Many years ago there was a scandal at some parimutuel race tracks. It seems the scammers had worked out a method of getting their bets in just a couple of seconds after the gates flew open and the horses started down the track. Now that would not seem on the face of it to be a huge advantage but apparently it was enough. If you had your eye on a 50-1 longshot and knew that he came out of the gate clean then he would make for a better wager than if he came out chasing all the other ponies’ rears. Conversely if the big favorite did not start well it would be less advisable to put money on his nose.
With so many baseball fans now being involved in Fantasy baseball, and in my own case Strat-O-Matic Baseball, a huge projections industry has sprung up. There are Steamer projections, Marcel, Pecota, ZiPS, Bill James‘ projections in his annual handbook, and others. And now some of these systems update their projections as the season moves along.
To give one simplistic example of this let’s take the sour start of one Daniel Murphy.
Murphy is a pretty easy player to project. If we restrict the discussion to batting average I think we can agree that he is an established .290 type hitter. Pretty much everyone would have expected a healthy Daniel Murphy to bat somewhere in the vicinity of .290 for the 2015 season.
But in his current funk it well may be that he will finish the season’s first month batting .170 or so. Ughhhh.
Now if his true talent level is as a .290 hitter so we could reasonably expect him to start hitting at that rate in the season’s second month. So if we add .170 to five months of .290 it comes to 1.620. Then divide that by 6, for the six month season. The result is .270. A reasonable expection now is that the horrible start for Murphy will cause him to finish the season at .270 rather than the .290 we originally expected. Is this a guarantee? Certainly not. This is a streaky player and he could realistically end up anywhere between .250 (which likely loses him a job given his lack of power and subpar defense) and .300.
So how does all this relate to the exceptional start of the season for the Mets?
Even though the long winning streak is now over the team will go into Saturday’s late afternoon game against the Yankees with a record of 13-4. That in baseball terms is like those first two or three seconds in the horse race.
Before the season started many blogs and newspapers ran polls to see what the fans thought of the Mets’ chances. The most pessimistic fans thought the team would be hard pressed to win 78 games. The most optimistic ones saw the team winning 90. The huge majority came out in the 80-89 win area. Personally I voted in a few of those polls and always pegged the win total at 83.
I’ll use the 83 win projection here and you can do your own math if you started at a different number.
The Mets have played 17 games so they have 145 regular season games to go. If their true talent wins them 51.2% of those games (that’s 83/162) then we could tack on 145 times 0.512 for 74 more wins. Those 74 wins get added to the 13 they have already for a total of 87.
That number probably looks low considering how marvelously the team has played in the early going even while sustaining some significant injuries. My heart wants to say that if these polls were run again that I should predict an 89 or 90 win season. But my head tells me that opponents are not going to continue to commit costly errors at inopportune times, the bullpen could become a lot shakier, and the up the middle defense will cost games. So my head is sticking with 87 wins.
It’s great to have had such a solid start to the campaign. But we must remember that it is only the beginning of a very long season.
Larry, interesting thoughts. But, let’s just say that the Mets are able to get improved production from Murphy, Cuddyer, Wright, Lagares and Granderson, now how many wins? I say this because while they have won a few opportunitic games, only Duda has been hot and Flores and TDA lately. While the jury may be out on Lagares and Granderson, certainly the others are expected to heat up a bit. I’m thinking that 89-90 may be possible, and Terry comes back 🙁
The truth is, if the Nationals don’t really get healthy and their bullpen never comes around, the Mets have enough to take this division. The better the start, the more pressure it puts on the rivals!
What always amuses me is that there are some fans, and I’m not pointing a finger at you TexasGus, who do their what-ifs using only the good stuff.
They’ll say “If the guys who were hurt last year (Harvey, Wright, Parnell, Hefner) come back as good as new and as productive as always, the guys who had off years bounce back, and the guys who blossomed (Duda, d’Arnaud) grow better then the team will win 90 or more games.”
But this doesn’t happen. What happens is some guys come back while others don’t. The guys you are counting on sometimes disappoint. The injuries will hit the some of the same guys (Wright, Parnell) and then hit some others (Wheeler, Blevins, d’Arnaud).
Meanwhile some people might surprise just by staying healthy. I would have guessed that Cuddyer would already be dinged by now and I suspect something physical is bothering Daniel Murphy. d’Arnaud being on the DL is no big surprise but I’d have bet that he would have gotten hurt catching, not batting.
The point is that the totality of the talent made me think the Mets were an 83 win team. The great start has bumped my expectations by a few wins. The slow start and the nasty injuries to the Nats may have made that 95 win team a 90 win team. So if the Mets project now to about 88 or so wins and the Nats 90 well, boys and girls, we might just have us a horse race.
“What always amuses me is that there are some fans, and I’m not pointing a finger at you TexasGus, who do their what-ifs using only the good stuff.”
Boom. Hit it on the head. Case in point, the Nationals.
Most fans and pundits completely ignored the fact that they lost LaRoche and replaced him with the never healthy Zimmerman, that Span and Rendon and pretty much every SP except for Gio had career years and could do it again, that Werth wouldn’t decline in his age 36 season, that the Nats youngsters could cover Soriano and Clippard’s heavy workload and instead just focused on the fact that they added Scherzer, who really just replaced a guy who had a career year too.
The Mets don’t have a dynamite offense. It has, ideally, an offense that goes 1-8 with a solid baseline of talent. However, when you lose Wright and d’Arnaud and replace them with two guys who likely won’t hit HRs — and when you have Juan Lagares who really is a #8 hitter — suddenly you’ve got an offense that is going to struggle to put up runs. They’ll look good when teams give out free passes, but those so-called “quality at-bats” dry up in a hurry when the guy on the hill throws strikes. The functionality of the Mets offense depends on a lot of working pieces, rather than superstar performances from 2-3 guys.
Granderson isn’t a leadoff hitter, but because he’s there the Mets don’t want to follow with another LH hitter in Murphy — who really should be in that #2 spot.
Cuddyer isn’t a cleanup hitter. Duda, OTOH, is one, but again because of the L-R-L-R thing that begins with Granderson up top, the Mets feel compelled to bat Lucas 3rd or, I suppose, 5th.
D’Arnaud in the 2 spot looked good to me, but that’s a long ways off.
Larry, I like the clarity of your article and also your response. Looking forward to more of reasoned perspectives in the future.
Thank you Norm. A very nice thing to say.
I’ll do my best to not disappoint.
Let’s Go Mets
I like the interesting and honest “heart versus head” article.
Whenever we engage (my family) in predictions at get-togethers, we lay out our predictions and, most always, go with the heart.
I predicted a 5-1 drubbing of the Yankees yesterday, with JDG going 7 strong innings.
Since I’m not a gambler outside of family betting on who does the dishes, I wonder how much the new realm of statistics is employed in Vegas by big wagers. Where there is money, there is effort and detail.
Thanks for an interesting article!