Baseball Update

My Emergency NL Backup Team has a two and half game lead with only a week of baseball left. Which means it is entirely likely that the Diamondbacks are going to the playoffs. They also hold a slight lead in the race for the best record overall in the NL, so they have about a better than 50-50 chance of having homefield advanatge. Now, this is of course pretty cool for me, as it is the first pennant race I have been able to enjoy in a decade. And it also makes me feel like I did a real bang-up job of picking an Emergency NL Backup Team. I'm happy my fandom was not the kiss of death.

OK, but I'm also a huge stat dork, and the D-backs are pulling off one of the most unlikely statistical seasons ever, one that has the stat geek community rubbing their calculators and has Eric Byrnes saying things like:

"As far as I’m concerned, all the stat geeks really don’t come into play in this situation... The last I checked, wins and losses determine who goes to the playoffs. I’m on a team that is in first place."

Duly noted, Eric. But here's the thing. There is no better predictor of a team's record than the difference between runs allowed and runs scored. The formula is eerily accurate, and most teams finish within about five games of their Pythagorean Win projection. Here's the rub: the D-backs have allowed more runs than they have scored. They are outperforming Pythagoras by 11 games. No team is close to that number.

Which begs the question... how are they beating Pythagoras. Everyone seems to have an idea.

Sabametric (a fancy word for baseball dork) orthodoxy is that any deviation from Pythagoras is atrributed to luck. I'm not sure that is true. I think the huge deviation is luck, but the deviation itself might come from something else: the D-backs concede games in which they are losing. They couldn't hit water falling out of a boat, so armed with a pea shooter for an offense, when the starting pitcher has a bad game, the Snakes just pack up and send in some marginal reliever who won't be in the Majors next season to take one for the team. When the game is close, the Dbacks go to the core of their pen, which has four pitchers with an ERA below three. In a close game, the D-backs have an edge: they will almost always have the better bullpen. They might not score many runs, but Lyons, Pena, and Slaten give up even less. And Valverde, the closer, allows nothing.

The good news is that in the playoffs, the back end of your bullpen isn't terribly important. The bad news is, the lousy offense probably will be an issue. I'm hoping the D-backs gift for winning one-run games continues in the playoffs.