Athletics 6, @Angels 5: A 9th-inning roller-coaster left the Halos queasy and their fans downright nauseous. After the visitors tacked on 2 runs while the best Angel reliever sat idle, Anaheim quickly got those runs back and — with no outs — had the tying run on 3rd, and the winner on 1st in the speedy form of Peter Bourjos.
But in an uncanny replay of their first inning, the Angels were turned aside again. Lefty Jerry Blevins replaced closer Grant Balfour, which turned around Kendrys Morales to his much weaker side, whence he feebly fanned. Then Howie Kendrick got a hittable pitch on 1-and-2, but his hard grounder found only leather, as Josh Donaldson started a 5-4-3 that dropped the Angels 2.5 games out of the playoff chase.
- Wait a minute! Blevins didn’t have a save all year — wasn’t it against the rules to bring him in there?!?
- Speaking of roller-coasters … In the 1st, Torii Hunter singled to put men on the corners with no outs; they didn’t score. In the 2nd, he fanned with a man on 3rd and 1 out. In the 7th, he homered to bring his team within a run. Top of the 9th, he misplayed Coco Crisp‘s drive, costing at least 1 run and maybe 2. In the home 9th, he drove in a run and went 1st-to-3rd on Albert’s laser single to LF. But there he stayed.
- Talk about an eerie replay: Look how last year’s 9/11 game ended for the Angels. That loss also left them 2.5 games out of the postseason race.
- A’s are 38-17 since the Break, best in MLB, and have the AL’s 2nd-best record over all.
- Rookie Dan Straily allowed 2 HRs, making 6 in his 2 starts against Anaheim — but won his 2nd straight outing and has 3 QS in 4 tries.
@Diamondbacks 1, Dodgers 0: Saturday’s Giant-tipping rally was nice and all, but LA has been blanked on 5 hits in both games since then, without ever getting 2 hits in an inning. Tuesday’s tormentor was Ian Kennedy, who has spearheaded 6 wins in 7 starts vs. LA in the last 2 years. The leading victim was Clayton Kershaw, whose first taste of 1-0 defeat was made more bitter by the E6 in the 7th that led to the game’s lone run.
- Brad Ziegler relieved Kennedy in the 8th with the tying run on 1st and induced a 3-6-3 GDP to end the frame. Ziegler’s 17 GDPs rank 8th in the NL, even though he has just 58.2 IP. The only other season of 16+ GIDP in 60 IP or less was … Ziegler’s rookie year, 2008 (20 GDP, 59.2 IP).
- Yo, Adrian — that pitch is a strike all day long. The Big Pickup still hasn’t homered since his first swing in Dodger blue.
- “I gotchyer ‘defensive liability’ right heah,” says Jason Kubel.
- Nice setup and throw by Kemp, but don’t even try to tell me that Dan Iassogna saw the play. Can any of you umps explain his last-second change of position?
- The Snakes have won 16 games by 1-0 in their history, four of them against LA.
- It was the 6th game this year with no earned runs, all since Aug. 21 and 4 since Sept. 5.
@Padres 6, Cardinals 4: St. Louis nicked Edinson Volquez in the 2nd and 3rd, but missed many chances at bigger innings (1-14 with RISP), while the Friars focused their ministrations on a 5-run 4th. Luke Gregerson came on with 1 out in the 8th and the tying run on 1st and recorded 5 outs for the save.
- “Pay it forward?” Last year, St. Louis profited from Atlanta’s 10-20 finish, making up a 10.5-game gap to snag the wild card on the final night. This year’s Cards are doing what they can to help those less fortunate, dropping 10 of 14 to keep free-falling LA and Pittsburgh in the race (1 GB and 2.5 GB), while opening doors long thought barred to Milwaukee and Philly (both 4 GB).
- Maybe they should’ve shut *him* down at 160 IP? After reeling off 5 straight August wins (1.47 ERA), Wainwright has lost 3 in a row, yielding 16 runs in 13.2 IP.
- Everybody talks about STL’s one-run record (17-23), but they’re now 6-14 in games decided by 2 runs.
- Gregerson got the 15th save of exactly 5 outs in MLB this year; that would tie last year’s low for the expansion era.
- Volquez is the first pitcher since 2009 with 100+ walks in a season.
@Red Sox 4, Yankees 3: I dare not say much about this game — I don’t want to risk a Schadenfreudian slip.
- Every Yankee team from 1918-2011 won at least 10 games in which they hit no HRs; this year’s model is 4-22 in such games. (Baltimore is 9-28, but nobody was talking about that yesterday as the O’s slipped back into 1st place.)
- Joe Girardi used pinch-runners on 1st base with 1 out in both the 8th and 9th. The first was erased on a DP, the second on a CS.
- There was a time when you wouldn’t dream of stealing with A-Rod up. But I guess Eduardo Nunez didn’t expect to be the 2nd guy thrown out in 22 tries against Ryan Lavarnway.
JA:
This is hardly news, but the Yankees are too old. A bunch of old sluggers, matched with a group of pitchers, mostly old, who aren’t at the top of their game either. If they don’t continue their slide in the division, it will almost certainly be because Baltimore and Tampa Bay have their weaknesses come home to them as well. When I look at the standings in the AL, I’m struck by the number of teams—6—with almost identical W-L records, something rare for this late in the season. Parity seems to be the rule, a parity of not-quite-mediocrity.
I think it’s fair to say that the Rangers are a notch above everybody else. I fully expect them to take the whole shebang this year.
Uh, you know, nothing fair about that statement.
Nats and Reds hold better (far better) records.
The A’s are charging up like demons in the division. I don’t have the numbers, but I’m certain the A’s have a better record than the Rangers since the All-Star break.
The Rangers may be baseball’s answer the the Buffalo Bills.
Yeah, I kinda agree. The Rangers are well constructed for the regular season. Their pitching is good enough, and they’re going to hit enough two-run doubles and three-run homers to win a good number of games. But as we’ve seen the past two years they might be doomed to failure in the postseason.
Ooops, “far better” records for the Nats & Reds was way overstating it. My bad.
Well, nsb’s original comment, and my “notch above everyone else” response, were both w.r.t. the American League.
As for the WS, the Rangers have two straight years of experience there, which is most certainly an advantage for them, whereas very few of the Nats or Reds players have ever even been in a playoff game, let alone a WS.
And since you are a fan of luck-based arguments tag, I find it hard to follow your argument that the Rangers previous two years’ experience somehow works against them.
Jim,
Recent WS have shown that having two dominating starters and good hitting are the key to winning a short series. There are of course other ways to win, but I don’t see the Rangers as having enough pitching. Experience is great but a couple guys with low ERAs and high K/BB ratios are better.
John: Do you mind telling me how you ran the PI for fewest games won by a team with no home runs? I ran it and got different results from yours.
Richard — Thanks for the note. I definitely messed up those searches. (Rushing to post before I dashed off to the Mets game, fool that I am.)
Here are the correct numbers (unless I screw this up, too):
— Every Yankee team from 1918-2011 won at least TEN games in which they hit no HRs.
— Every full-season team from 1918-2011 won at least FIVE games in which they hit no HRs. (The ’94 Tigers won 4; the ’99 Tigers won 5.)
I got those same results.
Damn, John, everyday you come up with some quality coinage, even cross culturally and in multiple languages. Schadenfreudian slip! Awesome.
Also, I’ve been keeping tabs: the Angels, Braves, Cardinals, Dodgers, EFG, HIJK… – basically every team except the one whose nickname begins with O has had their one-run games decided the way they’re supposed to be: by blind luck. (I loved how the Braves won 1-0 when the opposing pitcher failed to catch the return toss from his catcher: talk about random.) Jim definitely has some major voodoo going on with regard to the Orange Birds’ record in that department. We all should get a piece of his John the Conqueroo or some of his goober dust or whatever he’s using.
Anyway, since my man Timmy P seems to be shirking his duties, those hard-charging Phils won again Wednesday. Juan Pierre didn’t do a whole lot but he was still out there giving his all. Which is more than can be said about most of us.
Since Jim and I made our little wager, not only have the O’s continued their mystical dominance of 1-run games, they’ve actually raised their winning percentage. They were 19-6 at the time, but have gone 7-1 since then.
No voodoo or goober dust tag, just simple binomial probability models. And I have to disagree with your tab-keeping (although I will check the records again), because the last time I checked, the other teams who were doing well in 1-r games at the time the O’s were 19-6, have continued to do so, the Indians and Giants coming immediately to mind.
Why you are so attached to this luck argument I don’t know, but such an argument is much more akin to voodoo than any of the arguments I’ve presented to date. I mean, certainly you don’t ascribe the Royals’ awful record in 1-r games over 20 years to “luck” do you?
Jim,
I guess I just don’t see the applicability of binomial probability models in this instance. Now I obviously could be wrong. It’s clear to me when something can only be heads or tails that bpm fit. But baseball games don’t work that way.
Let’s look at Baltimore’s situation in particular. I recently wrote on another thread that I found a rough breakdown of their first 29 one-run games (they are I think two-and-one or in one-run games since then).
The wins:
8 times the O’s had a multi-run lead by the middle innings but allowed various numbers of later-inning runs to record the one-run victory.
7 times the O’s had the one-run lead in the top of the 7th or earlier, and held the other team scoreless for 3+ innings.
6 times the O’s won in extra innings.
1 time, the O’s came from behind in the 8th inning and kept lead in the 9th.
1 time, the O’s blew lead in the 8th but scored in the 9th to win.
The losses:
1 in extra innings
3 times they fell short after scoring late runs
1 time they had a 3-0 lead but allowed 4 runs in the 5th-8th to lose
1 time they trailed by 2-1 most of the game and never scored
So, basically, the O’s have a superior bullpen, which we all recognize, and are skilled at protecting a one-run lead in the late innings (as are, I think, the Braves, Reds and Yanks, to name three other teams with very good bullpens but without eye-popping one-run margins). What the O’s are not skilled at is adding to their lead in the late innings, i.e. tallying those classic insurance runs, which their runs-scored total indicates. In essence, that first important skill may be exaggerated by their lack of that second important skill.
The O’s have also gotten nice early leads before frittering most of them away while again not adding runs once they’ve amassed the early lead and then finally closing the door for the W. But is winning this type of game really indicative of any particular skill?
I’m not sure anything truly meaningful can be said about these one-run games in the aggregate. Plus, when I talk about “luck” in such games, I’m talking to a large extent about exactly the first 15 games (wins) mentioned above. I’m not saying the O’s aren’t skilled in certain vital facets of the game, just that there’s a good deal of “luck” involved in having so many of your games end with this type of one-run margin (because other “better” teams generally score more when they have a one-run lead or conversely let in fewer late-inning runs when they have a big lead).
Obviously, closing the door when you have a one-run lead in the seventh indicates a very good bullpen, but even then to truly assess the overall luck factor you’d have to examine each of these particular games closely to see if the O’s benefited from specific examples of in-game luck (in their most recent one-run win, for example, a late-inning blown umpire call was crucial to it).
Winning the most number of games by 3+ or 5+ or 10+ runs is definitely a skill and, in addition, a good indicator of how strong a team is. I’m just not seeing the same with winning one-run games. And none of this is a matter of my being “attached to luck.” It’s just that baseball as a game depends so much on luck (the difference between a base hit in the hole and a 643 double play is often miniscule and not genuinely controlled by the batter; neither is a shot down the line that draws chalk as opposed to one that misses by a half-inch, to name just two of hundreds of instances), and I think we have to really look at the role it plays to be able to recognize when a team is really good and can neutralize a lot of the inevitable bad breaks it will be confronted with as opposed to when it’s winning by unsustainable means.
tag, you’re re-treading old ground with some of this stuff. In no particular order:
1. Whether a team is successful at winning non 1-r games does not directly address the question of whether they are skilled at winning 1-r games, strictly speaking, even if a correlation is reasonable to expect: it’s not the question at hand. However, if we want to bring that point into the discussion…if you would argue that teams are using skill to win games overall (and lack thereof to lose them), why would you not also believe they are doing so in a subset (i.e. 1-r) of games? On the other hand, what is your explanation for a team like the Indians this year, who are 40-75 in non 1-r games but 19-9 in 1-r games? Why the huge disparity?
2. W.R.T. the fact that the O’s have won eight games where they built a lead in the middle innings and then held on for a 1-r win: yes, that’s *skill* involved in doing that. It takes baseball *skill* to build the lead over the first half of the game, and then also some *further* level of skill to hold onto it. But you ignore this and focus on the fact that they’ve eight times “frittered away” these leads.
3. You say “Winning…by 3+ or 5+ or 10+ runs is definitely a skill…a good indicator of how strong a team is”. Yes, it is, but so what? It shows you have skill in winnin by large margins. This does not logically equate to the conclusion that when you win by small margins, that skill was not involved in doing so. It doesn’t follow.
4. The fact that they’ve won 7 of 8 in extras is direct evidence that they have the type of skill that you seem to be equating (solely) with winning close games. You can’t find any type of game that is more direct evidence of the ability to pull out a tight game. And as everybody now agrees, there’s a clear and obvious reason for this: they have an excellent bullpen that shuts other teams down in late innings.
And finally, just a return to some basic numbers. The Orioles started 11-6 in their 1-r games. Pretty good in and of itself, almost 2 of every three. Unlikely by “chance” causes alone, but not out of the question under a random assignment of Ws and Ls to each game. But they then ripped off 15 out of 16 wins in such games. This, not even to mention their very successful record in the next closest type of game, 2-run wins.
I mean at what point do you just throw in the towel on this? What kind of evidence are you looking for exactly, that will convince you?
The bottom line is that “chance” or “luck” explanations are often just vague grasps at mirages of straws when no other explanation is immediately obvious or apparent. Sometimes chance is indeed a perfectly valid place-holder for processes we don’t fully understand, but that’s not the same thing as saying “it’s due to ‘luck'” Indeed, good philosophical arguments can be made that there is no such thing as “chance” at all in the universe, as per Einstein’s famous quote that God does not play dice relative to the laws of the universe.
” It’s clear to me when something can only be heads or tails that bpm fit. But baseball games don’t work that way.”
Yes, they do! You can either win them, or you can lose them; two possible results, exactly like flipping a coin, and binomial models are designed for exactly this kind of process. You are confusing possible outcomes with the ability to explain the causes of those possible outcomes.
And furthermore results observed from repeatedly flipping a coin are not truly “random” either, in the common sense of what is meant by that term. It’s just that we have no ability to account for the exact, specific forces applied to the coin each time it’s flipped. Cause and effect doesn’t go away just becuase we don’t have the measurements needed to allow for predictability in the results of individual trials.
Jim, the Royals have been bad in one-run games the last 20 years because they’ve been bad in all games.
The “luck hypothesis” says that good teams generally win more one-run games than bad teams but that is not necessarily the case, and they tend not to win one-run games at nearly the same rate that they win games with 3+ or 5+ or 10+ run margins.
In fact, as winning margins approach a single run, “luck” plays more and more of a role in the game’s outcome – so much so that the results of one-run games don’t exhibit much consistency in who wins them and “luck” seems to be the overriding determining factor in their outcome. (Not that there can’t be other factors – good bullpen, etc. – but these factors appear to be outweighed by luck.)
Teams that play, say, .620 ball only rarely have that good a percentage in one-run games. Teams that play, say, .400 ball usually also have a losing record in one-run games but it can easily be better than their overall winning percentage and it can occasionally be much better (that 1990s Tiger team that lost 110+ won more than half their one-run games).
Does anyone know what happened to the Yankees Mt. Rushmore post?
And the O’s do it again, winning yet another one run game, this time 3-2 in 14 innings. After failing to score with the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the 13th, the O’s scored in the bottom of the 14th after two were out and none on. Jones walked on a 3-2 pitch, then Chavez and Machado singled.
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