Tuesday, May 02, 2006
EXPECTATIONS
Last night's 1-0 loss to the Athletics exposed the impotency of our offense and wasted a fantastic start by Hector Carrasco. Adding to the frustration was that our guys hit four consecutive balls right on the button in our eighth and ninth innings, and all we got out of it was one lousy single. But such is life.
A lot of people were projecting mediocrity for the Angel offense, and thus for the team, before this season, so I'm sure they see our current performance as vindication. I always maintained that our offense should be in the middle-of-the-pack; we entered yesterday's game ranked a poor eleventh in the league, and I don't even want to look and see if last night knocked us back even further.
What I do want to see is whether or not we can reasonably expect this offense to improve. So I've looked at pre-season projections for our batters, using two different projection systems. One is the "Marcel the Monkey" system, developed by Tango Tiger. This is designed to be the simplest projection system possible, simply averaging a batter's past few seasons and applying an age adjustment. It is designed only to predict the predictable.
It doesn't include any minor league numbers, so to get fair projections of our youngest players I've also turned to Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projections, which he posts over at the Primer. Longtime readers may recall that I've fooled around with a projection system from time to time; my projections are often very similar to Dan's.
Anyway, what you see here are the actual Linear Weights Runs Above Average each of our hitters has produced thus far, as well as what was projected by Marcel and ZiPS for each player, prorated to how many plate appearances they've had.
Don't worry, if you want to skip the chart, the punchline comes at the end.
To sum up, our offense has been around 20 to 25 runs worse than we could have reasonably expected them to be to this point. That's around two wins. And two wins is the difference between being 14-12 and 12-14.
So we should be better than we are now. We only have four regulars who are out-performing expectations, and all of those overperformances are slight compared to the lack we're getting from the rest of the lineup.
If these guys can't turn it around and play like they're supposed to, it's their own fault.
Last night's 1-0 loss to the Athletics exposed the impotency of our offense and wasted a fantastic start by Hector Carrasco. Adding to the frustration was that our guys hit four consecutive balls right on the button in our eighth and ninth innings, and all we got out of it was one lousy single. But such is life.
A lot of people were projecting mediocrity for the Angel offense, and thus for the team, before this season, so I'm sure they see our current performance as vindication. I always maintained that our offense should be in the middle-of-the-pack; we entered yesterday's game ranked a poor eleventh in the league, and I don't even want to look and see if last night knocked us back even further.
What I do want to see is whether or not we can reasonably expect this offense to improve. So I've looked at pre-season projections for our batters, using two different projection systems. One is the "Marcel the Monkey" system, developed by Tango Tiger. This is designed to be the simplest projection system possible, simply averaging a batter's past few seasons and applying an age adjustment. It is designed only to predict the predictable.
It doesn't include any minor league numbers, so to get fair projections of our youngest players I've also turned to Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projections, which he posts over at the Primer. Longtime readers may recall that I've fooled around with a projection system from time to time; my projections are often very similar to Dan's.
Anyway, what you see here are the actual Linear Weights Runs Above Average each of our hitters has produced thus far, as well as what was projected by Marcel and ZiPS for each player, prorated to how many plate appearances they've had.
Don't worry, if you want to skip the chart, the punchline comes at the end.
Player Actual Marcel Diff ZiPS Diff(To read that: Jose Molina has been -7.7 runs against average this season [note: none of these figures are park-adjusted], Marcel projected he'd be -2.5 after having as many plate appearances as he's had, so he's -5.2 against expectations. ZiPS had him at -3.3 at this point, or -4.4 against expectations. In other words, he's been around five runs worse than we would have expected.)
Molina - 7.7 - 2.5 - 5.2 - 3.3 - 4.4
Mathis - 5.9 - 0.0 - 5.9 - 2.0 - 3.9
Kotchman -10.1 - 0.5 - 9.6 - 1.5 - 8.6
Kennedy + 0.2 - 1.0 + 1.2 - 1.4 + 1.6
Figgins + 0.5 - 0.8 + 1.3 - 0.7 + 1.2
Cabrera + 1.1 - 2.5 + 3.6 - 3.2 + 4.3
Anderson + 1.0 - 1.0 + 2.0 - 1.5 + 2.5
Erstad - 5.2 - 2.2 - 3.0 - 2.6 - 2.6
Guerrero + 1.5 + 5.0 - 3.5 + 6.4 - 4.9
Rivera - 1.1 - 0.3 - 0.8 - 0.1 - 1.0
Alfonzo - 5.0 - 0.7 - 4.3 - 0.8 - 4.2
Izturis + 0.6 - 0.7 + 1.3 - 0.6 + 1.2
Quinlan + 0.2 - 0.3 + 0.5 - 0.5 + 0.7
Salmon - 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1 - 1.2 + 0.2
Kendrick - 1.3 ----- - 1.3 - 0.2 - 1.1
TOTAL -32.2 - 8.4 -25.8 -13.2 -19.0
To sum up, our offense has been around 20 to 25 runs worse than we could have reasonably expected them to be to this point. That's around two wins. And two wins is the difference between being 14-12 and 12-14.
So we should be better than we are now. We only have four regulars who are out-performing expectations, and all of those overperformances are slight compared to the lack we're getting from the rest of the lineup.
If these guys can't turn it around and play like they're supposed to, it's their own fault.
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