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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Thursday, August 26, 2010
To say that the Seattle Mariners have disappointed this year would be a monumental understatement. Expected to compete for the division title on the back of a pitching rotation anchored by Cy Young contenders Felix Hernandez and Cliff Lee and a defense with a number of Gold Glove candidates, Seattle has instead gone 49-76, and is 12 games behind the thirdplace Angels.
How then, did the Mariners end up where they are today? The obvious answer is the offense. While the offense was never expected to be among the best in the league, the general thought was that the team would at least score enough to support the excellent pitching and defense. Instead, the Mariners have scored 3.29 runs per game. The last American League team to score fewer runs per game was the 1981 Toronto Blue Jays at a time when an average team only scored 4.07 runs per game. That number is 4.42 this year.
So, by how much has the team’s bats undeperformed expectations? And how does this compare historically?
Cue #6 jokes!
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1. Rich Rifkin Posted: August 26, 2010 at 04:28 PM (#3626475)And yes, I fully expect someone to say something like "well that's easy to say in hindsight." I felt this way at the beginning of the season, really.
Although a team OPS+ of 78 is much worse in the AL than the NL, since the Mariners don't have the excuse of having pitchers hit.
I'm still wondering how anyone but the Kool Aid drinkers predicted a division title for a team that finished in 3rd and 12 games back the year before.
A lot of it is because most people thought that the whole division would be lousy, so they really wouldn't need to be *that* good to be competitive.
Isn't OPS+ done separately for both NL and AL? If so, I don't see this mattering. That said... nobody expected the Astros to be anything other than terrible at the beginning of the year. People were saying that could have been one of the worst teams/offenses in decades.
There was no reason to think that, as in 2009 the AL West was the strongest division in baseball. The AL East always gets the publicity (and this year has in fact been the best) but often that division is not better than the west, just more top-heavy.
Sure, but the team had a weak offense and did little to improve it. They needed serious improvement to be even better than their 2009 record, because they were going to fall back to earth from their overinflated record to begin with.
I was using my friends, but this is a great deal since I occassionally do fantasy through ESPN. $12 bucks for 3 years of insider is a great deal - I'll very, very rarely read the magazines but they're decent enough time killers if you're flying. Thanks.
But ESPN causes cancer.
No Wallop in Puyallup.
Yeah, I think I'd rather start smoking than send any dough to Bristol.
I find this kind of stuff silly, but given that you're getting 26 magazines and a lot of legitimately good insider content that ESPN has to pay for, they're losing money on your subscription.
The coolest thing about having an editor is not having to think up titles. I'm terrible at titles (and concluding paragraphs). If I ever write a book, 99% of the book will take me less time to write than the final page and the title.
Yeah, four bucks probably doesn't even pay for the cost to ship the magazine for a year. Szym, how many words in that article would four bucks pay for?
I'm buying 1-2 years for insider, always wanted it but never really wanted the damn mag that came along with it. For $4, the magazine is like the free gift that I can skim once in a while over the course of 2 weeks.
I've got genuine, legitimate reasons for my feelings toward Dan's employer. I would never give them a ####### dime.
But the magazine stinks and the next time ESPN Insider breaks news, making it actually "insider" material, will be the first. There's nothing that ESPN Insider has that I want that I can't get elsewhere for free.
Trying to get me in hot water?
For $4, the magazine is like the free gift that I can skim once in a while over the course of 2 weeks.
I can see someone wanting more hard analysis, but I find it to be enjoyable, unlike how it was back when it started years ago. While I obviously like stuff like the 8 page ZiPS feature in the spring the best, there have been things like pitch f/x featured and used. At the very least, it's a good bathroom read.
As for the magazine, ever issue has a couple interesting long-form articles and interesting magazine-type things like a feature on hockey sticks through the years with high-quality photos, that are not on the internet. It's not all "Dan Patrick asks dumb questions to Dhani Jones".
I'm not. Let me rephrase. EPSN Insider offers no real insider information. That stuff is all available for free at many places. So I'm paying for articles by ESPN employees. Well, no thanks. Whatever they have to say is already being said by others, for free.
I seem to recall that a few teams in the last 75 years or so have had a team OPS+ of around 70. So 78 is not all time bad. But it is the worst in a while.
Let's start with legitimate rumors. Or how about stuff by ex-players and managers on how they played the system. But that stuff would find it's way to the free domain. For example when Buck Showalter showed how to cork a bat on Baseball Tonight. That was great, because it was taboo.
They have a lot of hacks (as do other places). I should be fair, it's not just ESPN employees, Football Outsiders has a gig on Insider, which is kind of humorous. If SI or Yahoo put a good portion of their stuff behind a paywall, I wouldn't pay for that either.
In my best Michael Corleone impression: Nothing.
Agree on the Law writing tool, though.
The baseline for OPS+ does not include pitcher hitting, but the team OPS+ numbers listed on BB-Ref do include pitcher stats. As a result, the team numbers for the NL are always going to be lower than those for AL teams. The NL as a whole has an 94 OPS+ this year.
It might be closer to all-time bad if you do some sort of timeline adjustment, where you adjust for the fact that the spread between the best and worst teams has gotten smaller over time.
I too will not give ESPN a dime. They cheated me out of money, on principle I can't do business with them.
Otherwise, I would love to get Dan's stuff for $4 p.a.
The baseline for OPS+ does not include pitcher hitting, but the team OPS+ numbers listed on BB-Ref do include pitcher stats. As a result, the team numbers for the NL are always going to be lower than those for AL teams. The NL as a whole has an 94 OPS+ this year.
This is an important fact and possibly responsible for a large fraction of the "Tigers, White Sox, Blue Jays, Red Sox, A's or Angels could all win the NL East"-style commentary on BTF and other websites.
If you don't like it, that's your right. But I think some of the football outsiders stuff, Hollinger, and some of the scounts inc stuff for college basketball/football and NFL draft stuff to all be pretty interesting. Interesting enough to be worth 4 dollars a year.
FWIW, although I don't read him - Buster Olney is one of the best at breaking trade rumors, and I think he's behind the ESPN paywall.
I don't care for basketball. I like FO but have never once thought "man, I wish I could read this article." It's all stuff I can and do live without.
Not that I know of, NGWhaler.
When I got it, I emailed in a few days and gave them my name and the site had already submitted my information electronically and ESPN went ahead and activated my Insider access. You don't actually have to wait for your first issue. You could try to email them now and past the receipt or something - the worse they'll say is no.
Ironically, you have to be a paying Baseball-reference insider for full database access! (I'm not so I can't give you specific instructions, but I am sure someone here can; it's much less of a stigma than paying ESPN for insider!)
The recently terrible offensive Giants teams had an OPS+ of about 80.
WTF Dan? 8-10 weeks in 2010 is like 2 years in 1990. I kid, thanks for info on the offer. I'll try the insider trick in a day or so, hopefully it'll work..
I'd be surprised if ESPN didn't have all your subscriber info in less than a week.
Year OPS+2010 76
2009 87
2008 87
2007 100
2006 93
2005 88
2004 89
2003 99
2002 105
2001 112
2000 103
1999 102
1998 110
1997 118
1996 113
1995 107
1994 101
1993 100
1992 103
1991 97
1990 98
1989 98
1988 100
1987 101
1986 97
1985 101
1984 96
1983 82
1982 90
1981 96
1980 82
1979 98
1978 90
1977 89
Safeco since 2000, Kingdome before that, so you can add 1-2 points after 2000, subtract 1+-2 before that. Still, 2010 looks to be the worst offensive year in Mariner History.
I haven't looked at all other teams- but the 1965 Mets were worse... barely
I thought OPS was, by definition, park adjusted. Are these your, rather than Sean's numbers, or do you think his numbers require further adjustment? Or am I mistaken in my initial assumption?
I would guess Johnny took the team OPS each year from the Mariners' franchise index page and converted each OPS into OPS+ by normalizing them with the American League OPS for each of those years.
Well, as TFA alluded to, the 1981 Blue Jays were worse. 74 OPS+. The 1968 White Sox were 76. And the 65 Mets were definitely worse, OPS+ of 73, same as the 63 Mets.
But the latter two of those (assuming you're pulling OPS+ numbers from BB-Ref) suffer from the problem identifed by DCW3 in #33 here: the "average" team OPS+ in the 1968 AL and 1965 NL were not 100, but were, in fact, 93 and 92, respectively. A 78 OPS+ relative to a league OPS+ of 100 seems to me like it's worse than 76 relative to an average of 93 or 73 relative to 92.
*single tear*
OK, I see what you're getting at. The 1981 Blue Jays were worse. So were the 1920 A's, 69 OPS+ in a league of 94. Maybe the 1932 Red Sox (72/93). Looks like the M's are historically bad.
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