A Tale of the Wild, Wild West

Dave Paisley

Scanning through the year's stats, I'm always on the lookout for strange anomalies in the baseball-time-space continuum, and I found one right under my nose in the AL West. Two of the teams in the division, Anaheim and Seattle, finished with identical run differentials, but with very different W-L records, so I thought I'd investigate.

The first oddity is that their run differential is only 4 runs, so both teams should have finished around the .500 mark. That's not what happened, though. The Angels made the most of what they had, turning an even amount of runs to an eight-games-over -500 record, while Seattle managed to fritter away their runs and come up nine games short of break-even. The following table summarizes the basic data.
 

	Anaheim	Seattle
Runs For-Against	787-783	859-855
W-L	85-77	76-85

To be sure, blind luck plays a part in this, as the standard deviation from the Pythagorean win calculation is about 4 games (just about the deviation these teams show). However, there are certainly some features that stand out that go beyond random chance. Before we investigate what those factors might be, let's look at how their wins were distributed. The following graph shows how many games each team won or lost by how many runs. You can see at a glance that the Angels win 24 one-run games, while the Mariners only won 10 (and 6 of those came in a flurry at the end of the season.)

The key difference here is the low number of close Mariner wins and their relatively large number of close losses. For the Angels, the key feature is the large number of 1- and 2-run wins. More than half of the team's wins came this way. Treating games decided by 3 runs or less as "close" games, the Angels did very well at 53-42, while the Mariners were just about the opposite at 39-52. Those numbers tell the story quite well for both teams.

So much for the numbers - from here I'm just into pure speculation about why these two teams were radically different. I believe there are two reasons why the results are so different. The first, and by far the larger effect, is the bullpen quality. Anaheim's wasn't anything to rave about this year, but Hasegawa, Percival, DeLucia and Harris provided almost 300 innings of 4.00 ERA relief. Contrast this with the misadventures of Ayala, Slocumb, Timlin and Spoljaric in the Seattle pen (300 innings, 5.50 ERA) and you can see the difference. The inability of the Mariner pen to hold a lead certainly caused a lot of those one-run losses.

The other effect, at least for the Mariners, was an inability to score just one or two more runs at the end of a game. With the bullpen waiting to blow any and every lead, the offense desperately attempted to score more runs than were necessary, ending up usually scoring none.

What does this mean for next year? The Seattle pen will be totally retooled, but perhaps it isn't all the fault of the players. Lou Piniella has chewed his way through numerous bullpen combinations and they've all been bad. Meanwhile, teams like Anaheim have been getting decent performances out of retreads like former Mariner Rich DeLucia. They'll probably continue to do so. They will, however, be doing it without the injured Pep Harris.

As for timely offense, I'm willing to put that down to a fluke year for the Mariners. I certainly don't want to see Rodriguez and Griffey bunting next year.

Dave Paisley would stick around for a drink, but he has to go read up on the history of the ERA. Ask what he's doing studying feminism when he should be drawin' up graphs at drdjp@strikethree.com.

 

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