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May 6, 2007

Every Given Sunday

Central Obsessions

by John Perrotto

• One of the many sabermetric truisms that Bill James uncovered when he was publishing his Baseball Abstracts in the 1980s is that teams who fail to live up to their Pythagorean record in one season tend to be much better the next, and those who overachieve one year tend to underachieve the next. In other words, everything tends to even out over the long haul in baseball.

  Thus, that might be the most logical explanation of why the Cleveland Indians are 17-10 and in a virtual tie for first place with Detroit in the American League Central after the season’s first five weeks. After all, no major-league team undershot its Pythagorean record like the Indians did last year by going 78-84 instead of the 89-73 record that their averages of 5.4 runs scored and 4.8 runs allowed per game suggested.

  In contrast, the Indians’ simple stats for 2007 certainly don’t look like those of a team on top of what is generally considered baseball’s toughest division. The Indians went into the weekend ranked in lower half of the 14-team AL in ERA (ninth), batting average (10^th), and fielding percentage (14^th). However, more tellingly, they were fifth in the league in runs scored, sixth in runs allowed, and currently they rank 19^th in defensive efficiency. Those aren't great figures, but they are better ones.

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