Hello and welcome to SBN’s newest regular series. If you’re a fan of editorial content with sharp wit and thought-provoking opinions, this one won’t be for you. However, if you’re a fan of baseball, or numbers, or baseball and numbers, then I’ve got good news: this should be right up your alley. What follows is a dearth of baseball opinions and a wealth of baseball facts. I will, of course, use my own baseball opinions to shape which baseball facts are presented and which are withheld, but, come on, I’m not a robot. I’m a person. People have feelings.
Five Numbers: Examining Important Trends And Piquing Your Baseball Interest, With Math!
Here, each week, you'll find five numbers. It's really that simple. Five up-to-date numbers that I consider to be interesting and important, each followed by a little bit of discussion. Are they the five most important numbers in baseball? No, they're not. The five most important numbers in baseball are the number of Yankee wins, the number of Yankee losses, the number of Red Sox wins, the number of Red Sox losses, and David Ortiz's dinger count. But even still, these are five numbers you'll want to pay attention to, because you can learn a lot about baseball through math, provided you just open up.
See the numbers. Listen to the numbers. Don’t be afraid. The numbers are there to teach.
1) 28
Rich Harden was a hotly pursued commodity over the offseason. As iffy and unreliable as he's been throughout his career, he's always flashed elite-level talent, talent that allowed him to rack up 352 strikeouts over 289 innings between 2008-2009. Both the Mariners and Rangers, desiring a shutdown arm for the front of their respective rotations, showed considerable interest in Harden, and the 28 year old with known health concerns wound up signing with Texas for $7.5m.
However, while the Rangers were able to land their man, things haven’t exactly gone as planned through his first five starts. The righty with that out-of-this-world changeup was supposed to give Texas its first truly intimidating starting pitcher in years, but instead, Harden’s five April starts totaled just 23.2 innings, with 23 walks and five hit batsmen. 28 hitters issued free passes to first base, for an average of 1.2 per inning.
The truth is, I could’ve presented any of a number of different Harden statistics, and they all would’ve gotten the same message across. Harden has issued a free pass to more than a batter an inning. His fastball velocity is down more than two miles per hour. His whiff rate - the percent of swings batters take that miss - has dropped from last year’s 33% to this year’s 16%. There is nothing - nothing - about which to be optimistic.
This could all be one giant statistical anomaly, but the overwhelming probability is that Rich Harden is broken. He just doesn't look anything like the guy he used to be, and while the Rangers are 3-2 in his starts, that's not because they've received a lot of help on the hill. Something needs to be done, and with Derek Holland blowing through AAA opponents right now, something can be done, provided the team finds a way to get Harden on the DL. He needs a break, and he needs to get checked out. Something is wrong, and it's probably not going to right itself overnight.
2) 14%
By and large, the people around the Red Sox are in fairly good spirits, as the team has won seven of its past nine games and pulled itself up to .500 on Wednesday after a miserable start to the season. “It’s only April,” they say. “The team is playing good baseball now, and there’s plenty of time to play catch up.”
Those people are right. It is only April, and there is plenty of time left in the year. The 11-11 Red Sox still have another 140 games on their schedule. Needless to say, a rough couple weeks early on didn’t exactly knock Boston out of the hunt.
But it’s important to recognize that all the games matter, regardless of when they happen, and as of this writing, the Sox are three games back of New York and 5.5 back of Tampa Bay. The result? According to both CoolStandings.com and Baseball Prospectus, Boston’s odds of making the playoffs are hovering around 14%, well down from where they were at the start of the month.
When you expect to be locked in a tight race, you never want to lose any ground. The Sox, Yankees, and Rays all feature comparable amounts of talent and depth. Most preseason projections had them as being very similar teams overall. Between them, making the playoffs basically looked to be a three-way coin flip. Games have been played, though, and the teams have separated themselves, and even if you don't think much has changed since the beginning of April, the Sox are trying to work their way out of a disadvantageous position. No matter how early it may be, their bad start hurt them.
The Red Sox, I imagine, won’t go down without a fight. They’re one of the best clubs in baseball, and they’re going to play like it from now on. They’ll just have to play that much better than the Yankees and Rays if they want to get into the playoffs, and that’s no easy task.
3) +17
Every April, you'll see some flukes. On the player scale, and on the team scale. On this date last season, for example, the Blue Jays were 15-8, the Rockies were 8-12, and the Rays were 8-14. It wouldn't have taken a superior level of expertise for one to predict that those courses would reverse themselves over the remainder of the year.
So it would be easy to look at the San Diego Padres' current record of 13-8 and write it off as insignificant. Just a minor statistical quirk that, come July, will be all but forgotten.
Now, I’m not here to say the Padres are for real. They have a lot left to prove. But I am here to say, hey, if nothing else, they’ve earned the record they’ve put up. And they’ve earned it by scoring 94 runs and allowing 77, for a run differential of +17 that ranks in MLB’s top ten.
Last season, the Padres struggled to score, and they struggled to prevent. So far - against an unimpressive but by no means easy slate of opponents - they've managed to produce at a decent clip while posting the fourth-best ERA in the National League. The big keys? A shutdown bullpen and a talented defense. The Padres' bullpen has struck out better than ten batters per nine innings, and guys like Will Venable, Tony Gwynn, Chase Headley, and Scott Hairston have been catching a lot of the balls put in play. Run prevention isn't the sexiest way to succeed, especially when your rotation is fronted by Kevin Correia, but the Padres have made it work.
San Diego doesn’t get a whole lot of recognition, and that’s understandable. It’s an organization going through some significant changes, and the product is lacking in name value. The team they’re putting on the field, though - that’s not a championship team, but it’s a better team than a lot of people realize. They’re not going to go away quietly.
4) 4
Gaps between first and second place in the divisions, as of this writing:
AL East: 2.5
AL Central: 2.5
AL West: 0.5
NL East: 0.5
NL Central: 4
NL West: 1
St. Louis is just on a different level. My big bit of enlightening exaggeration before the year started was that the Cardinals were so much better than their division that they could bench Albert Pujols all year and still win pretty easily, and while that declaration wasn't backed by any complicated statistical analysis, it's sounding pretty good right now. 4.5 games up on April 29th? That's three times as big as the AL West's entire spread.
And while the Cardinals probably aren't going to win the Central by 30 games, as is their current pace, it's just hard to see where the threat's going to come from. They were already better than everybody else a month ago. Now? Now that they've built up a significant buffer? Who's going to get hot? The Reds can't keep anyone off the scoreboard. The Cubs are just average at everything. The Brewers haven't done a whole lot other than whoop up on the Pirates.
It’s a mediocre division with one standout leader, and at this point, the Cardinals would have to do an awful lot wrong for their playoff plans to go awry. Not even a major injury would do much more than serve as an annoyance.
5) 80.1%
The red-hot New York Mets have won seven games in a row, launching them into first place in the NL East with a 13-9 record. The reason they're there? Run prevention. Though the Mets' offense hasn't lit up many scoreboards, they've been able to keep the opponent off the board as well, and during this seven-game stretch, they've allowed just 13 runs in 59 innings.
It’s pretty easy to rack up a good record when you’re only giving up 3.3 runs a game. But here’s the bad news for Mets fans: that’s not going to sustain.
According to the LOB% statistic kept at Fangraphs, the Mets’ pitching staff so far has stranded 80.1% of its baserunners on the basepaths. The league average is closer to 70%, and, historically, no pitcher and no team has ever demonstrated a clear ability to keep runners from coming around once they’ve already reached.
And reaching, they do. Mets pitchers have generated a lot of strikeouts, but they also lead the Majors in walks, with 110 in 203 innings. Their .338 OBP against is worse than the league average. What’s kept them afloat is the following split:
Bases empty: .251 BA, .718 OPS
Runners in scoring position: .173 BA, .601 OPS
New York’s pitching staff has clamped down in run-scoring situations, and while that’s nice to see and really helpful when it happens, it also isn’t really a skill so much as it is a statistical happening. Those hits are going to start distributing themselves a little more evenly, and as they do, the Mets are going to start coughing up more runs.
By no means am I suggesting that the Mets are in for another free-fall. What I’m suggesting is that there’s regression on the way. They’ve pitched well in the clutch, but given their low hit rates with men on base and their extraordinarily low home run rate overall, there is good reason for Mets fans to be nervous. That’s a delicate division lead they’ve got.
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