Joe Sheehan Newsletter Today: Blue Jays Streak & Variance
Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2013 9:06 pm
Really enjoyed this Newsletter today from Joe Sheehan and thought I would post it to share. Wish we could have more sharing of interesting baseball articles on the MB's that others have seen and find interesting, and not just Fantasy-related stuff. Maybe we can start an on-going thread for people to post. I, for one, really appreciate some of the articles Outlaw posts that I never would have seen, especially that Washington Post Bryce Harper article and the Matt Harvey Yahoo Article.
I have never been a big Baseball Prospectus guy, and have never subscribed to their website as I find they make the simple, sound really complex and convoluted. I find Joe Sheehan the opposite (and I know he used to write for them). I began subscribing to his Newsletter last year and his insights have really added to my enjoyment of the season. I feel have become a smarter fan from reading his stuff. Not really fantasy focused, but very enjoyable none-the-less. Highly recommend it for fellow seam heads. Anyways, here it is:
The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. V, No. 58
June 25, 2013
Last night in St. Petersburg, the Blue Jays had their 11-game winning streak snapped by Jeremy Hellickson and the Rays. The Jays remain above .500 and just 5 1/2 games behind the Red Sox in the AL East. The streak may be over, but the effect of it -- changing the story of the Blue Jays' season -- will remain. A team that just two weeks ago was one of the most disappointing in baseball is now the contender it was expected to be, and with Jose Reyes coming back tomorrow, a real threat to win the division for the first time in 20 years.
It's a fascinating turnaround, not least because no personnel upgrades explain the sudden change. The same guys who went 27-36 were the ones, more or less, who then went 11-1. The latter group got nothing from the injured Brett Lawrie, with the playing time mostly going to Maicer Izturis, who did hit .298/.312/.511. The team also had Josh Thole rather than Henry Blanco, who was DFAd just before the streak. While there were changes in the makeup of the starting rotation -- Chien-Ming Wang in, Josh Johnson back, more Esmil Rogers -- on balance the only obvious upgrade was in getting Johnson off the DL. Essentially, a .428 team turned into a .917 team for two weeks, with no real warning that it was coming.
It's easy to see why they won more games; the rotation began cranking out quality starts in front of a bullpen that has been fantastic all year. (In the 11-1 stretch, the Jays' pen has been charged with just two runs in 30 2/3 innings.) A lineup with power hit 20 homers in 11 games, making up for a .306 team OBP to the tune of 5.9 runs per game. What's not easy to see is why that suddenly happened. Why did Munenori Kawasaki go from defensive replacement-forced-to-play to a .269/.367/.577 hitter? What made Edwin Encarnacion, having a strong follow-up season, go off for a .326/.408/.744 stretch? Why did Mark Buehrle's strikeout rate leap from 14.7% to 22.4%?
The answer is most unsatisfying: nothing. What the Jays have done, streak aside, isn't particularly notable. Conceding that I'm playing with endpoints here, it's just not that strange for a team to have extended stretches of good and poor play, and while there are externalities -- health, schedule, mix of ballparks -- the fact is that teams and players can post a wide range of results over even two months of play. Good teams can look bad for a long time, and bad teams can fool us for weeks and months at a time. I'm fond of saying that we'd all be better off if we just ignored April completely as writers, didn't report on anything that happened during the month, didn't look for truths. You remember April, right? When Vernon Wells ruled the land, when the Rockies soared, when the Padres tanked? When Barry Zito had reinvented himself and Torii Hunter was never going to age? That April.
The thing is, that doesn't make the point well enough. The baseline variance of performance is simply wider than we appreciate -- and much wider than we acknowledge in the 24/7 news cycle. Two bad starts or three tough weeks at the plate bring out the calls for change, while the high side of the wave gets…well, stuff like this. Even half a season can hide as much as it reveals. A year ago this morning, the A's were 35-38. They would win nearly two of every three games from that day through the end of the season, winning the AL West along the way. The Mets were 39-34 and finished 35-54. The Dodgers -- with the best record in the NL -- and White Sox led their divisions and missed the playoffs. Josh Hamilton was a cartoon superhero, as was Matt Kemp. The Marlins were still pretending to be a baseball team.
Variance swamps everything. At a micro level, there may be reasons for any individual's performance, although more often than not any listed reasons are post hoc rationalizations. At the team level, all those individual vicissitudes add up to wins and losses in ways that we can't predict in the short term, and can't predict much better in the medium term. In baseball, a .428 team missing a critical piece can rip off 11 straight wins. Hell, the Astros, who some people thought might lose 120 games and who started the year on just that pace, are playing .560 ball in their last 25 games. The Astros!
Baseball is incredibly hard. That we understand so much more of it than we used to has, however, led us in the opposite direction of the truth. We think that knowing the velocity of every pitch or the distance of every hit can lead us to meaning within those events. In searching for the micro, we've lost the macro, and the macro is that baseball is incredibly hard. When the top thousand players in the world are carved into teams and pitted against one another, things happen for no other reason than the difficulty of playing this game at the highest level. Mind you, this isn't just a feature rather than a bug; it's the entire reason the game is worth watching. No matter how many advances we make in measuring and analyzing and projecting, we're never going to make baseball predictable. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: the statheads have a better grasp of the randomness of baseball than any other group.
Why did the Blue Jays start 27-36? Because they didn't play very well. Why did the Blue Jays then go 11-1? Because they played better. I can explain the fine details behind those statements as well as anyone, but I can't answer the question you most want to know: why did it happen? Baseball seasons are 162 games long and even that might not be enough to suss out who the best players and teams are. I know, though, that 75 games aren't enough to address that question, and carving those 75 into 63 and 12 doesn't begin to get you there. You need a season, then another and another, piled and stacked until we have all the information we need…just in time to be done with that batch of players and on to the next.
The Jays won't be the last, of course. Some middling disaster like the Angels or Dodgers or Nationals is going to snap to in July and go 22-4 or something, and the Jays will be forgotten and we'll be on to the next search for explanations. Someone may have gotten healthy, and maybe the schedule will have softened, and perhaps a managerial decision put the players in better position to win. The real answer, the frustrating truth, is that over the course of one baseball season, variance swamps everything.
Friends and Family
For the months of June and July, current subscribers can buy additional subscriptions for friends and family for just $10 -- half the regular price. Go to http://joesheehanbaseball.blogspot.com and select "Friends and Family" from the dropdown menu.
Subscriptions
The Joe Sheehan Newsletter is an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, a mix of analysis, commentary and opinion, all linked by a deep love of the game.
Volume V of the newsletter is running from February 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014. Effective May 25, the cost for the rest of Volume V is $19.95, and you can subscribe through PayPal using your credit or debit card. That $19.95 gets you the rest of my in-season coverage -- including the popular "What I'm Watching" pieces -- postseason analysis, offseason breakdowns and more, with full access to the archives dating to May of 2010.
To subscribe, use the PayPal link at http://joesheehanbaseball.blogspot.com, or PayPal to [email protected].
I have never been a big Baseball Prospectus guy, and have never subscribed to their website as I find they make the simple, sound really complex and convoluted. I find Joe Sheehan the opposite (and I know he used to write for them). I began subscribing to his Newsletter last year and his insights have really added to my enjoyment of the season. I feel have become a smarter fan from reading his stuff. Not really fantasy focused, but very enjoyable none-the-less. Highly recommend it for fellow seam heads. Anyways, here it is:
The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. V, No. 58
June 25, 2013
Last night in St. Petersburg, the Blue Jays had their 11-game winning streak snapped by Jeremy Hellickson and the Rays. The Jays remain above .500 and just 5 1/2 games behind the Red Sox in the AL East. The streak may be over, but the effect of it -- changing the story of the Blue Jays' season -- will remain. A team that just two weeks ago was one of the most disappointing in baseball is now the contender it was expected to be, and with Jose Reyes coming back tomorrow, a real threat to win the division for the first time in 20 years.
It's a fascinating turnaround, not least because no personnel upgrades explain the sudden change. The same guys who went 27-36 were the ones, more or less, who then went 11-1. The latter group got nothing from the injured Brett Lawrie, with the playing time mostly going to Maicer Izturis, who did hit .298/.312/.511. The team also had Josh Thole rather than Henry Blanco, who was DFAd just before the streak. While there were changes in the makeup of the starting rotation -- Chien-Ming Wang in, Josh Johnson back, more Esmil Rogers -- on balance the only obvious upgrade was in getting Johnson off the DL. Essentially, a .428 team turned into a .917 team for two weeks, with no real warning that it was coming.
It's easy to see why they won more games; the rotation began cranking out quality starts in front of a bullpen that has been fantastic all year. (In the 11-1 stretch, the Jays' pen has been charged with just two runs in 30 2/3 innings.) A lineup with power hit 20 homers in 11 games, making up for a .306 team OBP to the tune of 5.9 runs per game. What's not easy to see is why that suddenly happened. Why did Munenori Kawasaki go from defensive replacement-forced-to-play to a .269/.367/.577 hitter? What made Edwin Encarnacion, having a strong follow-up season, go off for a .326/.408/.744 stretch? Why did Mark Buehrle's strikeout rate leap from 14.7% to 22.4%?
The answer is most unsatisfying: nothing. What the Jays have done, streak aside, isn't particularly notable. Conceding that I'm playing with endpoints here, it's just not that strange for a team to have extended stretches of good and poor play, and while there are externalities -- health, schedule, mix of ballparks -- the fact is that teams and players can post a wide range of results over even two months of play. Good teams can look bad for a long time, and bad teams can fool us for weeks and months at a time. I'm fond of saying that we'd all be better off if we just ignored April completely as writers, didn't report on anything that happened during the month, didn't look for truths. You remember April, right? When Vernon Wells ruled the land, when the Rockies soared, when the Padres tanked? When Barry Zito had reinvented himself and Torii Hunter was never going to age? That April.
The thing is, that doesn't make the point well enough. The baseline variance of performance is simply wider than we appreciate -- and much wider than we acknowledge in the 24/7 news cycle. Two bad starts or three tough weeks at the plate bring out the calls for change, while the high side of the wave gets…well, stuff like this. Even half a season can hide as much as it reveals. A year ago this morning, the A's were 35-38. They would win nearly two of every three games from that day through the end of the season, winning the AL West along the way. The Mets were 39-34 and finished 35-54. The Dodgers -- with the best record in the NL -- and White Sox led their divisions and missed the playoffs. Josh Hamilton was a cartoon superhero, as was Matt Kemp. The Marlins were still pretending to be a baseball team.
Variance swamps everything. At a micro level, there may be reasons for any individual's performance, although more often than not any listed reasons are post hoc rationalizations. At the team level, all those individual vicissitudes add up to wins and losses in ways that we can't predict in the short term, and can't predict much better in the medium term. In baseball, a .428 team missing a critical piece can rip off 11 straight wins. Hell, the Astros, who some people thought might lose 120 games and who started the year on just that pace, are playing .560 ball in their last 25 games. The Astros!
Baseball is incredibly hard. That we understand so much more of it than we used to has, however, led us in the opposite direction of the truth. We think that knowing the velocity of every pitch or the distance of every hit can lead us to meaning within those events. In searching for the micro, we've lost the macro, and the macro is that baseball is incredibly hard. When the top thousand players in the world are carved into teams and pitted against one another, things happen for no other reason than the difficulty of playing this game at the highest level. Mind you, this isn't just a feature rather than a bug; it's the entire reason the game is worth watching. No matter how many advances we make in measuring and analyzing and projecting, we're never going to make baseball predictable. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: the statheads have a better grasp of the randomness of baseball than any other group.
Why did the Blue Jays start 27-36? Because they didn't play very well. Why did the Blue Jays then go 11-1? Because they played better. I can explain the fine details behind those statements as well as anyone, but I can't answer the question you most want to know: why did it happen? Baseball seasons are 162 games long and even that might not be enough to suss out who the best players and teams are. I know, though, that 75 games aren't enough to address that question, and carving those 75 into 63 and 12 doesn't begin to get you there. You need a season, then another and another, piled and stacked until we have all the information we need…just in time to be done with that batch of players and on to the next.
The Jays won't be the last, of course. Some middling disaster like the Angels or Dodgers or Nationals is going to snap to in July and go 22-4 or something, and the Jays will be forgotten and we'll be on to the next search for explanations. Someone may have gotten healthy, and maybe the schedule will have softened, and perhaps a managerial decision put the players in better position to win. The real answer, the frustrating truth, is that over the course of one baseball season, variance swamps everything.
Friends and Family
For the months of June and July, current subscribers can buy additional subscriptions for friends and family for just $10 -- half the regular price. Go to http://joesheehanbaseball.blogspot.com and select "Friends and Family" from the dropdown menu.
Subscriptions
The Joe Sheehan Newsletter is an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, a mix of analysis, commentary and opinion, all linked by a deep love of the game.
Volume V of the newsletter is running from February 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014. Effective May 25, the cost for the rest of Volume V is $19.95, and you can subscribe through PayPal using your credit or debit card. That $19.95 gets you the rest of my in-season coverage -- including the popular "What I'm Watching" pieces -- postseason analysis, offseason breakdowns and more, with full access to the archives dating to May of 2010.
To subscribe, use the PayPal link at http://joesheehanbaseball.blogspot.com, or PayPal to [email protected].