Baseball Musings: If They Just Play .500...

September 07, 2006

If They Just Play .500...

Whenever a team gets a big lead in a division race, someone demonstrates how tough it will be for them to lose by showing how many wins their opponents need if the team plays just .500 ball. It's a good comparison, because a team that is far ahead of its competition is probably not a .500 team.

But sometimes you don't play .500 ball. Sometimes you play a lot worse. That's what happened to the Tigers. On the morning of August 8th, the Tigers awoke from a win against the Twins 40 games over .500 at 76-36, a .679 winning percentage. The chance of a .679 team winning at least 25 of their last 50 games is .9972. The Twins would need to win 36 of 51 to tie if that happened, the White Sox 36 of 52.

Instead, the Tigers are 9-19 since that date, a .321 winning percentage. That's tied with the Cubs and Rockies for worst record in the majors over the last month. It's a record so bad that Chicago at 15-14 and the Twins at 15-12 are back in the race. Four and 4 1/2 games out of first place. The Tigers have four games with the Twins (starting tonight) and three with the White Sox. What looked like a sure thing a month ago is now a race once again.

The Tigers offense disappeared. They've scored just 101 runs, 3.6 per game. They're hitting .246, and that's their strong suit. The team OBA is just .294 with a measly .386 slugging percentage. The chance of a .679 team winning no more than 9 games in a 28 game stretch is .0012, so something radical changed. An okay offense got bad.

Correction: I've change the penultimate sentence to start, "The chance of a .679 team winning no more than 9 games in a 28 game stretch is .0012," which is what I actually calculated.

Posted by David Pinto at 09:00 AM | Division Races | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Or...they were not a .679 team to begin with...

Posted by: Tor at September 7, 2006 09:43 AM

If the Tigers blow this, surely it would rank as one of the biggest collapses in baseball history. I'm really looking forward to this 4-game series in Minnesota. The Twins have the best home record in baseball.

Posted by: John N. at September 7, 2006 09:50 AM

How similar is the Tigers August vacation to last year's White Sox vacation? Can they recover in a similar manner before we call this the greatest collapse since my yankees fell to the sawx?

Posted by: mike at September 7, 2006 10:10 AM

Detroit's slide has not been as dramatic but has lasted longer then the White Sox' slide last year.

The Sox were 35 games over 500 before losing seven in a row in August. The Sox went on a couple more winning and losing streaks after that but never fell below 28 games above 500 and finished 99-63.

Posted by: Mike L. at September 7, 2006 10:24 AM

The Tiger offense was never as strong as it seemed. They have too many low OBAs to sustain a productive attack. They depend heavily on the long ball, which makes them prone to slumps.

Ordonez and Pudge are the only hitters who are above average at their positions... and Ordonez hasn't been himself in the second half. Given his recent history, I wouldn't be surprised if he's playing hurt.

It'll be disappointing if they fall out of the playoffs... but no matter what happens, given the Tigers' many years of futility, 2006 is still a big step forward.

Posted by: johnw at September 7, 2006 10:31 AM

Yankees basically took September off in 2000. Worked out nicely for them. What an amazing turn around for Detroit. Two years ago their fans would have been happy to just miss the playoffs. Now they'll be upset if the team doesn't win the division.

Posted by: rbj at September 7, 2006 10:41 AM

1. The Tigers have an above-average hitter in Carlos Guillen, as well. But the basic problem stands: terrible OBPs up and down the lineup.

2. The Yankees collapse in 2000 was (speaking as a Yankee fan) awful to watch. It was only thanks to poor play by the Red Sox that they Yanks didn't blow the division. If I recall correctly, the Yanks only won 87 games that year... but the Sox managed to win only 85.

3. You're never as good as you look when you're winning, or as bad as you look when you're losing. The White Sox and Twins have serious flaws too.

Posted by: Rob at September 7, 2006 11:09 AM

A couple days ago, I thought, "The '95 Angels..." and then found this blog post, and realized that this year's Red Sox have completely fallen apart too....not just the Tigers. Boston was in 1st at the start of August and blew 21 games during the month. They can be excused though...for some injuries and having to deal with the Yankees, so I guess we don't look much at them.

The Tigers were 9 games up in early august...the 1995 Angels were 11 games up (and blew it). Hopefully the Tigers can somehow manage to pull it together again.

Posted by: Devon at September 7, 2006 11:24 AM

What happened is some of their key hitters started slumping and injured and they tried to put out the fire with Neifi Perez and only playing Marcus Thames (their team leader in multiple catagories such as homeruns, slugging, and ops) a third of the time. That's like trying to put out a fire with a flamethrower.

Very very frustrating to be a Tiger fan right now.

Signing and playing Neifi Perez everyday makes me lose faith that this organization has any clue as to what they're doing, and makes me think that this was a blind squirrel finding a nut this year.

Posted by: Chris J at September 7, 2006 11:51 AM

Rob: Oops, I forgot Guillen, who's probably the best of the bunch, all things considered.

Thames got displaced by Dmitri Young. Some Tiger fans are hoping that Young's release will help the offense by getting Thames more at-bats.

Posted by: johnw at September 7, 2006 12:26 PM

David,

First of all, I don't know how you calculated the .00012 number. That's one in 8,333; I get one in 39,518 (.000025). Either way, you have to be careful with these significance values. Each major league team has 135 28-game "streaks" in a season. That's 4,050 such streaks a year overall. So given your odds, there's a 50% probability of this happening by random chance in any given season, and even given my tougher odds, the value is still not significant, with a p-value of .10.

It's possible that this change has been real, but it is certainly not statistically significant.

Posted by: David Gassko at September 7, 2006 12:55 PM

David Gassko,

I calculated the odds of the Tigers winning no more than 9 games in a 28 game stretch.

Posted by: David Pinto at September 7, 2006 01:26 PM

AND the tigres just released dmitri young for hitting .292, but they don't want him and they DO want the neiffer?

ah well

Posted by: lisa gray at September 7, 2006 04:31 PM

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