A Good Time To Be Hurting
The M’s are going to open the season at significantly less than full strength. With Cliff Lee, Erik Bedard, and Jack Hannahan on the DL, the team is going to have to fight through April with a roster that would probably finish below .500 over a full 162 game season. Don’t expect this team to come firing out of the gates and blow the doors off of everyone in the first month of the season.
However, if the M’s had to choose a month in which to be hurting, April may just have been their best bet. While they start the season with ten games against the A’s and Rangers, they follow that with series’ against Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City. There isn’t a likely playoff team in that bunch, and in reality, the last two weeks of April looks like one of the easiest stretches of baseball this team will play all year.
It’s easy to look at the roster and be a little discouraged with how this spring has gone, but the M’s may have caught something of a lucky break in their schedule. Thanks to the weaker opponents they play in the first month of the season, they’re unlikely to get buried early. Even with a lot of question marks, I wouldn’t be surprised if the M’s posted a winning record in April, which should inspire a decent amount of optimism if Lee and Bedard can rejoin a team that’s already over .500.
May to August are going to be tough. The M’s need their big guns back for that stretch. April, though, they may just be able to sneak through with this less than perfect roster.
Why does it matter if players are hurt during a strong or weak part of the schedule? If having players hurt decreases your win probability by (say) 5%, then isn’t it equally bad regardless of whether you’re playing a team where you’re expected to win 40% of the time as opposed to a team where you’re expected to win 60% of the time?
Still, it would be nice to make hay during that weak stretch. Hmph.
Well Julian if you’d be expected to beat team A by 3 runs on average, while being expected to beat team B by .5 runs on average, losing 1 run production per game would swing the the advantage to team B, but not to team A.
Numbers exaggerated for illustrative purposes. The bigger your advantage over an opponent, the more lee-way you have on giving up resources.
BJ:
Yes, but why is the 50% point sacred? If I play 100 games against team A and lose (say) 40 games instead of 30 because my guys are hurt, and I play 100 against team B and lose (say) 55 instead of 45, then I’m still 10 games worse off.
I think what you may be trying to argue is that there’s a non-linear effect going on here whereby decreasing your run expectancy by 1 affects your win probability less if you’re expecting to win by 3 than if you’re expecting to win by 0.5. I might believe that for the numbers you just gave, but the separation between MLB teams isn’t nearly that big and so I just don’t see how the non-linear effects will be that strong.
Also, on another note, losing Lee and Bedard *over a season* would be worth, what, 8-9 wins? Over a month, that translates to roughly 1.5 wins. Over 25 games, that hardly seems like a big deal, particularly with the degree that luck impacts the outcomes of baseball games.
Not sure what I’m arguing for mathematically. 🙂 The 50% point isn’t sacred, I’m saying that percentages are irrelevant.
The better the opponent, the more I’ll need better players in order to win. Losing a player doesn’t in practice reduce your chance of winning by any percentage, it takes away that players production and prevention.
If you play KC and you put up 10 runs, losing Lee’s better prevention may not matter much that day. Playing against the Yankees, it’s more likely that they will beat up on Vargas or whatever. Losing you 1 game.
Really? Or was that a little hyperbole?
Hannahan isn’t any great shakes, and Bedard wasn’t being counted upon anyway. So, basically, if Lee had not fallen into Jack’s lap last winter, the M’s would be an under .500 club this season?
It makes sense. Between those players that’s something like 6-8 Wins over a full season with a lot of that coming from Cliff Lee. The team looks to be roughly 85 wins on paper as it is.
I guess I have less respect for the M’s front office now. They didn’t target Lee, they sort of lucked into him. Of course, it took some skill to be in a position to be lucky, and took some smarts to pull the trigger on the deal, but still, without that lucky break they wouldn’t even have put together a .500 roster?
Cliff Lee isn’t the only piece of the roster missing right now.
For that mattter, what makes you think that the rest of the roster would’ve stayed static if they hadn’t gotten Cliff Lee?
The Mariners offense looks like straight garbage right now.
Could someone a little more familiar with the rules let me know if this is possible. Could we start Lee on the roster so his 5 game suspension is served (assuming it isn’t appealed successfully,) then DL him for 15 days?
I guess I have less respect for the M’s front office now. They didn’t target Lee, they sort of lucked into him. Of course, it took some skill to be in a position to be lucky, and took some smarts to pull the trigger on the deal, but still, without that lucky break they wouldn’t even have put together a .500 roster?
That’s ridiculous. First, the roster wouldn’t have looked the same if the Lee acquisition never happened. Second, Z didn’t just “luck” into Lee. They had been targeting him as far back as the trade deadline last year.
Could we start Lee on the roster so his 5 game suspension is served (assuming it isn’t appealed successfully,) then DL him for 15 days?
Maybe I’m missing something, but doesn’t 5 + 15 = 15 + 5 ?
It matters because the 5% hit on win probability you proposed does not balance out evenly amongst individual opponents throughout the year. Your win probability vs. the Yankees would take a much bigger hit (relative) with Cliff Lee out then your win probability vs. the Royals. If we were a median team, and there was an even distribution, it would be a different story.
When talking runs scored and runs prevented, each individual player during each individual game, on average, contributes only a fraction either way. You are correct that it’s not that big of a deal, especially considering luck plays such an important role in such a small sample size. However, in a game of fractions, each missing piece tightens the margin for error… and ours isn’t that big to begin with.
Julian’s right, people. For all practical mathematical purposes, the injuries will cost the M’s just as many games against bad opponents as they would have against good opponents. Dave’s point, if I’m reading between the lines correctly, relates more to the positive psychological impact of emerging from April above .500 and in contention, despite all the injuries.
Yeah, that.
If the team started 5-20, the media would freak out, Milton Bradley would be blamed (and that always goes well), and it could turn ugly real fast. So, the M’s are lucky in that they get a bit of a cupcake schedule in April, and avoid getting steamrolled by good teams while playing at less than full strength.
Another benefit psychologically could be the pitching staff. You have 4 guys trying to prove themselves with more room for error than facing the Yanks and Red Sox. They may not have to pitch quite as well to gain a win over lesser opponents, the offense could score more runs for them, etc.
With the opponents, those 4 guys just might have a great month.
Good thing we’ll have Sweeney on board during these tough psychological times…
Well, when Jack explained what happened, he described being asked if he wanted to trade for Lee. The only reason the M’s were able to get him is because Philly wanted to get rid of his salary and restock their farm system. From what he said, it certainly was driven from the Philly side.
Even if it was driven from the Philly side, it was driven to the M’s because they had been involved in discussions with Philly and Toronto about both Lee and Halladay for the past year. Do you really think there were no other teams in baseball who had 3 decent prospects that Philly might want? Obviously, there was a pre-existing connection there between the M’s and Toronto and Philly, and to not give Jack Z some credit for that connection is ridiculous.
That just makes absolutely no sense. Wouldn’t the curve accelerate as you moved farther away from an equal team?
In other words (with exaggerated numbers) your drop off in win probability from being equals to being 5 run underdogs is less than going from 5 to 10 run underdogs. Now I’ve never done the math, but there is no way that it has a linear relationship. It is the same reason a little league team would be a 1 in a quintillion underdog to a MLB team even though the run discrepancy is not nearly that large. You just reach a point where the run differential is too large to make up.
The fact you need to use “exaggerated numbers” to make your point perfectly makes my point. The fact that you’ve “never done the math” just hammers it home. For all practical purposes, it IS a linear relationship until you get to the extremes, and you will never get to the extremes in a game where the worst teams win 40% of their games and the best win 60%.
Well, yes, but it’s still a bit of a tricky decision, which is why the M’s wanted the suspension resolved instead of having the hearing postponed. By serving the games over the first five games of the year, the M’s would get to wait until the day of Lee’s start to activate him, making sure there were no setbacks. By immediately putting him on the DL, they have to gamble a bit if they want him to serve his suspension while still “injured.” They would need to try to predict when he would be five days away from being ready and a lot can happen over that five days. Because they’re going to have to go with a 24-man team for five days at some point, the only real downside to waiting five games to put him on the DL is that he can’t come off as soon. I’m not sure, exactly, but recall Ichiro only missed nine games at the beginning of last year because the DL stint is backdated a few days. However, if Lee is known to be out for at least twenty days, it seems to me to make the most sense to serve his five days over the first five games of the year, then DL him.
So, one of the main Mariners fan sites that (correctly, consistently) argues against the effect of things like “chemistry”, or reading too much into small sample size and early starts… is now talking about squishy things like psychological effect of a weaker schedule on pitching staff, possible media reaction to a slow start to the season (and their effect on Bradley), and how much standings after the first month of the season matter in a 6-month, 162-game schedule.
…
Who are you guys, and what have you done with USSMariner?
Yeah… you’re arrogant… so you must be right. Especially considering you’ve taken the considerable time “do the math”. Please… do share.
Maybe before you attempt to belittle those who disagree with you, you should study the meaning of a linear relationship.
C’mon now, guys. Be nice. Please?
You can disagree with the post, or each other, but words like “arrogant” start fights.
Big guns?
Lee?
That would be big gun.
Actually, the tone that incited the word “arrogant” started the fight, I deleted like 4 responses, and thought better of it, since I knew the next step was flame-war. But, FWIW. I agree with Former Star QB #16, certain people’s tone has not been very facilitating to constructive dialogue.
Just saying.
I agree I came off as arrogant and my tone could have been better. Sorry for that.