Pebble Hunting: The Mo... (08/27)
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August 27, 2012 Baseball TherapyOne-Run Winners: Good or Lucky?A few weeks ago, the topic for the BP Lineup Card was "Unanswered questions for the second half." I noted that at the time, the Cardinals were several games behind both the Pirates and the Reds in the NL Central standings, despite the fact that they had a better Pythagorean record than either. In theory, the Cardinals should have been atop the NL Central. As my father is fond of pointing out, everything works in theory. The question that I posed was whether Pythagorean records were really a "true" gauge of a team's quality. It's a topic that has never been fully resolved. Are differences between actual record and Pythaogrean records a matter of luck, or do they reflect some underlying property of a team? Both logic and previous research tell us that there's a really easy way to outperform your Pythagorean record: win a lot of one-run games. In one-run wins, the Pythagorean calculations see only that a team scored one more run than its opponent. The standings see that it won the game. So, are one-run wins a skill? The Orioles have a negative run-differential overall this season, but are an astounding 23-6 in one-run games so far this year, and as a result, are in the playoff hunt. Are they extremely lucky, or are they just gritty like that and "know how to win" the close ones? There are a lot of theories on the issue: teams with good bullpens (or good closers) can protect close leads. Teams with good starters can overcome a bad offensive day. Teams with crafty managers can win because the manager can expertly push all the buttons. Then again, no one ever takes the contrary position. A team with a bunch of one-run wins might belie a bullpen or a manager who can bungle a five-run lead into a one-run lead, barely hanging on to fly the W flag over the stadium. After studying the issue, I can boil down the recipe for winning one-run games to three words: wear white pants. Want to know how I got there?
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I think you backed off in your analysis. There's no doubt that one-run games can hinge on a bloop single or swinging bunt, and that weak teams are as likely to get that kind of hit as are stronger teams. But weak teams have an inferior lineup to stronger teams, and almost always have a weaker bullpen. A team with a strong bullpen should prevail more often. Isn't that what the Orioles have been doing? Not only have Jim Johnson, Pedro Strop and Troy Patton been extraordinarily effective, but the rest of the members of the bullpen have also been effective most of the time. All of them, not just three of them. They've won their last 12 extra inning games, games which stretch the resources of any bullpen (and probably reward the deepest 'pen). The Orioles haven't won very often with nine-inning last at-bat heroics (like Oakland, for example), but have won in the 12th, 13th, 15th, 17th after not scoring (most of the time) in the earlier extra innings. It's the bullpen that stymied the other team... How often has the Oriole bullpen shut down their opponents in the 7th, 8th and (not "or") 9th? Doesn't that throw the model off?
I recommend Sam Miller's article on the subject (from today). Bullpen performance is beset by all sorts of small sample size problems and luck.
It's true that the Orioles have played a lot of extra inning games, which are best won by good bullpen performance. To put it less charitably, the Orioles have been fortunate to be in a bunch of the type of one-run games that have called for a good bullpen and fortunate that their relievers all seem to have four-leaf clovers in their back pockets this year.
The model only sees games that end in one-run. Suppose that the O's go into the 7th inning leading by one, and pitch 3 shutout innings. The game ends with a one-run O's win. Conclusion: Good bullpen performance, but why didn't the offense make it a 3 run game?
I agree. The Orioles do not have the best offense. The bullpen has been (most of) the story this year.
I would actually expect a team with a heterogenous bullpen, rather than a uniformly good bullpen, to outperform its pythag. Most managers use their two or three best relievers to protect slim leads, or to keep the other team's lead small. They use the rest of the bullpen to eat innings when the the score isn't so close.
So a relief core that's top-heavy -- two or three great relievers and three or four terrible ones -- would seem to play tough in close games; get landslided if the other team had an big early lead (negative effect on overall run diff); and cough up big leads, turning them into smaller ones (negative effect on overall run diff). Landslide victories would be rare, landslide losses would be occasional, and great relief arms would contribute to a higher W% in close games.
A team with 2 or 3 good relievers wouldn't be able to hang around in a 19 inning game, unless the other team's pen is just as bad. Perhaps they are lucky enough to be involved in games that don't call for that. Perhaps not.