   They lost 3 of 4 in Toronto despite outscoring the Jays by 9 in the series. They scored 24 in the middle two games, and 4 runs in the bookends. They lost 3 of 4 at home to Baltimore despite outscoring the Orioles by 6. They scored 18 runs in one game, 14 in the other four combined.
   
   It's certainly an indictment of the pitching staff that they've gone 1-14 when scoring fewer than 10 runs, but it's an indictment of this offense that they've had 15 games in which they scored fewer than six, 11 (more than half) in which they've scored fewer than five and seven games in which they failed to score at least four.
   
   They struggled against Mariano Rivera and James Shields and David Price, but they also struggled against Pedro Strop and Willie Eyre and Jason Berken.
   
   The offense has been full partners in the "swoon." The offense has been just as ineffective as the pitching, or nearly so, but the nature of the beast allows for spectacular performances to skew the averages badly, and that's what they've done. A spectacular pitching performance, on the other hand, such as allowing 1 run in the 11th after 10 scoreless, can't make up for a bad one. So it looks like the pitching has been much worse. But it hasn't. Probably a little worse, but not MUCH worse.

I have zero interest in castigating the GM. Or the manager. Through the end of August, they were on a pace to win 100+ games. This is a talented team that's just played horribly in all phases of the game for three weeks. The slumps have all come together and they had two starters get hurt in three days when they already had two on the shelf, which challenged the depth. It's been painful to watch, and certainly, the starting pitching has been bad.

My only point is this - so has everything else. The relief pitching has been bad. The offense has been bad. They've lost games this month with bad starting pitching, bad relief pitching, bad base-running, bad batting and bad defense. (And bad luck. Barrel of the bat takes out the SS and directly leads to four runs scoring? Diving 3rd baseman lands on the base for a double play? Murphy's Law has been in full force.)

It may continue for another week, in which case they'll probably miss the playoffs. And they may come out of it. Either way, if they're still playing after next Wednesday, all of what's just happened has no bearing on what will happen going forward.

Bogus statistics are everywhere

April fools:

A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the "immortal soul clause" to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."

...

Due to the number of people who ticked the box, GameStation claims believes as many as 88 percent of people do not read the terms and conditions of a Web site before they make a purchase.

This would indicate that 12 percent or more DO read the terms and conditions of a web site before they make a purchase. That sounds farfetched to me...

Is OBP a new stat? Not at all.

David Pinto, at his invaluable BaseballMusings.com site, passed along an interesting story about Derek Jeter's defense, and how it improved to acceptable after years of being very bad. The story's interesting, and you should check it out, but I'm interested in a comment that David made at the end of the post:

it took a good ten years for the sabermetric community to get OBP main stream acceptance (it started appearing on ESPN baseball broadcasts in the early 1990s).

It took a lot longer than 10 years for OBP to make its way into the mainstream. There certainly was a big push for acknowledging its importance made by sabremetricians in the 80s¹, but it wasn't a new statistic then. Branch Rickey was preaching it (though not, apparently, by that name) in a national magazine back in the 50s². The name "on-base percentage" goes back at least to the early 60s. The earliest it appears in a game story (or at least, I haven't found an earlier mention) in the New York Times is on May 17, 1964³.

"In his last 17 games, Siebern has batted .414 with 24 hits in 58 trips. He has reached base 38 times in 71 trips during that span for an on-base percentage of .535."

When the Yankees signed Jimmy Wynn in 1976, Murray Chass, of all people⁴, cited his on-base percentage in the story⁵.

Wynn, who was sent by the Dodgers to the Braves a year ago in a six-player swap, still made significant contributions to the Atlanta attack. he led the National League in walks with 127, had the 10th best on-base percentage in the league, .377, and drove in 66 runs, which proportionately was a good total for his 93 hits.

If you go to the less commonly used terminology of "on-base average," its first appearance in the New York Times dates back to at least 1948⁶.

Reiser played in only 110 games last year, hitting .308 at home and .311 on the road for an over-all average of .309. He was hurt on June 4 and was out of action until July 13, but during July and August he topped the club's hitting. Pete's "getting-on-base" average, a new statistical wrinkle invented by the Dodger statistician, Allen Roth, was a snazzy .408.

There's no question that the new generation of baseball analysts beginning, like Bill James, in the late 70s and early 80s recognized and pushed the value of OBP. And it did, eventually, make its way into more mainstream analysis. But it was a long struggle, and there are still a great many writers, announcers and talk show hosts that will give batting average and RBI numbers when evaluating a player, and not OBP. They're dinosaurs, I think, but they still exist in large numbers. Fifty years from now, they'll be gone, and the people replacing them will all prefer OBP as an evaluative tool, but for now, while it has penetrated the mainstream, it's still treated as an innovation by far too many "analysts," treated as a kind of "special" tool, but not something we bring out for everyday use like AVG and RBI.




¹ - This isn't a criticism of David. His point is that people started really pushing OBP in the 1980s and that's true. And there was resistance when the pushing started, and that's true. But it's such a critical statistic (I believe it's fair to say that, to the extent that such a thing as "sabremetric conventional wisdom" exists, it would be conventional wisdom to say that OBP is the most important statistic for evaluating the performance of a hitter) that I think it's interesting to see how long it took from the conception of the statistic until the real pushing started. And it was a long time.<sup>7


2</sup> - Branch Rickey penned an article for Life Magazine, Goodby To Some Old Baseball Ideas, in 1954, in which he emphasized the importance of reaching base safely (and debunked the value of the RBI).

What were the factors that went into the scoring of runs? There were a barrel of them. There was ability to get on base by any means possible. There was power, the ability to hit for extra bases rather than just singles. Then there was speed, daring on the base paths, timeliness of hitting and making the most of opportunities....the ability to get on base, or On Base Average, is both vital and measurable...we found there was still no place for RBIs in the formula. As a statistic, RBIs were not only misleading but dishonest. They depended on managerial control, a hitter's position in the batting order, park dimensions and the success of his teammates in getting on base ahead of him. That left two measurable factors—on base average and power—by which to gauge the over-all offensive worth of an individual

Branch Rickey, 1954

³ - ORIOLES TRIUMPH OVER ANGELS, 5-1 :Robinson and Powell Homer Off Latman in Eighth. (1964, May 17). New York Times (1857-Current file),p. S2. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2006). (Document ID: 106969584).


⁴ - Chass has made headlines in the blogosphere for his attacks on baseball analysts and sabremetricians and bloggers:

Things I don’t want to read or hear about anymore:

...

Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics.

I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.

Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

People play baseball. Numbers don’t.

Of course, he, like most baseball writers, uses a lot of numbers. But newer ones are obviously of no value to him.


⁵ - By MURRAY CHASS. (1976, December 1). Yanks Buy Wynn, Right-Handed Slugger :Yanks Buy Wynn, Add To Power. New York Times (1857-Current file),33. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2006). (Document ID: 75742679).



⁶ - Pete Reiser Signs 1948 Dodgers' Contract For Reported Salary Increase to $20,000. (1948, February 21). New York Times (1857-Current file),16. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2006). (Document ID: 96416826).


⁷ - For anyone interested in the long and fascinating history of baseball statistics, I cannot recommend highly enough The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz. An excellent read on a fascinating subject.

Red Sox - a lot of bad luck so far

Hey, kudos to Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald, who has produced a statistically literate, relevant and useful article on the Red Sox early season troubles:

On both halves of the BABIP - batting average of balls in play - the Sox have been on the wrong side of the tracks.

BABIP, the newfangled metric, is a gauge on what happens to a ball when contact is made that results in a plate appearance. Home runs are taken out of the equation, so what a defender does, or does not do, with a ball hit to him is taken into account. With a typical BABIP of .290, the higher it is, the luckier the batter is and unluckier the pitcher is.

BABiP is something that I invented¹ several years ago, in order to look at defense. It has now been around enough for people to recognize it and understand what it is and how it works. But I wouldn't have expected to see it in the mainstream press yet. So that's a good job by Silverman.



¹ - OK, I probably didn't invent it. And Silverman certainly didn't get it from me. I probably had seen someone do that, or something like that, at some time previously. But I don't remember having seen it before I first derived it.

Correlation is not causation...

...but I don't think that it was just coincidence that I laughed when I saw this...




H/T: Professor Mankiw

Taking pride in ignorance

I'm not sure that there's a much more obnoxious trait than taking pride in ignorance, but there was a piece in the Cincinnati Enquirer yesterday that make one wonder if Paul Daugherty was serious or just tweaking. In any event, the noise coming from Dusty Baker makes me glad that I'm a fan of the Red Sox and not the Reds...

The other day, the Reds manager decided he wanted Joey Votto and Adam Dunn to swing their bats more. "I don't like called third strikes," Baker said.

Can we get an Amen?

It always amuses when fans defend heart-of-the-order hitters by pointing to their on-base percentage. Wow, look at all those walks.

Unless they're intentional walks, or the big boppers are being pitched around, walks aren't what you want from players hitting third through sixth. You want them up there smart-hacking.

As Baker said: "(Votto) needs to swing more. I'd like to see him more aggressive."

Even when I was 12 years old and playing on a 1-15 little league team, we understood that walks were a good thing. Maybe someday Paul Daugherty and Dusty Baker will be 12, and they'll understand it, too...

Stat of the day

21 of the NFL's 32 teams (65.6%) are averaging fewer than 22.29 points per game. The New England Patriots are averaging a 22.71 point differential per game.

Stat of the day

12 NFL teams are averaging 5 or more punts per game.

New England has punted 5 times in 4 games.