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**Thomas** · 03-22-2014, 05:54 PM

Re: Joe Peta

2014 AL West Preview
Joe Peta

AL West Preview

Two years ago in the inaugural 30 Teams in 30 Days series, I projected the San Diego Padres, coming off a 71-win season to win the NL West. It stood as the biggest surprise of the series and though the Padres rallied late in the season to stamp the Over 73 ½ win ticket a winner, that pick was wrong in so many more ways than it was right. Last season the big surprise was a call for the Cleveland Indians, coming off a 67-win season to make the playoffs. That pick, in contrast to the Padres call a year earlier was a rousing success. In both cases, although the projection was model-driven, I strongly supported the narrative and expressed my conviction for both of those out-of-consensus calls in my writings.

In the case of this year’s out-of-consensus call, I’m having a little trouble mustering the same level of conviction. So instead of donning a megaphone and shouting from the lectern, I think I’ll just whisper this and get the hell off stage.

The Seattle Mariners are going to win the AL West in 2014.

I think one of the reasons I’m having a small degree of discomfort getting behind the Mariners pick is that I’m subconsciously swayed by the sabermetric community. Dave Cameron, Jeff Sullivan, and Dave Schoenfield are three of the most visible contributors to the on-line baseball content and they all happen to be Mariners fans. As a result they are all, usually without exception, hyper-critical of Seattle and especially its front office. Some of that criticism from the seemingly haphazard construction of the roster that never seems to address their true weakness (more on that in a second) to the trading of Adam Jones for Erik Bedard to the consistent misuse of bullpen personnel, is certainly justified, but I wonder if some of the sarcastic “glee” that accompanies some of the commentary simply arises from being in love with the subject.

The Mariners front office should get some credit for trying. Scratch that. Not just trying but credit for what they’ve succeeded in creating. In the last preview, I noted the Tigers had, by far, the best starting rotation in baseball last year. This stat helps illustrate that: The Tigers were the only team in the American League with two starting pitchers (minimum 100 innings pitched) in the top 7 of league ERA (Sanchez and Scherzer.) If you expand that list one more spot to the top 8, another team joins the list – the Seattle Mariners (Iwakuma and Hernandez). Like the Tigers due, Iwakuma and Hernandez’ results are supported by their underlying skill sets. So why do I think the Mariners will allow less runs than last year while I warned of a backslide by the Tigers? Because the Mariners also trotted out, for more than 300 innings last year, two of the worst pitcher in the AL in Aaron (that’s pronounced A-A-Ron for all my fellow Key and Peele fans) Harang and Joe Saunders. (Other things to whisper in this piece – Saunders is a Virginia Tech grad. Sigh.)

It doesn’t matter how negative you are on Iwakuma’ early-season replacement as he recovers from hand injury, or how much you want to mock the Mariners front office for recruiting Scott Baker to the rotation I absolutely guarantee you that the combination of Baker and Blake Beavan (or whoever else they put in this parlay) will give up materially less runs over 300 innings than last year’s combination of Harang and Saunders. They allowed 198 total runs in 303 innings for an astounding RA of 5.88.

An improvement in starting pitching will certainly reduce the amount of runs Seattle allows year-over-year but it’s only part of the pitching equation. What about the Mariners bullpen? Providing their critics/fans with fodder for their misery, en route to a 19-29 record in 1-run games the Mariners bullpen was the second-worst in baseball allowing runs at a 4.87 clip per nine innings – over 505 innings. Which means that when manager Eric Wedge went to the mound to take the ball from Harang or Saunders, he essentially replaced them with different versions of themselves.

Regular readers of my writing know how volatile bullpen performance is year to year and how easy it is for a team to replace ineffective parts, and how improving the league’s worst bullpen can be easiest way to go from worst to first (see Diamondbacks, Arizona, circa 2011.) But here’s the thing; unlike Saunders and Harang, the bullpen wasn’t anywhere close to as bad as the results reflected. As stated, based on runs allowed, the Mariners had the second worst bullpen in baseball. However, based on expected runs allowed – a regression formula that forms the basis for SIERA, or Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average – the Mariners move so far up the ranks that you actually have to change the category. They’re no longer the second worst, based on skill sets they’re the 13th best.

Don’t think it’s possible? Well there is nothing a reliever can do that’s more important in high-leverage situations than strike batters out. Seattle’s bullpen was 4th in K-rate in 2013. They did walk too many people (25th in the league at 10.1% of batters) and their ground ball tendencies were merely middling. But put that together and the Mariners had a league-average bullpen that should have had an ERA of about 3.37. They could pitch exactly the same as last year and give up anywhere from 1.25 to 1.5 less runs per nine innings. Over the 505 innings the bullpen pitched that’s an amazing reduction in runs allowed of at least 70 and perhaps (gulp) 100 runs.

I’m starting to warm up to this call.

Let’s look at the offense. The Baltimore Orioles, paced by Chris Davis’ 53 dingers, led the majors in home runs. In 2013, fourteen different players hit 30 or more home runs and none of them played for the Mariners. Therefore, I can almost guarantee this next sentence is going to stun all but the most statistics-obsessed fan: Last year, behind only the Orioles, the team with the second most home runs in the majors was the Seattle Mariners. So why were they 22nd in runs scored? There was some negative cluster luck but even factoring for that league-wide, they still tied for just 18th in adjusted runs scored.

The real reason is the same shortfall which has bedeviled Seattle for years – they were 26th in on-base percentage. That actually represented a massive improvement because the Mariners had been last in on-base percentage the three prior years and hadn’t finished out of the bottom three since 2007.

That’s why the addition of Robinson Cano and his lifetime .355 on-base percentage is so exciting for the Mariners outlook. Cano, of course, would have improved every team in the majors leagues except possibly the Red Sox, but his addition to the Mariners line up is especially crucial given their dearth of on-base skills. Fortunately, for Seattle, it’s not just Cano. Corey Hart and Logan Morrison have also been added to the lineup replacing Raul Ibanez and Kendrys Morales and while they may not be able to replicate their 52 home runs, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility. However, based on their lifetime on-base percentages, it’s a near guarantee that while they might not clear the bases as often, they’ll certainly be on the basepaths more often. And that, more than anything, is what the Mariners need. They certainly have flaws on offense but they’re going to score a lot more runs this year.

You know what? I’ve come around to this call. Sometimes you have to take the Tom Cruise route, jump up and down on a couch, and tell the whole world. You have to channel your inner-Joel Goodman from Risky Business, don the sunglasses, and throw caution to the wind. Sometimes you just have to say,

The Seattle Mariners are going to win the AL West in 2014!

2014 Outlook:

87-75 – First in AL West

721 Runs Scored 669 Runs Allowed

(I think it goes without saying that I support the “over” 80 total wins even if that number creeps up a bit in reaction to inter-division injuries.)

Oakland A’s

Living in the Bay Area, I can’t tell you how little joy I take in throwing cold water on the A’s projection this year. (My three-month isolation in Las Vegas, while I finished my book during the 2012 season, was made forever memorable by Oakland’s run to the division title, a story I chronicled here: http://tradingbases.squarespace.com/...athletics.html )

This year, the A’s market opened at 89 wins and it was instantly one of my favorite under. At the time, I thought the A’s still had a decent chance to win the division, but as I saw virtually equal chances from their three, non-Astros competitors, they represented an easy under call. Then, early this week, Jarrod Parker was lost for the season to Tommy John surgery. There was no way anyone on the staff – and keep in mind, I love rookie Sonny Gray who is going way too low in fantasy drafts – was going to replace Barolo Colon’s run-suppression success (2.65 ERA in 190 innings). Now the loss of Parker means a truly replacement level pitcher is going to replace his innings. On the margin, that means replacing 400 innings pitched, and the health news for their other 200 inning starter from 2013, A.J. Griffin, looks cloudy as well.

The A’s offense, a true strength, and a testament to a carefully constructed roster, will keep Oakland competitive all year if their other three division mates beat up on each other. (Again, I’m excluding Houston.) But, there’s a decent chance Oakland loses too many high-scoring games to every get very far over .500.

2014 Outlook:

84-78 – Tied-Second in AL West

710 Runs Scored 685 Runs Allowed

Los Angeles Angels

Largely due to the expectations that came with the signing of Albert Pools after the 2011 season, the Angels have been considered such a disappointment the last couple of years that it’s hard to remember they actually won 89 games in 2012, in barely missing the playoffs. Then they added Josh Hamilton last offseason and anything less than a pennant would have been a disappointment. So when the won just 78 games last year, their manager of 14 years, Mike Scioscia found himself on the hot seat.

There should be better news this year. Los Angeles may have only won 78 games but they were really a .500 team when you strip out cluster luck. The still have the services of the best player in baseball, Mike Trout, and since he won’t be 23 until August, there is still the chance he’s getting better. Hamilton and Pujols suffered such huge drop-offs in production last year that you can expect some positive regression, even if it’s unlikely either will return to prior MVP form.

The problem, though, is that there are still other holes – just like last year, the starting rotation looks to be a considerable weakness – and expectations are still inflated. The Angels are still sporting a total wins market of 87 games. No team slated to start 41-year old Raul Ibanez in a stadium that heavily suppresses left-handed power (just ask Josh Hamilton) should be sporting an 87-win market. If that creeps up just one more half-game by the time the final projections are released on Opening Day-eve they may be an official “under” selection.

2014 Outlook:

84-78 – Tied-Second in AL West

726 Runs Scored 702 Runs Allowed

Texas Rangers

As a rule, I really don’t like to turn an objective, model-based exercise into a subjective one, and I try to limit the use of the ex-factor. By ex-factor I mean the logic flaw that occurs when people exclude items. Things like, I’m thin, ex-ice cream or I have a perfect driving record, ex-the state of California. But I’ve decided to make an exception when considering the Texas Rangers because there really was an extraordinary item last year.

The extraordinary item came in the form of the 111-loss Houston Astros. Texas won 91 games last year and outscored its opponents by 94 runs in advancing to the Wild Card game for the second year in a row. But a huge part of their success came on the backs of the Astros. Texas went 17-2 against Houston and outscored them by 57 runs. That means they went 76-70 against the rest of the league and when you strip out cluster luck from their scoring I have them barely outscoring their opponents, essentially a .500 team when they weren’t beating up on the worst team in baseball over the last decade.

From that baseline, they’ve made two significant changes, trading for Prince Fielder and signing on-base machine Shin-Soo Choo. The problem is the Rangers lost three solid contributors to last year’s team, Ian Kinsler, Craig Gentry, and A.J. Pierzynski. They’ll be better on offense this year but I don’t think it’s going to be as dramatic as people think and they’ll give up something on defense, especially in the Choo for Gentry department. They’ve got as good a chance as Oakland, the Angels, and Seattle does to win the division, but like the Angels, I don’t think there is any value in their mildly inflated total win market of 87 games.

2014 Outlook:

84-78 – Tied-Second in AL West

762 Runs Scored 731 Runs Allowed

Houston Astros

I missed huge on the Astros last year because I didn’t account for just how far they’d go in tanking. Unlike the NBA or even the NFL where taking can improve your place in the draft, that wasn’t driving Houston’s indifference to fielding a competitive team. They had the first pick in the draft locked up before the season started. No, Houston apparently felt that if they were going to be the worst team in baseball there was no sense in spending anything above the a minimum amount of salary on players. The result? A 111-loss team that beyond their promising young catcher, Jason Castro, embodied the replacement-level concept.

They’ll be somewhat better this year, but it’s really impossible to see them fielding a team much better than one that is destined to lose 100 games, or, judging from management’s attitude last year, caring if they do. Their 66-win market is fair.

2014 Outlook:

65-97 – Fifth in AL West

633 Runs Scored 790 Runs Allowed

**Thomas** · 03-22-2014, 05:58 PM

Re: Joe Peta

2014 AL Central Preview
Joe Peta

2014 AL Central Preview

To win 90 games in a season, you should expect to outscore your opponents by roughly 100 runs. Sure, there are exceptions, and while generally rare they can also be very notable. Namely, the 2012 Baltimore Orioles won 93 games while scoring just 7 more runs than their opponents. Still, if you expect (and really, since these previews are always viewed through the lens of Las Vegas expectations, it’s the right viewpoint for this piece) to win 90 games you must have a plan in place where you will outscore your opponents by triple digits over the course of 162 games.

Sometimes, but not frequently, a team is constructed in such a way that outside of completely unexpected skill deterioration or catastrophic injuries, a team looks destined to win far more than 90 games to the point that winning fewer than 90 games becomes a left-sided tail result on a distribution curve. Early-century Yankees teams (and by early century, I mean this one; think Billy Wagner, not Honus Wagner) that were built to score 900 runs are a good example as was the 2011 Phillies team anchored by perhaps the best run-suppression staff we’ve seen in decades. Far more frequently however, for the 90+ win outcome to occur a lot has to go right, and sometimes that confluence of events falls under the heading of non-repeatable.

To that end, let’s take a look at the 93-win Detroit Tigers of 2013. The Tigers outscored their opponents by 170 runs, and to be honest, they were even a bit better than that. Were they to post exactly the same offensive and defensive results as last year, the Tigers should really expect to outscore their opponents by 200 runs and win 100 games. (In other words, they had negative cluster luck.) But can they expect to post those same results?

Roster changes make that doubtful, but before we even address that point, consider a couple of other factors. One of the most underrated aspects of success in any year is the health of a team’s starting rotation. Every year there is one team (and usually only one) whose five-man rotation stays intact the entire season. Generally, that team has a very good year, and assuming the runs allowed results are in line with the composite skills of the rotation, no one questions the sustainability of the results. On a rate-basis that’s true, but as a counting measure, it’s remarkably unsustainable.

The Tigers got 156 starts from, by far, the best rotation in baseball last year; of the six starts not taken by their starting five, one was a throw-away late-season game and another was during the second game of a doubleheader when the staff needed to be expanded to six pitchers. No other team in baseball came close to matching the Tigers starting five in terms of starts (156) or innings pitched (995.) And oh! what productive innings pitched they were as Verlander, Scherzer, Sanchez, Fister, and Porcello allowed just 401 total runs during their outings. Only the otherworldly Phillies staff of 2011 (360 total runs allowed in 1,064 innings pitched) has been better and only the 2010 Giants staff (in a far different home-field, run-scoring environment) have come close to matching the Tigers.

It’s not just that that level of excellence can’t reasonably to expected to be improved upon, it’s that it’s even less reasonable to expect that level of durability – and that’s a huge potential drop-off. Sixth, seventh, eighth etc. starters are usually the very definition of replacement-level players. They’re usually either minimum-salary middle relievers or triple-A ceiling guys. For some teams, there’s not a lot of difference between their fifth starter and replacement level but when you have a staff like the 2013 Tigers who only gave up slightly more than 3.5 runs every nine innings, it’s a drop-off of at least one run a game. Getting a still-above average 140 starts from their starting rotation could still result in a notable bump in runs allowed.

Then there are roster changes, and the Tigers jettisoned the extremely effective Doug Fister (3.68 ERA). His starts will be taken by Drew Smyly, a promising young pitcher, to be sure, but one relegated to the reliever’s LOOGY role last season. Even young and promising, no one should expect him to match Fister’s 2013 output.

On the run scoring front, roster changes threaten to gut a healthy portion of the nearly 800 runs the Tigers scored last year. In a highly notable off-season trade, first baseman Prince Fielder was swapped for the Rangers second baseman Ian Kinsler. That threatens to cost the Tigers offensive output at two positions. Having Kinsler under cheaper team control for a few seasons might have been a defensible move and improved the team in the long run, but for the 2014 outlook we’re concerned with marginal changes from the year before. Kinsler, a lifetime .273/.359/.474 hitter in the AL’s best hitting park, will replace Omar Infante’s production at second base. Infante hit .318/.345/.450, numbers which look awfully similar to Kinsler’s lifetime mark. Once you normalize for the home field park factor and consider that Kinsler has been in decline since 2011, at best, the Tigers can expect a year-over-year wash in offensive production from second base.

There will be no wash offensively replacing Fielder with third baseman Nick Castellanos while Miguel Cabrera moves to first base, even with Fielder coming off the least productive year of his career. Finally there is the curious case of shortstop production – on both sides of the ledger. Jhonny Peralta (.303/.358/.457) gave the Tigers superior offensive output for 2/3 of the season before his PED-related suspension. Based on his full minor league resume, there is no way Jose Iglesias can ever hope to replicate that hitting line over the course of a full campaign. Tigers fans will tell you they don’t care because, of course, Igelsias is a far superior fielder. That view is plain to anyone who watches his super-smooth command of the area between second and third base. And yet – here we are back in the ‘your eyes lie’ territory – can he actually improve on Peralta’s output in the field last year? Your eyes say yes and every Defensive Runs Saved projection say so, but I disagree.

Here’s why: All any fielder can do to prevent runs is turn batted balls into outs via an assist or putout and for shortstops, obviously, assists are the most important part of the equation. Here’s a look at the defensive production of Detroit’s shortstops last year:

IP Assists A per 9 IP

Peralta 936 294 2.83

Iglesias 332 103 2.79

Santiago 193 49 2.28

Look at that – Jhonny Peralta got to more ground balls per inning played than Jose Iglesias. Remember, all of the things which can make assists-per-inning tough to compare (strikeout rate of pitching staff, quality of other defenders, number of right-handed batters faced, stadium differences, etc) are held constant here. I am not for one second saying Peralta is as talented as Iglesias in the field; I’m positively saying I think Iglesias will have a hard time improving on Peralta’s 2013 figures which means the supposed defensive gains Iglesias provides to offset the offensive fallout, comparing 2013 to 2014, look specious to me.

Coming back to the theme that opened this piece, expecting to win more than 90 games in a season usually requires a whole bunch of things to go right and while I think the Tigers are headed back to the postseason donning their fourth straight division crown, I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as everyone expects.

Owing to less division strength than the Rays, Athletics, Red Sox, Rangers, etc. face, the Tigers have been installed as the AL favorite to go to the World Series and prohibitive favorites to win the AL Central. I don’t think it’s going to be that easy this year and I’ll continue my zig-zag tendencies with Detroit since I started publishing these previews before the 2012 season: Under in 2012, over in 2013, and for this year, under the posted win total of 90 ½.

(This was written before it was disclosed Iglesias will miss time, possibly a significant amount, with leg injuries. You can probably comfortably lop another win off this projection.)

2014 Outlook:

87-75 – First in AL Central

720 Runs Scored 668 Runs Allowed

Cleveland Indians

I’m still basking in my very out-of-consensus call last year that not only was Cleveland my favorite over on the board but that they would ride a much better-than-expected season into the playoffs. Therefore, you certainly aren’t going to see me turn on the Indians this year. Oddsmakers have made that default setting rather easy projecting the Indians to win just 82 games this year, off of their 92-win campaign last year. Now, the Indians weren’t 92-wins good last year and not even they would pretend they were just one game short of the Tigers last year despite what the final standings read. (They finished 15-2 including 8-0 vs. the Astros and Twins and were still 6 out with 7 left to play when Detroit shut things down for the playoffs.)

Still, this isn’t the aforementioned Orioles. This year’s starting rotation looks arguably stronger than the core that left Spring Training last year, even with the loss of a very rejuvenated Ubaldo Jimenez. Danny Salazar is going way too late in the fantasy drafts I’ve witnessed and while the loss of Jimenez is notable, the departures of Scott Kazmir and Chris Perez may be additions by subtraction despite their serviceable performances in 2013.

At a market of 82 wins, the Indians are a candidate as an Over for the final Opening Day releases.

2014 Outlook:

84-78 – Second in AL Central

704 Runs Scored 675 Runs Allowed

Kansas City Royals

By far, the most bizarre baseball-related news to surface this winter was that Lorde, she of the nine-straight-weeks-at-number 1, teen dissatisfaction anthem, Royals, titled her song after paging through a 1980s-era magazine featuring George Brett in uniform. My guess would have been a Bo Jackson-inspired video game sighting, but there you have it.

The Royals are the most obvious candidate to be this year’s Pittsburgh Pirates. I missed on the Pirates last year and I hope I miss on the Royals this year. I’d like to see them playing baseball in October. However, my dispassionate model thinks the bullpen performance (2.55 ERA, second to only Atlanta’s 2.46 and easily the best in the AL) is bound to regress, and the staff will sorely miss Ervin Santana. They should give up a lot more than the 601 runs they allowed last year.

On the other hand, the offense could explode to the upside. Norichika Aoki is an inspired trade acquisition for a team that traditionally has on-base issues. Aoki is a massive pick-up in that area having a lifetime OBP of .355, a huge improvement over the .304 rate Royals right fielders posted last year. Additionally, don’t quit on Mike Moustakas and Lorenzo Cain yet; they’re still young with strong minor-league resumes. Royals fans should recall Eric Hosmer’s breakout last year and Alex Gordon’s a few years earlier in realizing there is still upside for their young roster.

I’ll be rooting for the breakout and the continued bullpen success. I just can’t project it or bet on it. The Royals current market is at 82, just like the Indians. I’d rather back Cleveland.

2014 Outlook:

81-81 – Third in AL Central

690 Runs Scored 687 Runs Allowed

Chicago White Sox

Last week I appeared on Chad Millman’s Behind the Bets podcast alongside Paul Bessire, of PredictionMachine.com to discuss season win totals. We had some interesting, albeit minor differences of opinion – he’s a bit more bullish on the Tigers, Dodgers, and Rangers than I am – but I suppose maybe our biggest undiscussed difference concerns the White Sox. It’s not because I’m bearish, it’s that he is wildly bullish seeing more value on the White Sox than say, the Indians and Royals. One of underpinnings of his premise is that the White Sox really “weren’t who they were” last year, to change tense on Bill Parcell’s famous evaluation of one of his Cowboys team, because Chicago tanked in the last couple of months to ensure a favorable status when it came to protecting draft picks from free agent signings, a new development in the recently enacted CBA.

I took a look at my numbers and frankly, I don’t see it. I’ll be shocked if the White Sox get out of fourth place this year. On the other hand, I love to watch Chris Sale pitch and I’m very excited at how low in my league’s draft I got new lead-off hitter Adam Eaton for my fantasy team.

The White Sox have assembled a young enough roster to provide hope for their fans, and apparently, at least one model-based outlook. I can’t see it even squinting however, as I see a team that is going to have a lot of trouble turning batted balls into outs and a starting staff that is alarmingly bad whenever dark-horse Cy Young candidate Sale is in the dugout.

The young offense will certainly be better than the 2013 version which didn’t even score 600 runs last year. But I see real problems in the run suppression outlook and given the clear delineation of talent in the division above them and below, the White Sox look locked into fourth place to me and a win total right around their Vegas-based projection of 75 wins.

2014 Outlook:

74-88 – Fourth in AL Central

678 Runs Scored 748 Runs Allowed

Minnesota Twins

The Twins had by far the worst starting pitching in baseball last year. How bad was it? Well Minnesota’s starting pitchers had an ERA (5.26) more than a half-run worse than the 110-loss Houston Astros. One half-run per nine innings is a huge amount. Consider this: We all know how bad the Houston Astros were last year. Well the Astros were closer in starting pitcher effectiveness to the Phillies (with Lee and Hamels) the Giants (Bumgarner/Cain) Angels, and four other teams than the Twins were to the Astros.

For Twins fans, that, in a word, is horrendous. Sadly, it was also entirely predictable. As I pointed out in last year’s preview, in an era when pitchers are striking out more batters than ever, the Twins stocked their staff with below-average strikeout pitchers. And by below average, I mean below average for the 1970s. (The K-rate of Twins starters in 2013 was 12.4%. The MLB rate was 18.9% and hasn’t been as low as 12.4% for starters since 1976.)

The good news is management has finally recognized that flawed approach to roster construction and has started to make changes. Ricky Nolasco, and Philip Hughes now anchor the staff and while Mike Pelfrey and Vance Worley still represent a pitch-to-contact problem, they are at least in the back of the rotation now. This small step is helpful and represents the start of a new approach to rebuilding the one-time powers of the AL Central.

The results aren’t going to be seen this year and, in fact, I could see a bottoming out around 100 losses as a more likely result than a .500 record. Thanks to the on-air support of Twins broadcaster Kris Atteberry, Trading Bases sold well in the state of Minnesota. Like the Royals, I’ll be rooting for the Twins to over-achieve compared to their consensus win total of 71 games, but I just can’t bet on it.

2014 Outlook:

70-92 – Fifth in AL Central

655 Runs Scored 759 Runs Allowed

**TheGame** · 03-22-2014, 05:59 PM

Re: Joe Peta

Thanks for posting this.
I actually just sent him an email about doing a link exchange

**Thomas** · 03-22-2014, 06:03 PM

Re: Joe Peta

You mean before my post JD ? Great minds ..... Also if you don't want clickable links (and I try not to) in here let me know I'll dump them buddy

**TheGame** · 03-23-2014, 12:20 PM

Re: Joe Peta

Originally posted by Thomas View Post

You mean before my post JD ? Great minds ..... Also if you don't want clickable links (and I try not to) in here let me know I'll dump them buddy

I have no problem with the link.

Do you follow the Jays ?
Got Reyes in one of my 88 fantasy leagues and seen he is having hamstring issues.
Was wondering if it's a real injury or he is sitting as a precaution today

**Thomas** · 03-23-2014, 07:58 PM

Re: Joe Peta

No I don't follow baseball much at all the last couple of years but I may get back into it

NL West Preview

Owing to the requirements of SEC rules which require publicly held corporations to disseminate to their shareholders materially adverse news, companies are notorious for issuing these negative press releases on Friday afternoons, after the stock market has closed. The thought is that the weekend news cycle may push the negative item to a less-publicized standing by the time Monday morning rolls around and the stock market reopens.

Need to issue an earnings warning because your quarterly results are going to fall short of previously-issued guidance? Use Friday to issue a 4:30pm EST press release. Need to announce the sudden resignation of your CEO so that he can ‘spend more time with his family’? No better time than Friday evening. Writing a preview piece for the upcoming baseball season that is relatively negative on the fortunes of your current hometown team – a team on which you are friends with some employees? Write it up Friday night for weekend dissemination in the middle of March Madness!

(Note to self: Send resume to Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Pryce’s PR division.)

Los Angeles Dodgers

More than any other division in baseball last year, the AL West was a tale of two seasons with very different outcomes. A look at the closing standings for 2013 shows the Dodgers atop the NL West by 11 games, the largest margin between first and second place in MLB’s six divisions. It would therefore, be quite logical to assume that the Dodgers breezed to a division title. However, that was hardly the case. On June 22, seventy-two games into the season and just 9 games away from the half-way point, the Dodgers took the field with a 30-42 record, 12 games under .500 and 9 ½ games out of first place. Los Angeles wasn’t just in last place, they had been there for 47 consecutive calendar days and it was a foregone conclusion that Manager Don Mattingly would be fired in short order.

The Dodgers won on June 22, they won on June 23, 24, 25 etc. and although their consecutive days in last place reached 56 days just one month later, on July 22, the Dodgers were in first place – a position they held for the next consecutive 69 days until the end of the season.

The call-up of Yasiel Puig from the minors in June, just prior to the Dodgers surge made it pretty easy for sportswriters to craft a narrative for the cause of the turnaround. At the exact same time, Hanely Ramirez came off the disabled list to play in about 80 of the last 90 games and as much as Puig electrified fans with his .319/.391/.534 batting line, Ramirez was even better at .345/.402/.638 and the press noticed, rightfully providing enough voting support to land Ramirez 8th in NL MVP voting, despite only playing half the season.

As easy of those narratives were to identify, Don Mattingly – at exactly the point his job was in serious jeopardy – corrected a major roster construction flaw he inherited from the front office. (Please note that Wendy Thurm covered the following thoroughly in the Dodgers essay in this year’s Baseball Prospectus.) Brandon League, a low-strikeout, above-average walk reliever, wholly unqualified to be a closer in today’s environment, had been given an insane 3 yr., $22.5mm contract before the 2013 season. Mattingly had his high-priced closer, and it meant the wrong arms were in the game at the wrong time. The Dodgers bullpen struggled early and on June 21, League, sporting a 5.33 ERA entered a game in the 7th inning – the first time all year he entered before the 9th inning. The next night – June 22 (see above) – Mattingly used Kenley Jansen to save a game, and the Dodgers never looked back.

As I mention, Ms. Thurm covered this in much more detail in her piece, but I wanted to restate the highlights here because a bullpen's success or failure can really mask the underlying skills of the rest of the team. It’s why the Mariners were a lot better last year than anyone realized, why you should be at least mildly suspicious of bullish Royals and Braves previews, and it’s why the Dodgers didn’t look like anyone’s candidate to win 42 out of 50 games even though the talent to do it was there all along.

The Dodgers enter 2014 with best bullpen in the division, the best lineup and the best starting pitching so, of course, they’re favored to win the division. There wasn’t much value in making that assessment last year (the Dodgers total wins market was 91) and at 94 wins this year (when they started the season in Australia) there’s even less value this year. I’ve got the Dodgers winning 91 games just like I did last year, but unlike last year, I don’t have them going to the World Series. I don’t think they have the best rotation in the league, nor the best lineup and they definitely don’t have the easiest schedule – but I’ll get to the team that does later this week.

2014 Outlook:

91-71 – First in NL West

690 Runs Scored 604 Runs Allowed

Colorado Rockies

If you could take two players from one lineup in the NL West to build a team around, who would you choose? Buster Posey, turning a peak-age 27 this week and a catcher to boot, is probably the most valuable piece you could start a team with, but who on the Giants are you going to pair him with? The Diamondbacks have Paul Goldschmidt but he plays first base where power is still prevalent throughout the league and while he’s still young, at this point he’s still a poor-man’s Ryan Howard. (That’s right, I said it. Look at Howard’s age 25- and 26-year seasons, to see the comps the 26 year-old Goldschmidt is facing this year.) You might take Adrian Gonzalez and Hanley Ramirez on the Dodgers and if you’re guaranteed to get the 2013 Ramirez that’s a defendable choice, but Ramirez only played 86 games last year and the 2011 and 2012 Ramirez was a merely league-average shortstop.

Why not start with the best shortstop in the league and pair him with a speedy, .300 hitting outfielder with considerable power? That’s what the Rockies have in Troy Tulowitzki, truly the most underrated superstar in baseball and Carlos Gonzalez, a very underappreciated outfielder (outside fantasy circles), both of whom are still under 30.

In addition, to that rock-solid core the Rockies have two proven veterans in Michael Cuddyer (who quietly had a fabulous year last year – a late blooming sabermetric-favorite if there ever was one) and new this year, former MVP Justin Morneau. Morneau still needs to demonstrate he’s recovered from career-halting side effects of a concussion but he’ll be replacing the meager 2013 contributions of the retired Todd Helton. Helton may be revered, justifiably, in Denver, but between his and Jordan Pacheco’s 700 at-bats at first base, the Rockies had the second-least productive first basemen in the majors – the most important hitting position in baseball. (The Brewers were worse.) If Morneau had just a league-average year, the run production increase with be quite notable.

Nolan Arenado learned on-the-job as a 21 year-old third baseman and looks poised to be the Rockies next breakout star – if he can beat 25 year-old catcher Wilin Rosario to that distinction. The Rockies only have one lineup hole, DJ LeMahieu at second base, and as a result should return to their perch as the highest-scoring team in the National League and possibly all of baseball. That would represent a huge uptick as they finished 77 runs behind the Cardinals and 147 behind the Red Sox, respectively, for that distinction last year.

A great offense is nothing unusual for Colorado but the real reason I think they will finish second in the division and threaten for the Wild Card is that the addition of Brett Anderson to the rotation gives the Rockies a fairly adequate starting five. The defense, an enormously important factor in Coors Field, improved last year thanks to the addition of youngsters and I’m projecting another leap in competence in 2014.

There is zero chatter about the Rockies this spring that I can discern and I love that for the value that may lie in their total wins market. Colorado opened at 75 ½ in Las Vegas, and while it hasn’t moved there, it is listed at 76 ½ at most off-shore books I’ve seen. In either of those cases, I enthusiastically support the over.

2014 Outlook:

82-80 – Second in NL West

767 Runs Scored 761 Runs Allowed

San Francisco Giants

If the Dodgers were one side of the ‘tale-of-two-seasons’ coin, there had to be someone residing on the other side, and in this case it was the Giants. The 2012 World Champions got their title defense off to a fine start in 2013, sitting atop the NL West by a couple of games after the first quarter of the season. The Giants started 23-15, looking exactly like the team that had the perfect combination of pitching, defense, and high-contact offense that had captured two World Series flags in the last three seasons. Then, they embarked on a six-game road trip in Toronto and Colorado and it all fell apart. The Giants went 1-5 in those games giving up 52 runs in the process. Sure, any pitching staff can hit a rough patch and there’s no reason to draw conclusions, but in this case it wasn’t the pitching that sent up the red flags. The Giants defense looked horrendous during that trip and it turned out to be a worrisome omen. The defense only got worse as the season went on and what was a top-tier unit from 2010-2012 fell to bottom-quadrant by the end of 2013.

The Giants only won 76 games and while they really had the underlying results of a 79-win team, it’s hard to see where a lot of improvement will come from in 2014, especially as I now project the defensive decline to continue. Further, when only 76 wins result at the same that two of your players have career years, it’s problematic. While I certainly believe there are bigger things ahead for Brandon Belt, I’m just as sure a decade from now, it’s as likely 2013 turned out to be a career year for Hunter Pence as it was for Macklemore. A full season from Angel Pagan will help on the margin, but it’s more ‘wishcasting’ than forecasting to think the newly signed, 32 year-old Michael Morse, lugging a 25% strikeout rate in a park that punishes three-true-outcome players, is going to return to his pre-2013 form, as opposed to the worst outfielder in the majors, on a rate basis, that he was last year. (-1.6 WAR in just 337 plate appearances.)

There is some good news on the other side of the ledger. When it comes to year-over-year changes in the starting pitching, there is plenty of room for improvement. Barry Zito and Ryan Vogelsong tossed 231 innings of 5.60+ ERA baseball – a truly dreadful result considering the run-suppressing environment in which they toil half the time. Zito is gone, but with gratitude, not mocking from a fan base that will never forget his 2012 post-season heroics. The Giants will assuredly get better production from their new rotation member, Zito’s former A’s teammate, Tim Hudson. The Vogelsong problem, however, is unresolved. His skill-based peripherals have declined the last two years and even if management has him on a short leash, it doesn’t appear there are a lot of in-house options in 2014 that would result in playoff-inducing improvement.

Tired of a downbeat forecast, Giants fans? Let me go on record with Madison Bumgarner as my 2014 NL Cy Young Award pick.

With a 7-year old daughter showing interest in baseball cards this spring, Little League fields filled with a rotating cast of kids on Saturdays in the City, and knowing how much more fun a baseball season is when the local team has October aspirations, I’m disappointed to say I don’t see the Giants being in the post-season mix. I can’t see them scoring more runs than last year and while there will be some improvement in the starting pitching, for there to be a lot of improvement, the defense must arrest a troubling trend that surfaced one-quarter of the way through the season.

San Francisco’s total wins market opened at 85 ½ (and is quoted at 86 ½ some places). It’s with disappointment I make them a fairly strong “under” call for the season.

2014 Outlook:

81-81 – Third in NL West

637 Runs Scored 640 Runs Allowed

San Diego Padres

The Padres have been a winning “over” pick two years in a row in these pages. The oddsmakers have caught on this year however, as a market which sat at 73 ½ and 74 respectively, the last two years has been set at 78 ½ this year. As of now, it’s a “pass” in 2014, as the Padres have a roster that still projects having trouble scoring more runs than they give up.

That puts them roughly in the same boat as their three other division mates chasing the Dodgers. The Rockies are the most attractive “over” play due to expectations (as reflected in their wins market) and the Giants are an “under” play for the opposite reason, but the Padres are the team with the most upside. There is so much exciting under-30 talent on this team, that I can see a clear path to 90 wins that isn’t very far-fetched. The problem at the moment is injuries. Cory Luebke has been lost for the season, and Josh Johnson, Cameron Maybin, and Yasmani Grandal are all in danger of missing chunks of playing time in April.

Those injuries, inconsistent play from some-time All Stars, Chase Headley and Carlos Quentin, as well as other young players make it impossible to place a high probability on a post-season outcome. But make no mistake about it, if I had to place a bet on which of the four teams outside of Los Angeles would win the most games the next three years, my bet would be on the Padres.

2014 Outlook:

80-82 – Fourth in NL West

627 Runs Scored 633 Runs Allowed

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks, an 81-81 team for each of the last two years, took steps to improve their lineup in the offseason adding Mark Trumbo and his annual 30 home runs. The problem for Arizona is that any additional runs Trumbo will provide (and frankly, the additional home runs will be offset by a low batting average and a terrible glove) are certainly lost with the news that staff ace Patrick Corbin is likely lost for the year.

2014 Outlook:

77-85 – Fifth in NL West

679 Runs Scored 713 Runs Allowed

**Thomas** · 03-27-2014, 01:28 AM

Re: Joe Peta

AL East Preview

“We don’t really consider how lucky a (performer) is. If (he’s) consistently outperforming, wouldn’t that luck transform to a skill at a certain point?”

-- Unnamed General Manager, Winter 2014

It’s quotes like this that launch 2,000 word articles on FanGraphs followed by eight dozen snarky posts in the comments section. It’s logic like this that leads to Brandon League getting a guaranteed $22.5 million contract after a string of 72 innings pitched in 2012, during which he gave up a home run on just 2.1% of the fly balls he allowed – 8% below league average and 11% below his career average (accumulated over 5 times as many innings, mind you.) It’s Gary Matthews, Jr. getting a $50 million contract a year after hitting .343 on balls in play, with no increase in power. That’s 43 percentage points above his career and the league’s average.

Those contracts were disasters for their employers as the unsustainable luck which drove the player’s pre-contract performance reverted back to normal. Yet, the GM quoted above apparently believes that if someone is lucky over an extended period of time, it’s not luck, it’s a skill. Being lucky is a skill, is what he’s proposing, apparently susceptible to the coin flipper who gets 7 heads in a row, and then asks to be paid a premium before entering the team’s next head-flipping contest.

In this day-and-age of analytics and Big Data, with new-generation sportswriters like Bill Barnwell and Zach Lowe checking your logic, that type of thinking in the management suite gets ridiculed. But you know what – Who cares? I mean who is the GM really hurting? The owner of the team is writing the checks so if capital gets misallocated, financially it only hurts the billionaire owner. Emotionally it might hurt the fans, but it’s just a game – in the grand scheme of things, the flawed logic of our uninformed GM is merely comical.

Except, I haven’t been completely transparent with you. The unnamed GM above does indeed oversee a nine-figure payroll, but he’s not in charge of a major sports team. He’s the Fund Chairman of a $27 billion state pension fund. When he misapplies capital due to logic flaws, it’s not fans or a billionaire owner who get hurt, it’s the hundreds of thousands of retirees to whom he has a fiduciary duty who suffer.

When this GM has sub-standard critical reasoning skills, it isn’t comical, it’s tragic.

Within the last month, I’ve spoken to two different classes of MBA candidates who have formed a sports analytics club at their university. I tell them that their immersion in the world of sports analytics and particularly sabermetrics make them uniquely qualified to excel at whichever future employer they end up working. Amazon or Netflix needs a data analyst to uncover customer trends? Give me someone who’s gone through Pitchf/x data. Nate Silver excelled at analyzing polling data because he’d solved much tougher data problems within the realm of baseball.

Nowhere is the critical overlap more applicable than in the field of asset management. Voros McCracken’s discovery that pitchers could only control certain elements of an at bat’s outcome was a truly revolutionary advancement because, at the time, it was thought impossible to quantify the effect of defense on a pitcher’s results. Today, it’s believed to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to separate fund managers’ results, which come under influence from a variety of factors out of their control, from the underlying set of skills which produced the result.

To my eye, it’s exactly the same problem and if it can be solved in baseball it can be solved in the field of asset management, where a lot more is at stake than figuring out if the Yankees payroll of $200million is efficient. Why? Because the state I’ve referenced above with the $27 billion pension fund is going to spend annually, at a minimum, $540 million (2% management fee, with no consideration of incentive fees) constructing its roster of money managers. And the state we’re talking about falls right about in the middle-of-the-pack in terms of state population. So you can multiply the wages paid by 50x to get a scope of what’s at stake – and states represent just a sliver of all institutional investors.

That’s why, in conjunction with my employer, Novus Partners, I am working to develop a metric that measures skills and not results. Baseball has WAR; I’ve created a single value to identify the value to a potential client (a state pension, university endowment, etc.) of the skills that active managers display while investing. In other words, how much should anyone pay an asset manager for the Worth of their Actively-Generated, Exhibited Skills? Or WAGEs.

Brian Kenny, of the MLB Network, is probably the most sabermetric-minded national analyst across the broadcasting landscape. For more than a year, he’s waged a campaign to Kill the Win, complete with a Twitter-friendly hashtag (#KillTheWin). I want to Kill the Track Record in asset management, or at the very least diminish its importance. Like the ‘win’ statistic in baseball, the 1-, 3-, and 5-year track record is replete with factors affecting its value that fall entirely outside the control of the manager it’s trying to evaluate. I’ll give you an example.

In the largest case study I’ve done, I’ve found a manager who trails the S&P 500 on a 1-, 3-, 5-year, and Inception-to-Date basis. Virtually any investor looking at that track record would reject the manager as someone who could not create value for the investor. If we had a fantasy draft, I could pick up this manager in the last round for no cost, and would do so gleefully. An outsider would think I was insane but the truth is our manager should have gone in the upper rounds. Why? Because his skill set is obscured by factors he has no control of (the pitcher who gets no run support or is saddled with a shaky defense in the field) or by his attempting tasks he’s not skilled at (the plodding slugger who constantly tries to steal bases, or big men shooting 3s in the NBA). I would very confidently outbid my competition for his services, assign that manager a role that he he’s perfectly suited for, and be in an optimal position to outperform my competitors. Exactly the way today’s forward-thinking GMs operate. WAGEs, not a track record, uncovers those skills.

Michael Mauboussin, author of The Success Equation, would call this exercise “detangling skill from luck” and he’s devoted an entire field of study to the need to focus on skills, not results, in a wide range of endeavors. Led by the initial work conducted by baseball researchers, fans across all sports ridicule management that doesn’t embrace this advanced thinking to at least some degree. To me, it’s a shame that sports franchises have widely embraced data-driven critical reasoning that benefits its fans while the financial industry is using the same metrics it’s used for decades. Compared to today’s team previews on Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, or FanGraphs, a Sporting News season preview from your childhood is primitive. Yet, Morningstar is using the same track record-based, 1-to-5 star system to rate money managers that it used in the 1970s.

And it is a shame, because the constituents who would benefit in the financial industry aren’t fans; they’re the endowments of the Mayo Clinic and Sloan Kettering, or one of hundreds of universities educating our next generation of students, or the retirees in a pension fund, or a sovereign wealth fund charged with ensuring the prosperity of its citizens. Voros McCracken cracked the code in baseball and it changed the way pitchers are evaluated and compensated and the way rosters are constructed, but there’s a lot more at stake in the financial industry than a shiny trophy.

If you’re with a hedge fund or a mutual fund, or some other corner of the financial industry, drop me a note (see below) and let’s talk about this some more. We need WAGEs to enlighten our industry’s general managers.

Tampa Bay Rays

Yesterday, in these pages, the Washington Nationals were revealed to be the projected 2014 World Series Champions. So, let’s not bury the lead in the American League. I foresee the Tampa Bay Rays winning the AL pennant.

Ask a casual fan who the most consistently excellent team over the last four years has been and I suspect it might be a while until you heard the right answer. Candidates such as the Red Sox, Yankees, Tigers, Rangers, Giants or Cardinals might surface, and while it’s true those half-dozen teams have accounted for the last four World Series titles and all eight pennants, the Tampa Bay Rays and the Rangers are the only team that have won 90 or more games each year since 2010. In fact, stretch it back six years and the Rays have averaged just under 92 wins a year. That’s a remarkable stretch of elite play, but the success of the last four years has been obscured, just like the A’s a decade earlier, by Tampa’s failure to win a single playoff series.

That doesn’t effect this year’s regular season however, as Tampa once again will put 90+ win talent on the field. In fact, thanks to a somewhat surprising decision to ‘stand pat’ in the face of a looming payroll squeeze, I think it’s the best team the Rays have fielded of the lot. David Price, Tampa’s ace and former Cy Young Award winner is under his 7^th and second to last year of team control. Arbitration eligible for the last couple of years, Price has signed a series of one-year contracts including a $14 million deal for 2014 this winter. $14 million may be significantly below market-value for a pitcher with Price’s skills (Clayton Kershaw just signed for more than $30 million a year, over seven years, although he is three years younger than Price) but $14 million represents about 20% of Tampa Bay’s 2014 payroll. As such, two-years of arbitration-eligible Price was a very logical trade chit for Tampa to use to acquire a haul of cheap prospects in return. (Think James Shields for Wil Myers a year earlier, only better.)

The Rays didn’t trade Price though and as a result, they have the best rotation in the American League outside of Detroit. It’s filled with high-upside mid-twentysomethings and, as always, it’s backed by the league’s best defense. Here’s a cool comparison of the power of defense comparing the Rays pitching staff with the AL’s best in 2013, the Tigers.

Balls in Play Runners DPs Baserunner Kills
Tigers 4,059 1,277 135 56
Rays 4,086 1,192 147 58

The Rays staff allowed 27 more balls hit into the field of play, but allowed 85 less runners, and even though there were fewer runners, they erased 14 more of them once they got on base. Put it into a formula and you see that the Rays defense was worth 52 runs or about 5.5 wins more than the Tigers. 5.5 wins is more than the difference, per FanGraphs WAR, between Max Scherzer (6.4 WAR) in 2013 and Jeremy Hellickson (1.4 WAR). In other words, comparing their staff to the Tigers, Tampa’s defense prowess is more than enough, holding all else equal, to make their worst starter as good as the 2013 AL Cy Young Award Winner. It also explains why I have Tampa, and not Detroit, leading the league in runs allowed in 2014.

In addition, I love the lineup construction of the balanced offense, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to see (attention fantasy players) Wil Myers push Evan Longoria for offensive MVP.

The Rays consistence of regular season excellence is not lost on the oddsmakers who have set a total wins market of 88 ½. I project them to win more, but there are better plays on the menu.

2014 Outlook:

90-72 – First in NL East

713 Runs Scored 627 Runs Allowed

Boston Red Sox

In looking at last year’s team previews I was pretty shocked to read the following conclusion at the end of the Red Sox essay:

“There is a path to the playoffs for the Red Sox (it involves a lot of runs scored and competent performances from all five members of the starting rotation) and I don’t think it’s that far-fetched. But you should be getting paid a much better price to back that position.”

All through the piece I wrote how the Red Sox had 800 runs-scored potential and sure enough that’s exactly what they did, easily leading the majors with 853 runs scored. Further, they more than overcame my starting pitching caveat, posting a 3.84 ERA, 4^th best in the American League. The other secret sauce? The bullpen went from being anchored by Alfredo Aceves (2-10, 5.36 ERA and 8 blown saves) in 2012 to Koji UeHERO (4-1, 1.90 ERA and 3 blown saves) last year. Improving a bullpen is the easiest way to make the dramatic leap in the standings from one year to the next that Boston did last year. (I’m looking at you, Seattle.)

The point is, the Red Sox didn’t come out of nowhere and they aren’t going to disappear this year, although some regression from a squad that won 97 games and needs to replace Jacoby Ellsbury and very productive departed pieces at shortstop and catcher is highly probable.

Oddsmakers had a good read on Boston not just in the preseason but all through the year – no one made money blindly betting on Boston, even early in the year, thanks to inflated lines. I think that’s the case again this year. The Red Sox are equipped to battle the Rays all season for the division and comfortably grab a Wild Card spot if they fall short, but with an over/under market of 87 ½ games, there’s no value in chasing that scenario.

2014 Outlook:

87-75 – Second in NL East

751 Runs Scored 689 Runs Allowed

Toronto Blue Jays

Toronto may not have deserved the hype that accompanied them north, post-Spring Training, after their splashy acquisitions of a reigning Cy Young Award winner in R.J. Dickey and a consistent all-star in Jose Reyes, but neither were they really a 74-win team either. They may have finished in last place for the first time since 2004 (first time in a decade? That surprised me, frankly) but poor health cost the team a lot of production last year, and I think, with much more muted expectations, better things are in store in 2014.

This may be the one year the window is open for this roster because with the exception of Brett Lawrie, all of the needed contributions on offense will come from players who are over 30 now (Reyes, Encarnacion, Bautista) or who will be 30 by season’s end (Melky Cabrera). The lineup is solid enough to produce more than 750 runs as long as they don’t have to give 18 different players at least 100 plate appearances like they did last year.

Almost certainly though, pitching will prevent Toronto from maintaining any sort of meaningful differential between runs scored and runs allowed – a requirement to project an over .500 finish.

There is more upside here than there is perhaps at some with some other teams pegged to finish somewhere around the .500 level, but Toronto’s market of 79 ½ strikes me as pretty fair. Pass.

2014 Outlook:

80-82 – Third in AL East

721 Runs Scored 735 Runs Allowed

Baltimore Orioles

Widely regarded a year ago as the luckiest team to ever win 93 games in a season and the least-qualified of all the 2012 playoff entrants, the Baltimore Orioles regressed 8 games last year to 85 wins and missed the playoffs. So, last year karma paid the Orioles back for their good luck in 2012 right?

Not exactly. Famed stock analyst Gordon Gekko might take a look at the 2013 Orioles, compare the data to the 2012 squad and say, “not bad for a quant but it’s a dog with different fleas.” You see, while the Orioles got lucky in 2012 in terms of how their runs scored and allowed translated into wins, in 2013 they got lucky in terms of the actual runs they scored and allowed.

In other words, in 2012 Baltimore outscored its opponents by 7 runs, a differential that is expected to result in 82 wins. (Per Bill James Pythagorean Theorem.) Last year, there was no such Pythag Luck. The O’s outscored their opponents by 36 runs, which leads to an expected win total of 85 games, exactly what they won. The trouble is, the Orioles underlying stats suggests they were lucky, by a wide margin, to have scored and allowed the run totals that they posted. In 2012 it was Pythag luck; in 2013 it was cluster luck. After I normalize for cluster luck the Orioles runs scored/allowed goes from 745/709 to 727/742 and an expected win total of 79 wins.

Starting from that benchmark, the loss of Manny Machado for at least a month is quite damaging considering he was the second most valuable everyday player for Baltimore last year. His September knee injury was gruesome and while advances in surgical techniques have progressed to such incredible lengths that Machado won’t just be back this year, he may only miss a month. Still, one must wonder if it will take more than a season to get back to 6.0 WAR production. The lineup has some nice pieces, especially if Matt Wieters would finally take ‘the leap’ at age 27, but the starting rotation is even messier than the Blue Jays and that should hamper any effort to get in the playoff chase.

2014 Outlook:

79-83 – Tied-Fourth in AL East

697 Runs Scored 714 Runs Allowed

New York Yankees

Previously, covered in the opening piece of the year.

2014 Outlook:

79-83 – Tied-Fourth in AL East

699 Runs Scored 721 Runs Allowed

**Thomas** · 03-29-2014, 11:35 AM

Re: Joe Peta

NL Central Preview

Given that a lot of readers of these pieces aren’t just baseball fans, but are also fond of sports betting, as the 2014 preview series comes to a close, this is the perfect venue to tell you a story about the intersection of those two topics. As a result of writing my book, I met a lot of people I would have never met otherwise; here is a recounting of one of those experiences. It’s a column that you’ll never read about on mlb.com, but probably should.

When I first became aware of baseball as a kid, a lot Major League teams were essentially owned and operated as family trusts. Names like Wrigley, Yawkey, O’Malley, Carpenter, and Busch were synonymous with the teams they owned but these days ownership groups are comprised of many different shareholders and unlike the collective buffoonery periodically exhibited by the owners 40 years ago (as entertainingly recounted in Lords of the Realm) today’s owners are, first and foremost, savvy businessmen.

Shortly after my book came out, one of those owners contacted me and we began an extended string of communications. We hit it off on a number of topics ranging beyond baseball, and a couple of months later he invited me to spend a few days golfing at a private club on the other side of the country – even going so far as to arrange transportation for me. During my three days there we were joined by nearly a dozen of his friends, including another Major League owner. Sitting on an oversized veranda overlooking water, and sharing gin and tonics late into the night while listening to a couple of MLB owners discuss business and rib each other was priceless, of course, and there were certainly some quotes that were not meant to leave the table. But there was one discussion that hit so perfectly on the intersection of the topics I’ve been writing about for nearly three years, that I think you’ll enjoy a recounting of it here.

“Joe,” one of the owners said to me when the topic of my book came up, “MLB has a problem but it’s masked by some good fortune. However, it’s non-recurring good fortune and it’s going to come back to hurt us some day, sooner than you’d think.”

There was some back and forth, but at this point, I’m just going to relay his side of the conversation as if he were giving a lecture.

“Specifically, we have a demographic problem and it became apparent a few years ago. You see, when the Expos moved to Washington there was a period of time during which they shared RFK Stadium with the D.C. United (of the MLS). It turns out that both the Nationals and the United drew roughly the same amount of fans, something in the mid-20,000s a game. However, the makeup of the fan base was completely different. The median age of a Nationals fan was in the upper 30s but in the low 20s for the United.”

“There’s not a business in the world that would rather have the Nationals customer base than the United’s. And that’s the demographic problem we face as an industry.”

He then went on to cite a statistic, along with the time series trend, of the number of kids playing youth soccer in America compared to Little League baseball. (Depressingly, for those of us whose childhood springs/summers revolved around Little League, the soccer lead is more easily expressed as a factor, rather than a percentage.)

“This looming demographic problem,” he continued, “is masked by the massive amount of television revenue, especially at the regional level, that is giving our industry fantastic top-line growth. The problem is, it’s not a sustainable growth rate; it’s a one-time reset that’s going to plateau. The industry of baseball is a most fortunate beneficiary of the invention of the DVR, because we provide cable networks with 162 days of 4-hour long, DVR-proof programming. There’s not another product that can provide that type of content and we’re being rewarded with huge bumps in our local renewal contracts. The problem is that some within the game think this is a growth rate in revenue that can be modeled going forward. What they can’t see is that it’s a one-time bump that’s going to plateau over time.”

He summed it up in one sentence that would be used as the signature quote in a Harvard Business School case study. “We’re like a country club that doesn’t have enough new candidates to take the place of the original members when they all get old at once.”

With the problem stated, he then advanced his solution – and you won’t believe it. I’m not going to comment at the end of his quote, as I think it’s simply worth considering the thoughts of a man who is so clearly a thoughtful, intelligent business man with a string of successful ventures in his past. Remember, however, that this is an owner of an MLB franchise who sits in meetings with Bud Selig.

“We’re not going to change this demographic problem by trying to get kids to play baseball. That boat’s sailed. Instead of trying to change their behavior, we need to adjust to it. Look at what kids love these days: video games, analytics, poker playing, fantasy sports, etc. Competitive, short-duration activities that revolve around using your mind and provide instant gratification.”

Having laid all this out, he continued as if the following were the most natural conclusion in the world: “If baseball wants to attract young people to the game, it needs to embrace sports betting.”

St. Louis Cardinals

It might not have the spectacular upside that Clayton Kershaw gives the Dodgers or Stephen Strasburg gives the Nationals, but the Cardinals starting rotation is simply the envy of baseball. The entire starting rotation is home grown, having never pitched an inning in the majors for another team. (Although Adam Wainwright did come over as a minor league prospect in a 2003 trade with the Braves for J.D. Drew.) Simply stated, when you’re fifth starter is either Joe Kelly (3.08 ERA in 31 career starts) or Jamie Garcia (3.45 ERA in 90 career starts) you probably have the best rotation in the league top-to-bottom. It projects to be better than last year’s version which was second in the majors in ERA.

The Cardinals will benefit from that strength because the team that scored 783 runs last year – by far the most in the National League – won’t be nearly as prolific this year. Thanks to a .313 batting average with runners on base (and .330 with runners in scoring position) compared with a 236 average with the bases empty, St. Louis benefitted from cluster luck on offense to the tune of an astounding 71 runs. Their run scoring total was even more amazing when you consider they had three replacement-level black holes in Pete Kozma, Daniel Descalso, and former World Series hero David Freese who made 1,300 plate appearances in aggregate during 2013. Super prospect Kolten Wong and free-agent signee Jhonny Peralta will take a lot of those at bats in 2014 and improve on last year’s production. Peter Bourjos will struggle to replace Carlos Beltran’s offensive production, but he’ll make up for a lot of those lost runs with a superior glove in the field.

Anytime a team is projected to score at least 100 runs less than they scored the year before would generally be a nice candidate for an under play. But the Cardinals are going to be a run suppression machine this year and while I think their battle with Cincinnati is going to be tighter than expected, I’m passing on the posted under play at 91 ½ wins.

2014 Outlook:

89-73 – First in NL Central

672 Runs Scored 603 Runs Allowed

Cincinnati Reds

As fun an activity and intellectually stimulating as poker is, the worst part about dwelling among those in the poker sub-culture is . . . say it with me, poker players . . . ‘bad beat’ stories. It’s not that the stories aren’t accurate or aren’t really bad beats, it’s the people that tell them never tell you about the wins that they didn’t deserve. To atone for those sins, I present to you the season results of the 2013 Cincinnati Reds.

As regular readers know, I released 10 total wins over/under picks last year and well before the season ended it was clear there were 6 easy winners, 3 sure losers, and the Padres trending towards a win. Sure enough, as September wound down, the Padres clinched the seventh win with a few games to play. However, the Reds, on a pace to win 94 games or more all of the summer, dropped their last six games of the year and finished with 90 wins, one-half game under their closing market, making me 8-2 on the year. That was absolutely the opposite of a ‘bad beat’; it was an undeserved win.

One of the reasons I got the Reds outlook so wrong last year was a projection that their defense would be leaky, at best. It turns out Cincinnati’s defense was the best in baseball. The primary reason you’ll see me projecting more wins for the Reds than others in 2014, is that there’s no reason their defensive prowess should drop-off significantly in 2014. Their weakest fielder, Shin-Soo Choo departed via free-agency and he’s replaced by the fastest man in baseball, Billy Hamilton. The rest of the unit returns this year and while offensively they will surely miss Choo’s on-base prowess (.423 OBP) any sort of bounce back from Ryan Ludwick and Joey Votto who actually had a relatively down year power-wise, along with the speed dimension which Hamilton brings to the table, should keep the Reds right about where they were last year scoring runs.

In the mid-2000s it was said the Phillies would never have an effective pitching staff because of the home ball park they played in and that turned out to be a false narrative. The same thing was said about the Reds a few years ago and last year they disproved that as well by stocking their rotation with five sub-3.50 ERA starters. They’re all back this year, although Mat Latos will start the year on the disabled list. Aroldis Chapman’s frightening and headline-grabbing face injury is a bit more problematic for a bullpen with three major arms on the DL as the season starts, but overall there is no reason the Reds won’t be just as good as they were all season long last year.

For a while it looked like I might only be releasing four “over” calls this year, but with the Reds market having settled in at 84 games, this becomes the an official “over” play, joining the Mariners, Rockies, and Nationals. (The fifth one, which was never in doubt, is still to come below.)

2014 Outlook:

88-74 – Second in NL Central

674 Runs Scored 616 Runs Allowed

Milwaukee Brewers

Milwaukee only won 74 games last year, but stripping out Pythag and cluster luck they were really an 80-win team, and that was without Ryan Bruan for a third of the season. They’ll be roughly the same team this year with a possibly improved starting rotation thanks to Matt Garza’s arrival, but the offense still has a huge hole at first base with Lyle Overbay and Mark Reynolds trying to improve last year’s awful production. The loss of Norichika Aoki and his on-base skills probably removes the possibility of a playoff run, given the division they’re in.

The total wins market of 80 is fair.

2014 Outlook:

80-82 – Third in NL Central

663 Runs Scored 669 Runs Allowed

Pittsburgh Pirates

On September 9 last year, with 19 games left in the season, the Pirates won their 82^nd game of the year, emphatically bringing to an end their ignominious streak of 20 consecutive years of under .500 results. Pittsburgh, of course, didn’t stop there, winning a total of 94 games, defeating the Reds in the Wild Card game, and pushing the Cardinals to a full five game NLDS before finally succumbing.

The Pirates had been steadily improving for four years, especially in run suppression, culminating in a National League leading 577 runs allowed last year. How much improvement did that represent? Just three seasons earlier, in 2010, the Pirates allowed a major league worst 866 runs. A 289 runs-allowed decrease (33% improvement) in just three years is astounding and a credit to the roster construction of the front office. The Pirates transformed themselves into a strikeout-heavy, groundball-inducing staff (only team in 2013 to have a groundball percentage over 50%, and at 52.5% it easily outdistanced the second-highest St. Louis staff at 48.5%) backed by excellent defense. Last year they also had a bullpen that allowed earned runs at a 2.89 ERA clip.

I freely admit, therefore, that the projection of 78 wins at the bottom of this capsule seems low and wouldn’t seem to pass the smell test. Let’s see how I get there, so the post-mortem will be easy when it looks so wrong in September.

The bullpen ERA is simply unsustainable. Even allowing for a regression to their mean as opposed to a regression to the (league) mean, the Pirates should allow an extra half-run every nine innings. Doesn’t mean they will, but it has to be modeled that way. That’s an extra 30 runs or drop of 3 wins.
Pitt had the third most “clutch” defense last year. The Pirates actually played better defense in small-sample, high-leverage situations with relievers pitching than they did when starters were on the mound. The overall level of defense may be sustainable but the distribution is not. Model 15 more runs at a cost of 1.5 wins.
The loss of AJ Burnett, who tossed 191 innings of 3.30 ERA ball last year, is an enormous hole to fill. Jeff Locke had a 3.52 ERA in 165 innings and he’s starting the season in the minors. Locke, who possesses mid-4.00 ERA stuff as opposed to his mid-3.00 results wasn’t going to repeat that performance but neither will his replacements. That means the Pirates start the year with only one pitcher who threw more than 120 innings for them last year. A full season of future star Gerrit Cole will help but it’s only 11 more starts year-over-year and the Pirates will have a lot of drop-off making up another 50 or so starts. Cost: 45 runs and 4.5 wins.
Projected offense regression of 22 runs or 2 wins.
The Pirates had 6 wins of Pythag luck in 2013.

That’s a 17 win drop-off and it gets you to 77 wins. With a total wins market of 84 ½, this becomes an emphatic “under” play – even if my head doesn’t like it one bit.

2014 Outlook:

77-85 – Fourth in NL Central

633 Runs Scored 669 Runs Allowed

Chicago Cubs

Here are some ingredients needed to be a no-brainer “over” call. We’ll compare them to the Cubs as we go along.

Requirement Cubs Qualification
Repeated failures lead to diminished expectations. Averaged 66 wins last three seasons,
worst in NL. 68 win market is NL’s
lowest in 2014.

Negative cluster luck obscuring actual skill level. 4 wins of negative cluster luck in ’13

Negative Pythag luck on top of cluster luck 5 wins of negative pythag luck in ’13

Poor bullpen performance; easiest path to mean 4.04 ERA in 2013, 3^rd worst in NL.
regression improvement.

A player with 600 ABs and negative WAR, Two players with negative offensive
which rarely repeats. WAR totaling 1,260 ABs!

There’s a lot that can go wrong for the Cubs this year. Their pitching staff isn’t very good outside of Jeff Samardzija, Jose Veras is the closer, and the defense is pretty bad. But I guarantee Starlin Castro and Darwin Barney will provide more than -2 WAR worth of offense because they are either far better than that, or if they aren’t they will be replaced during the year by players who are merely 0 WAR. Plus, I’m very excited about Mike Olt at 3B (a true steal for the half-season sale of Matt Garza to Texas last year) and a possible high-ceiling breakout from Anthony Rizzo at 1B.

Sure, I suppose the pitching could be so bad, there could be one more year of full-season tanking and a selling of any asset at the trading deadline to collect more prospects, but there are also so many ways the Cubs could be bad and still cover the over 68 wins market. Honestly, this might be my favorite “over” call on the board.

2014 Outlook:

76-86 – Fifth in NL Central

630 Runs Scored 674 Runs Allowed

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