First One To 85 Wins It
Mediocrity is the new black, at least on the west coast. After last year’s debacle of a division called the NL West, where the Dodgers won the division by finishing 84-78, the parity-by-lousiness looks to be shifting to the American League West this year. The Replacement Level Yankees blog just finished up their simulation extravaganza for the American League, and the aggregate of the CHONE/PECOTA/ZIPS/THT/CAIRO/MARCEL simulations (6,000 in all) has the Angels leading the division with an average of 85.4 wins. The A’s come in at 81.1, the Mariners at 77.8, and the Rangers at 72.1.
That’s not good, and it gets worse – these projections are likely too optimsitic for the top three teams.
The Angels are going to open the season with John Lackey, Ervin Santana, and Kelvim Escobar on the disabled list. There are legitimate questions about how well and how often those three will be taking the hill, and an Angels rotation without those three isn’t much of a rotation at all.
Justin Duchscherer is undergoing arthroscopic surgery next week – how long he’ll be sidelined is up in the air, and it wouldn’t be surprising to anyone if his innings pitched for the season was something approximating zero. With Duchscherer out indefinitely, the A’s are essentially counting on five starting pitchers who have never pitched a full season in the big leagues.
The Mariners ability to take advantage of the injury bug hitting the two division favorites took a hit yesterday when Brandon Morrow announced that he wanted to head back to the bullpen and the team shipped Jeff Clement back to Triple-A to start the season.
The only team that hasn’t experienced a recent bout of bad news is the Texas Rangers, but they’re also the only team who the projection systems didn’t think had a real shot at winning the division this year – their simulated playoff odds were 3%.
This division is bad. Four flawed teams fighting for one playoff spot that none of them will deserve. Bad rotations, bad line-ups, bad defense… there’s no shortage of problems floating around the American League West this year. The only thing the division currently has an abundance of is injured pitchers.
25
You’re right that the talent is poor, but keep in mind that teams will rarely actually win exactly as many games as their talent level projects. Confidence intervals are about 15 games wide on either side, based on the binomial distribution. That means that an 81 win team will have more than 96 or less than 66 wins a total of 5% of the time. As a result, the Wests are probably likely to be won by teams with about 90 wins, even if there were only two teams in each and each were projected to go 81-81. I know that’s not what you meant, but the title is a bit misleading, since it’s unlikely either division winner would win less than or equal 85 games.
First, I though that the confidence intervals were around 10 games for most projections systems, but that doesn’t really matter.
The opposite is also true though, there is a chance that the division winner could have LESS than 80 wins, simply because of how strong the rest of the AL is.
I didn’t check the confidence intervals for the projection systems recently (though a got a standard deviation of around 7 a couple years ago for PECOTA, IIRC). I meant even if the projection systems were 100% perfect at projecting the talent level, the binomial theorem projects a standard deviation of sqrt((w%)*(1-w%)*162) which is about 6.4 for a .500 team, so I guess the confidence intervals are about 13 games, not 15.
You make a good point about covariance, though. I’m not sure if that widens or tightens the intervals. It could widen them because AL West teams play each other a lot and their performances negatively covary, or they could be tighter because (as you mention) the odds of each game turning up a win vary by opponent difficulty.
Remember the year not too far back when the Padres won the NL West with a record of 82-80?
FWIW, in the 6000 iterations I ran, the AL West winner finished with fewer than 81 wins 231 times. So it’s possible, but there’s around a 96% chance it won’t happen.
I think Morrow as the closer helps the Mariners. Sure, 175 IP of him is better than 75 IP, but for this year, he gives them a shot to convert better than 60% of their saves with the no-name bullpen they have. Of course, it is also dependent on the no-name offense getting an 8th inning lead.
Why are people so obsessed with “names” in the bullpen.
The Yankees get criticized for their bullpen (which, in 2008, was one of the best they’ve had in years) just b/c nobody knows the guys after Rivera.
Most great relievers were no names (failed starters, injury rehabs, journeymen) who finally clicked.
I agree. It would be an interesting exercise (actually, it’s probably been done a few times) to see how many players are actually successful “name” relievers for a period of more than about 2-3 seasons or so…other than the superstars, like Rivera, Fingers, Gossage, K-Rod, Hoffman, etc. (Papelbon will probably be on this list eventually, but who knows?), I bet it’s not very many at all.
The M’s can do mediocrity! Can we do it better than the other three teams? Only time will tell.
The AL Central is barely projected to be higher. Why is that less noteworthy than the mediocre AL West? Not going to argue that the AL West isn’t bad, but the AL Central looks to be similarly mediocre. In any case, both divisions are standing under the shadow of the AL East.
I can’t say much about the AL Central but as for the AL West, due to the issues 3 of the 4 teams are facing, is looking to get worse. Those projections could very well be the teams’ upside.
Anything could happen in baseball of course but whomever wins this division might get run-over in the playoffs.
Yeah, just by reading the headline I was sure this post would be about the AL Central.
Escobar was out all of last year. He is projected to pitch between 80-140 innings, so even though he is out for April, he can easily hit the projected innings, so the you cannot adjust the Angels win totals down because he is injured.
Duchscherer is projected to be just 90-113 by ZiPS, CHONE and Marcel. So that alone is not killing the A’s either. He was a 3 win player with 140 IP last year, so the projections have him around a 2 win this year. That should be relatively easy to replace.
The first one to 85 wins probably wins all the West and Central divisions. Heck, I’d bet the first team to 85 wins wins a vast majority of the division titles sense the 6 division system.
Also, I think its pretty easy to be pessimistic at this point in the season. All we basically know right now is the depth charts and injuries. We don’t know who’s going to come back from injuries or surgeries strong, who will surprise, or who’s going to make a big trade. I’m betting either the A’s or the Angels emerge as a pretty decent team by the end of the season. Either the Angels get healthy or the A’s get some solid contributions from the youngsters, or maybe both. I don’t think “neither” is the safe bet here.
I disagree completely with your rankings. Last season the Angels opened up 2008 with Lackey, Jered Weaver, and Kelvim Escobar on the DL. Lackey didnt come back until mid May, and Escobar didnt pitch one inning. This is the same Angels team as last year who had the best record in baseball prior to getting Mark Teixeira. Granted K-Rod is gone, but they have upgraded the outfield swapping Garret Anderson with Bobby Abreu. Lackey will be back the 1st week of May this year (2-3 weeks sooner than last season) and Escobar will be back in the rotation 3 weeks into April. To say the Angels won’t dominate the AL West this season is absurd. Once June 1st hits the Angels will have Lackey, Santana, Escobar, Saunders, and Weaver in their rotation. Angels will easily win the West and probably 85-90 games this season.
You do realize that the Angels vastly outperformed there true talent level last year, right? And they lost Garland, Texiera, Anderson, K-Rod and Kotchman and got Abreu, Fuentes and Kendry Morales. They got worse, they weren’t that great to begin with, deal with it.
Vastly outperformed their true talent last season? Who overperformed for them? Lets start with Vladimir Guerrero who had the worst start of his career and finished with a mediocre Vladi season. Torii Hunter had an average .278 which is around his career average, but only had 21 homeruns which is down 6 or 7 from his career. So we’ll just say Hunter had an average season. Figgins finished the season with a .276 batting average and 1 homerun, both vastly lower than his career average. So we’ll also say Figgins was below average last season. Kendrick had an average season only playing 92 games, Aybar batted .277 with 3 homeruns (thats outperforming his true talent?). I dont know who you’re talking about other than maybe K-Rod whos no longer on the team, but if you ask any Angels fans, they will tell you that the Angels underperformed their “true talent” last season.
How do you comment on a site like Fangraphs and quote shit stats like those. By “true talent level” I mean how many games they should have been expected to win based on the performance of all of their players. Going by WAR, they should have won roughly 85 games last year. When you add in their weak schedule they would maybe push 88.
The reason they were so good last year was that they were incredibly clutch, especially on the pitching side. It has been shown that clutch isn’t a repeatable skill (if it is a skill), so that will regress and they will most likely play to there true talent level next year.
Hahaha…your last comment was a joke right? Please tell me it was.
Ugh.
The Angels seem to be to MLB what a crappy Democratic politician is to Massachusetts (OORAH POLITICAL REFERENCE OUT OF NOWHERE).
They make head-scratching moves, yet the media just doesn’t seem to care. The Yankees / Red Sox / Mets seem to get every bad move paraded, but the Halos have $33 mil due to a #6 outfielder over the next 3 seasons and no one bats an eyelash.
I don’t know, random rant, Angels = most overrated team of the decade.
Ooo one bad contract. The angels are terrible. Best winning percentage in baseball over the past 4 seasons. But they made ONE bad signing. Awful, pass, next. Just like the Yankees. The minute they signed Pavano they went from good to terrible. So overrated. They signed that guy to a terrible contract. The Mets are paying delgado 18 million dollars this year. You know what, the Mers are overrated.
What head scratching moves? The only two moves I can think of are Hunter and Matthews. Everybody thought the Angels were crazy when they signed GMJ to that much money and everybody went apeshit when Hunter was given that monster contract. Division titles in 04,05,07,08 and a WC in 02. So terrible, much worse than the Mets in that time period, who won every game and swept their way to the WS (even though they were soo overrated for signing someone to a bad contract)
They did end up having Jon Garland pitch for them last year, and for some strange reason they did that on purpose, giving up a a shortstop who has been worth between 3 and 4 wins for the most part of his career to get him. Pitchers like Garland aren’t difficult to find.
They signed Torii Hunter to a 5 year deal, and he got paid $16 million last year. He has topped 3 win value three times in his career.
Fuentes isn’t making a lot of money, but last year was the best year of his career. It seems unlikely that he’ll sustain such a high level of performance.
They signed a very done Shea Hillenbrand.
Matthews Jr. has already been mentioned.
Traded Kevin Gregg for Chris Resop.
They signed Jeff Weaver.
Giving Juan Rivera 3 years, $12 million is certainly questionable. He probably could’ve been had on a one-year deal.
I’m not saying the Angels are the only team that makes more than just a few bad moves, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking they have only made one or two truly bad moves.
You forgot planning on giving Bobby Abreu an appreciable run in the OF. Signing him to be anything other than a full-time DH is a disaster waiting to happen.
Garland was worth 3-4 for three straight seasons before coming to LA. It was a good move, as they had Erick Aybar, who is a decent player.
I think 72 wins for TEX is very pessimistic. they won 79 games last year and look to be better in 2009 on both sides of the ball. i bet they finish above 500 this year–heck, they may even win this division, weak as it is.
A little off topic, but you look at those projections and wonder how long before the AL East troika breaks the current playoff system. What if all three teams win 92+ games each of the next five years, while the AL West or Central gets decided ~85?