Bronx Bomb?

Dave Paisley

With the Yankees playing the American League West the past couple of weeks, it?s been instructive to take a look at them in more depth. Sure, 99% of the world was deceived into thinking they were due to romp to a 150-12 season due to that early schedule against weak teams. They?re a good team, but it?s a bit early to crown them World Series Champs just yet.

With All-Star voting getting under way, it appears that the hype over new Japanese import Hideki Matsui is about to mimic the Ichiro campaigns of the last two years. Trouble is, Ichiro was a genuine phenomenon - albeit over-hyped. Matsui has looked pretty ordinary this year, despite the noted grand slam on opening day in Yankee Stadium.

On the surface, Matsui looks good by traditional means. After all, he has 24 RBI, so he must be good, right? And he currently boasts an eight game hitting streak. Trouble is, during that streak his OPS jumped all the way from .678 to .691. Be still my beating heart. And those RBIs? If I batted right behind the heart of the Yankee lineup, even I might drive in 20 runs or so.

A month or so isn?t really enough to properly evaluate a player, though, especially one adjusting to a new country and league (and of course, to make a liar out of me he has just hit a 2 run homer against the Mariners - only his third, though.) Let?s just say the Yankees deep pockets that paid for Matsui and Contreras (or even Jason ?.687 OPS? Giambi) aren?t what have driven them to the best record in baseball.

But moving on from the Yankees, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how each league is doing. You may remember that occasionally I?ll take a look at teams Pythagorean formulas to see who?s overachieving and who isn?t. The Pythagorean formula relies on runs scored and allowed per game, which of course are well documented. Before now, I could take it one step back for offense by examining team OPS, which is a better indicator of raw offense. Now OPS allowed by pitching staffs is readily available too, so we can do the same thing for runs allowed.

If all that seems complicated, let me illustrate with an example. Here?s the AL teams plotted up with runs scored per game vs. OPS. The red line is the best linear fit to the points.

It?s evident that the correlation is excellent. It?s also evident that some teams get more out of their OPS than others. That?s to be expected because if you randomly redistribute the same numbers of hits and walks, you?ll get different results. If that home run comes with two guys on you score more runs than if it was a solo shot, but that?s just the luck of the draw.

That poor lone blue dot at the bottom left is, of course, the hapless Tigers, while just a bit further up the line are the Cleveland Indians. With their .681 team OPS, the Indians should be scoring around half a run per game more than they are. Sadly, they?re not, so the team is doing worse overall than you might expect. The good news is that should turn around. Clustered at the top are the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays, who are all getting roughly six runs per game from between .820 and .870 team OPS numbers.

On the pitching side, here?s what things look like (note that being at the bottom here is good?):

And there we have the solid evidence that giving up hits, walks and extra base hits correlates very well with runs given up. There are few teams very far from the trend line - only Seattle (below) and Minnesota (above) are very far away. Note that giving up and OPS of .850 is really bad for your ERA (a lesson Texas has yet to learn, apparently.)

There is of course, one step even further back than OPS, and that?s how the team generates those numbers. What I?ve shown only shows what has happened so far. Some teams are performing at a level beyond what you could have reasonably have expected (er, kansas City), so as they come back to earth their OPS for or against will adjust accordingly. As OPS adjusts, so will run scoring or conceding, roughly according to the trend lines. If all that sounds complicated, well, it is, but hopefully all will become clearer as we follow this through the season. I guess what I'm trying to say is the glory days for the Royals are now behind them, and even the Yankees won't be able to keep up thier torrid pace.

For those of you that prefer your data in tabular format, here's the raw material:

Team          OPS   OPS Against  RS/G   RA/G

NY Yankees   .868     .681       6.09   3.81

Oakland      .745     .644       4.81   3.47

Seattle      .780     .693       5.34   3.69

Kansas City  .780     .719       5.00   4.07

Boston       .818     .772       6.00   5.45

Minnesota    .736     .710       4.35   4.58

Anaheim      .759     .765       4.84   4.71

Baltimore    .711     .725       4.75   4.66

Chicago Sox  .736     .751       4.09   4.47

Toronto      .829     .849       5.85   6.09

Texas        .821     .850       5.31   6.34

Cleveland    .681     .769       3.42   4.84

Tampa Bay    .714     .834       4.53   6.00

Detroit      .565     .765       2.81   5.10

Next week I?ll take a look at the National League. If it's still there, of course.

about the author

What's OPS you ask? Dave Paisley will be happy to tell you if you ask him nicely at drdjp@strikethree.com. He'll also help with IOU, HTH and BFD.