TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, June 23, 2005

AL CENTRAL A JOKE NO MORE
Division boasts best team in baseball

Long regarded as the weakest division in baseball, the American League Central Division is alive and well and flourishing on the junior circuit and in inter-league play. With teams like the World Series champion Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees (with their $200 million payroll) in the AL East, and the talented Los Angeles Angels and the hard hitting Texas Rangers in the AL West, it would have been almost absurd to suggest before the season began that the AL Central might house the American League wildcard winner. As the all star break approaches that is more than a possibility.

The Chicago White Sox have the best record in all of baseball as they sit 27 games over .500 at 49-22 after a 5-1 win over the Kansas City Royals on Wednesday afternoon. Are these the same White Sox who were 83-79 last season and finished a distant second to the Minnesota Twins for the division title? Well, not really. General Manager Kenny Williams changed the look of the team considerably in the off season and the Sox busted right out of the gate in April and have not looked back. Many were scratching their heads when Williams traded slugger Carlos Lee to the Milwaukee Brewers for 2003 National League Rookie of the Year Scott Podsednik. Lee smashed 31 home runs and drove in 99 runs in 2004 while Podsednik hit a meager .244 after hitting .314 in his rookie campaign. What Podsednik did was steal 70 bases in 2004 and that was an element that Kenny Williams wanted to add to his ball club, much to the delight of Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. Going into today's play, Podsednik leads all major leaguers with 36 stolen bases and has scored 41 runs. The White Sox traded power for speed and it is a move that has paid off nicely.

The White Sox knew they were going to be solid at the top of their rotation with Mark Buehrle and Freddy Garcia. However nobody could have predicted that right-hander John Garland would already have 12 wins this season (5-1 victory over KC Tuesday night) in only his fourteenth start. The Sox knew they had plenty of decent arms in the bullpen but they also could not have predicted that Dustin Hermanson who was signed as a free agent from the Giants would have 17 saves in 18 opportunities. Catcher A.J. Pierzynski and outfielder Jermaine Dye have completed the Sox new look and the South Siders have their sights set on their first post season appearance since 2000.

Kenny Williams has to be given credit for making some gutsy moves in the off season that have the White Sox flying high at the top of the AL Central.

The Minnesota Twins continue to lose players every single off season and General Manager Terry Ryan just seems to take it all in stride. The Twins develop talent and they could be used as a model on how to run an organization. The Twinkies have won 3 straight AL Central titles and were the favorites once again at the start of the season. The White Sox have set a torrid pace that not even the Twins respectable record of 39-31 can come close to. Johan Santana and Brad Radke are two of the top pitchers in the American League and Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer are two of the most talented young players in the game. With veterans like Torii Hunter, Jacques Jones and Shannon Stewart in the lineup, the Twins continue to be a force in the American League. The White Sox will have to continue to win because a collapse of any sort will have the Twins nipping at their heels all the way to the finish line. The Twins are anxious to return to the post season and to finally have success there. Counting them out right now because of the White Sox large lead would be a mistake.

At the end of the 2001 season, The Cleveland Indians did something that did not sit well with the fans in Cleveland. General Manager Mark Shapiro (with owner Larry Dolan's approval) tore apart a team that was just coming off a playoff appearance. They dealt Roberto Alomar who was coming off an MVP type season. They let Kenny Lofton walk away as a free agent, and the gutting continued into the 2002 season when they traded workhorse Bartolo Colon to Montreal for a package of talented prospects. The Indians felt they were aging quickly and the farm system was barren. They decided to start the rebuild sooner rather than later and after only three and a half seasons the Indians have a very competitive baseball team and plenty of talent spread throughout the organization. The Indians put together a 9 game winning streak last week and quickly jumped from two games under .500 (28-30) to 7 games over. After being swept by the Red Sox , the Indians find themselves with a record of 37-33. Not bad for a team that got off to a very poor start. After having one of the most explosive offenses in all of baseball last season, the Indians bats went cold in the winter and have stayed that way for most of the season. The Indians are hitting only .252 as a team (Second worst in the AL) but sport an team ERA of 3.67 which is third best in all of baseball. The bullpen has been rock solid with Bob Wickman leading the American League in saves with 20 in 23 opportunities. If the Tribe bats get hot and the solid pitching continues, the Indians could find themselves in the playoff mix at the end of season. Impressive for a team that began a full scale rebuilding plan such a short time ago.

The Detroit Tigers have gone from having the worst team in AL history (43-119 in 2003) to being a competitive team in a relatively short period of time. Owner Mike Illitch has not been tight with his money and Detroit now has one very expensive .500 baseball team. The Tigers are sitting at 35-34 and fourth place in the AL Central. They have accomplished this feat without the services of high priced free agent Magglio Ordonez who signed with the Tigers in the off season. Ordonez went down early with a hernia and his anxiously anticipated return has the Tigers focused on moving up the Central Division standings. The Tigers may not be practicing fiscal responsibility or even a blueprint for long term success, but they have put a decent product on the field and a team that at least has a chance to win on most nights. The Tigers will host the 2005 Major League All Star game at Comerica Park on July 12th.

The American League Central has 4 teams playing at an above .500 clip and after Florida's loss yesterday not even the National East can make that claim. The White Sox, Indians, Twins and Tigers are all in the top 10 in ERA in all of baseball. It's time the Central Division be recognized for being one of the better divisions in baseball and certainly one of it's most competitive. Don't be surprised if two AL Central teams are still playing baseball come October.

There is no need to apologize to the Kansas City Royals for omitting them from this article.

posted by Dean Swanton 12:47 PM

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

What's a Wild Card Pace?

The other night on ESPN I heard the commentators refer to Atlanta as being "back on pace for the wild card." This seemed like fairly abstract talk, considering that we're not even at the All-Star break yet. But I thought: well, we've had ten years of wild card teams, that's 20 finishes, maybe that's enough data to start looking at what it takes to win the wild card.

In the table that follows, you'll see a complete list of all of baseball's wild card playoff qualifiers, the number of wins they had, and the appropriate winning percentage. I've also included the number of wins and percentage of the second-place team in the "wild card race", often a second-place team in another division, but also occasionally a third-place team in the same division as the wild card qualifier -- one or the other, of course. I list this latter because, theoretically, the number of wins a team needed in a given year was just one more than the wins of the second-place team. This is a minor fallacy, of course, since won-loss records are a zero-sum exercise, so just saying one more win than the next team would suffice isn't necessarily true. But for our purposes, we're going to pretend that it is.

So to figure out the "minimum number of wins to become a wildcard", we take that second-place team's wins and add one.

There are a few outliers. The A's won 102 games on the way to the wildcard behind the record-setting Mariners' 116 wins (as recently as 1993, the Giants won 103 games without making the playoffs). The number of wins by the "second place" team in the wild card "race" was 85 that year, because of all those wins sucked up in the AL West. That's on the low side but not without precedent even with such a small sample of 20 races to look at.

Another minor trend: qualifying for the wildcard is now taking slightly more wins than at the inception of the extra round of playoffs, in the low 90s on average, instead of the high 80s. I speculate that this is because as teams realized a wild card team could, in fact, win the World's Championship, more teams have been gunning for a wild card slot more explicitly, staying in the race longer, and making for closer wild card races.

Almost all the close wildcard races -- ones that went down to the final series for each team -- featured two teams who ended up with win totals in the low 90s.

Excepting the strike-shortened 1995 season, the median number of games sufficient to beat the second-place team is 89. So, 50% of the time 89 wins is sufficient to win the wild card. 94 wins would've won a wild card 95% of the time; 92 wins gets the wild card 80% of the time.

So to answer the question, a "wild card pace" during the season is a minimum of .525, probably better set at .543 (the 50% mark); a team with a winning percentage of .575 will get the wild card 95% of the time.

Looking at today's standings, that means only Boston (.577) among either league is playing at a 'guaranteed' "wild card pace" and not leading its division. If the season ended today, Philadelphia would be the NL wild card winner at .542 -- just at our median number.

Teams that will qualify for the wild card are effectively battling against their entire league of teams; so if you want to keep an eye on your team's wild card "pace" during the season, keep an eye out for those numbers: .525, .543, and .575.

Year	League	WC Team	Wins	Win%	"2nd Place"	Win%2
2004	NL	HOU	92	0.568	91	0.562
2004	AL	BOS	98	0.605	91	0.562
2003	NL	FLA	91	0.562	87	0.537
2003	AL	BOS	95	0.586	93	0.593
2002	NL	SF	95	0.590	92	0.568
2002	AL	ANA	99	0.611	93	0.574
2001	NL	STL	93	0.574	90	0.556
2001	AL	OAK	102	0.630	85	0.525
2000	NL	NYM	94	0.580	86	0.556
2000	AL	SEA	91	0.562	90	0.531
1999	NL	NYM	97	0.595	96	0.589
1999	AL	BOS	94	0.580	87	0.532
1998	NL	CHC	90	0.552	89	0.546
1998	AL	BOS	92	0.568	88	0.543
1997	NL	FLA	92	0.568	88	0.543
1997	AL	NYY	96	0.593	84	0.519
1996	NL	LA	90	0.556	88	0.543
1996	AL	BAL	88	0.543	85	0.525
1995	NL	COL	77	0.542	76	0.528
1995	AL	NYY	79	0.549	78	0.538

posted by The Crank 10:06 PM