Reaching for the buoy has grown old

by Johnny Safron on Jun 20, 2009 5:55 PM EDT

Aside from fans in KC, Oakland and Pittsburgh, there's one phrase that is more bitter than sweet, and it's been uttered too often by Dick Bremer after a Twins' win this season: "And the Twins are back at .500."

Thanks to the parity that almost no one predicted at any time since free agency, baseball teams are more even than ever. That means the Twins would be fighting for first place with this record if they got their mail in any division in baseball - other than the National League West.

There have been only two teams to win 100 games since 2005 in the NL and AL combined, and last season 19 teams won at least 75 games and three others missed that mark by one. Basically, all that spending by the Mets and the Yankees hasn't mattered much. It's like the Minnesota State High School League - everyone has a chance.

Thanks to baseball achieving what Pete Rozelle envisioned for the NFL decades ago,parity the Twinks have been able to overcome an outfield that has been potholed bi-monthly (Cuddyer's finger, Span's inner ear problem, the death of Delmon Young's mother, plus his inability to understand he's supposed to be a big-league hitter).

Despite that and

Alex Casilla's two dozen mental errors in about three dozen games,
an infield that now has a spring-training spare part at starting shortstop,
an infield that has the starting shortstop at second base,
Joe Crede's nicks and twitches,
a bullpen that struggled so badly the Twins were forced to dumb it down by sending baseball's smartest player to Oakland,
a delivery from Francisco Liriano that finishes in the technically challenging pirouette,
Scott Baker's BertBlylevenitis,
and playing without its all-World catcher for a month,

the Twinkers are still in it.

Now it's time for this horse to quit drafting the leaders of this derby, sprint to the outside, take the lead and get Bremer to shut up about the Twins reaching sea level once again.

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Comments

At this point in the season

We’re alright. The most important thing is to stay in contention, and then make a run.

by ianmader on Jun 21, 2009 2:31 AM EDT reply actions

This garbage..

was disguised by proper grammar and use of bullet points.

Pass on this article.

by y2jayjk on Jun 21, 2009 4:32 AM EDT reply actions

Dude, if you disagree with points he made feel free to disagree with the author and tell him why,

but writing such a sweeping and hostile dismissal is just bad form.

This is a community based blog and comments like yours just “chill” conversation. I suspect we can all agree that without a “conversational” atmosphere here this would just be another blog where you are free to read what the authors have to say. Here we can have our own input and have an intelligent conversation about the Twins, baseball, or sports. Comments like yours do not help create dialogue.

by montanatwinsfan on Jun 21, 2009 10:22 AM EDT up reply actions 1 recs

I have to agree.

by Jesse on Jun 21, 2009 1:58 PM EDT up reply actions

Don't worry about it

Disguising “garbage” with bullet points and grammar is a greater skill than failing to disguise it with monosyllabic whining, so I’m still way ahead of y2.

Bloggin' the bloggers since 1938.

by Johnny Safron on Jun 21, 2009 2:02 PM EDT up reply actions

+1

I liked the article and think that it is very on point with the teams current situation. we finaly get over .500 and what do we do? we lose 2 in a row to the lowely astro’s to put us right back at 1 under. Arggh!

Will the Real Thor Please Stand Up ... ?

by the Real Thor on Jun 22, 2009 8:53 AM EDT up reply actions

The Twins have played this card a lot over the last few years...

…managing to hang around without actually being a good team to that point. If the bullpen and starters can keep doing the job they’ve been doing over the last couple weeks, and if the bottom of the order can just contribute SOmETHING a couple of times a week, we’ll stay in the race. But hanging around .500 all year like this will eliminate us eventually, which means the sooner this all happens the happier I’ll be.

by Jesse on Jun 21, 2009 2:02 PM EDT reply actions

Past performance...

…in no guarantee of future returns.

So, here we are again. A team can’t play this “back to .500” refrain all season, unless baseball has achieved even more parity than I have illustrated here.

Bloggin' the bloggers since 1938.

by Johnny Safron on Jun 21, 2009 5:15 PM EDT up reply actions

The real problem with .500 ball being good enough in the AL Central as I see it,

is that even if we pull it out in the end by beating other weak AL Cenral teams, we have set ourselves up for a sound thrashing in the first round by whichever teams come out of the AL West and East.

That would allow Gardenhire and Smith and co. to hang their hats on a playoff spot and hide the futility.

Man what happened, just a few short years ago the AL Central was arguably the strongest top to bottom in the majors…

by montanatwinsfan on Jun 21, 2009 7:33 PM EDT reply actions

Believe it or not, our division is better than the west.

And better than every division in the Natonal league. The East is substantially better though.

by lookatthosetwins on Jun 22, 2009 11:53 PM EDT up reply actions

Some numbers to back up my statement

From Beyond the Boxscore’s Power Rankings.
These are the average expected wins of teams in each division if there were no divisions and everyone played a balanced schedule.

0.5962 AL East
0.5472 AL Central
0.48975 AL West
0.4748 NL West
0.4582 NL East
0.4615 NL Central

Some things to keep in mind…

The National League is still substantially worse than the American League. This should be pretty obvious when looking at interleague records.

Oakland and Seattle are terrible. We don’t have a terrible team in our division.

Let’s start giving the AL Central its due. Being .500 in our division is actually pretty decent.

by lookatthosetwins on Jun 23, 2009 12:27 AM EDT up reply actions

Oakland and Seattle are terrible

which is why the Twins had to play better against them. Just like with the Astros, the Twins have to beat these teams or they’ll be like the White Sox, wondering what happened b/c they are better on paper.

You gotta win it on the field.

by caluofmn on Jun 23, 2009 4:37 PM EDT up reply actions

That's how it should play out in the post season but...

In 2002 the Twins were able to still beat Oakland even though most didn’t give the Twins a chance.
With the short series in the first round, you never know who will win.

The AL Central was thought to be very weak for some of those division winning years but you still have to win the games to get to the post season. Right now I wish all we had to worry about was how the Twins will do in the ALDS. The way they have been playing so far, I’m still not convinced they have a run in them to take the division. I hope so, but I don’t think they’ve shown that kind of play yet.

by caluofmn on Jun 23, 2009 4:34 PM EDT up reply actions

To paraphrase Billy Beane

The playoffs are a crapshoot.

They aren’t entirely, of course, but there’s certainly a lot of room for supposedly inferior teams to get hot at the right time and make a run. I think 2006 was possibly the best example – the Cardinals, who had one of the worst records of any playoff team in MLB history, won the World Series over the Tigers, who won something like one game in the last week of the regular season and blew what looked like a certain division title.

"There are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

by BeefMaster on Jun 23, 2009 5:03 PM EDT up reply actions

100 win seasons

There have been only two teams to win 100 games since 2005 in the NL and AL combined, and last season 19 teams won at least 75 games and three others missed that mark by one. Basically, all that spending by the Mets and the Yankees hasn’t mattered much. It’s like the Minnesota State High School League – everyone has a chance.

This comment seemed to me to be a little on the hyperbolic side, so I started doing a little digging. I’d like to look at standard deviations and report back, but here are my preliminary findings:

I looked at the 43 full seasons since 1961, when baseball switched to a 162 game season (excluding strike shortened 1995, 1994 and 1981 AND excluding the 1965 season which had a 3-game regular season playoff).

Out of the 1,130 team-seasons played in those 43 years, only 51 have been 100+ win seasons. That’s 4.5 percent of all seasons played. Since 2005, only 1.67% of team-seasons played have been 100+ wins, it’s true, but there were 5 more 100+ win seasons played in 2004 and 2003, so there’s a little bit of cherry picking going on. Again, I’d like to dig into this a little deeper.

As for 70 win seasons, in the 43 seasons since 1961 that I examined, 798 out of 1130 team-seasons played won 75 or more games. In other words, 70.6% of all teams have won 75 games in the 162-game season era. Using that percentage by itself, you’d actually expect 21 teams to win at least 75 games in a season.

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 21, 2009 8:18 PM EDT reply actions

"As for 70 win seasons"

should read “As for 75 win seasons”

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 21, 2009 8:20 PM EDT up reply actions

Thanks for supporting my position

My original contention: baseball teams are more even than ever.

As of tonight, there are 23 MLB teams playing at a 75-win clip or better. Two above what you calculate over 1,130 team seasons.

And thanks for also illustrating my point that free agency has not changed baseball’s competitive balance for the worse.

Bloggin' the bloggers since 1938.

by Johnny Safron on Jun 21, 2009 10:24 PM EDT up reply actions

Well, 23 teams playing at a 75 win clip in June is hardly a smoking gun

although anecdotally it does feel to me too like baseball is unusually even/mediocre this season.

I’d appreciate any help from someone who knows more about significance testing than I do. But I do remember from high school math that in a normal distribution, 68% of data points should lie between the mean and one standard deviation in either direction.

That means that in the 162-game era 68% of all teams have finished between 69 and 92 wins (roughly). Since 2005, 68% of all teams have finished between 70 and 92 wins (roughly). To me just eyeballing that difference, it seems very insignificant to me. But there are things like a t-test you can run on the data to determine for sure whether or not it actually is significant. But my sense is it’s not.

I think you’re right that that free agency has not changed baseball’s competitive balance for the worse, but at the same time it seems that your claim that baseball is more even since 2005 just does not seem to be borne out by the facts. This season could be an outlier, but since it’s not even half over yet it’s a pretty small sample compared to the 120 full seasons that were played ’05 – ’08.

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 22, 2009 12:30 AM EDT up reply actions

Alas

>>it seems that your claim that baseball is more even since 2005 just does not seem to be borne out by the facts

I never made such a claim.

Bloggin' the bloggers since 1938.

by Johnny Safron on Jun 22, 2009 6:47 PM EDT up reply actions

Thanks to the parity that almost no one predicted at any time since free agency, baseball teams are more even than ever.

Give me some dates to go with your claim above, and I’ll examine the data. I’m still curious to see if your hunch is right, but the little number crunching I’ve done so far indicates your hunch is incorrect.

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 23, 2009 3:01 AM EDT up reply actions

I see your point though

If parity started happening before 2005, then examining the data post-2005 relative to all the data since 1961 might not tell us anything. What date do you think this supposed increased parity began? I’ll read up on significance testing and hit you back with whether you’re right or not.

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 23, 2009 3:10 AM EDT up reply actions

Ok running a standard deviation calculation

In the 43 seasons since 1961: mean wins = 80.8681 and sd = 11.55
In the 4 seasons since 2005: mean wins = 80.97 and sd = 10.91

Is the drop in standard deviation statistically significant? Can a drop from 11.55 to 10.91 indicate greater parity? Doesn’t seem very significant to me, but could someone tell me how to figure that out please?

BTW, I’m assuming mean wins being < 81 is because some rain outs are never made up.

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 21, 2009 8:36 PM EDT reply actions

Go back to '87

If memory serves, and that’s really all I’m going to cite, the Twins were very good at home and less than .500 on the road. They hung around, won a couple of games late on the road in Texas, made the playoffs, and, because it was before division championships, beat the Tigers to get to the World Series.

They are in this thing, and they can get as far as their belief in themselves and their pitching can take them.

No one in ‘87 knew they could win the World Series, but between recent epic collapses (’85) and the variety of inputs they were getting from different players, they had the profile of a potential winner. It didn’t hurt that they had home field advantage either, considering that they did not win a World Series game on the road in either ’87 or ’91.

They really miss Span right now. And Morneau. But, they are very close, except in the bullpen.

by Old Twins Cap on Jun 21, 2009 10:24 PM EDT reply actions

Understatement of the year

If memory serves, and that’s really all I’m going to cite, the Twins were very good at home and less than .500 on the road (in 1987).

’87 Twins at home: 56-25
’87 Twins on the road: 29-52

That amazes me every time I see it (as does the fact that they only won 85 games in the regular season and won a 7-team division).

I happened to notice when I was looking up the records on Baseball-Reference that the Twins actually outdrew the ’87 team each of the last three years.

"There are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

by BeefMaster on Jun 22, 2009 9:21 AM EDT up reply actions

2009 Season

I went ahead and ran this season’s win-loss record in a standard deviation calculator and came up with this:

Mean: 34.4 wins
Standard deviation: 4.7

I figured I could project that out to a full season by multiplying out the 34.4 wins by 2.354 to get 81 wins and multiplying the standard deviation of 4.7 by 2.354 as well. That could be a mistake, but it feels right to me, so let’s go with it until someone says that’s wrong.

That gives us a standard deviation projection of 11.06 wins. That’s almost exactly the standard deviation of the 2005 – 2008 era, and is very close to the 11.55 wins of the 162-game era overall.

It could just be that every time the season is 42% over, fans take a look at the standings and notice how close everything seems. This could be a perennial tradition, like giving up on your team after a tough series loss to the Mariners.

"I don't care about feelings." - Lou Piniella

by natetheskate on Jun 22, 2009 12:42 AM EDT reply actions