June 26, 2007
Lots of Bad Luck
The Giants defeated the Padres in extra-innings last night, and Kevin Towers expects them to climb back into the race. The Giants are nine game under .500, despite scoring 315 runs and allowing .316. Look at the number of teams that are four wins or more below their projected total:
- Yankees
- Orioles
- Cubs
- Reds
- Padres
- Giants
The teams that many games above are the Nationals, Cardinals and Diamondbacks. There appears the bad luck is more concentrated than the good luck this year.
I don't think the Cardinals are lucky, they've just lost a whole lot of blowouts, and thus their runs given up total is skewed...
I think looking at pythagorean records is misleading. As JeremyR says, if you your rotation happens to have a truly terrible member, you are likely to suffer blowouts, skewing run allowed totals.
I don't see how that's misleading. If your rotation has a "truly terrible member", you should lose a lot of games. Unless the other 4 are all Johan Santana.
If you have a truly terrible member vs. just a somewhat terrible member, you'll probably both lose most of your games, but by a lot more with the one truly terrible one. For Example, look at Jeff Weaver's first 8 starts for the Mariners. Compare to the second worst starter, and they can be both 0-8, but Weaver gave up a lot more runs. It skews the pythag. record.