A Good Weekend, But Not Good Enough For Some

Rise and shine, Fackers. I know it's Monday, but the good weekend that was in Yankeeland should help soften the blow. They managed to get in all three games without so much as a delay despite a tropical depression lurking just off the coast in the Atlantic which prevented some complications later in the season. Although the Yanks struggled in their first meeting with the White Sox in Chicago, they swept this three game set and might have dealt the final blow to the Pale Hose' playoff hopes for this year.

After surrendering the lead in a dramatic 7th inning on Friday, the Bombers got a walk off, homer from Robinson Cano, with runners in scoring position, no less. Saturday played host to an offensive explosion and a stellar pitching contribution from the most unlikely of places. You can't tell just by looking at the final score, but Sunday's game was more similar to Friday's than Saturday's in that it was hotly contested. The Yanks held on tight until the bottom of the seventh inning and only after that did their offense finally take over.

In their past 9 games (dating back to the beginning of the Red Sox series), the Yanks have scored an average of 8 runs per game, which has allowed them to go 6-3 during that stretch against three teams that were all in Wild Card contention when it began despite allowing almost 6 against.

Steve at Was Watching, however, is not impressed. Yesterday, he noted that the Yankees are "only" 33-30 when playing a team with a record at or above .500 and even goes as far as to label the post "possible bad news". The point of the article was apparently to insinuate that the Yankees are doomed in the playoffs:

...but, I'm thinking ahead to the post-season, for the Yankees. And, there will be no Blue Jays, A's, Orioles, Twins or Mets for the Yankees to play in October. Most likely, New York will have to deal with Detroit or Texas in the ALDS and then face someone like the Angels, Red Sox or Rays in the ALCS (should the Yankees advance past the ALDS for the first time since 2004). And, that’s a horse of another color, no?

Well yes, the postseason is different than the regular season. But the rest of that argument? Yikes. Where to begin?

How about the fact that the Twins, who Steve lumped in with the "losing" teams, as a result of winning ONE GAME, are now at .500, swinging the Yankees record from 33-30 to 40-30 against these teams, which is now the best in the AL. So his post went from spurious to irrelevant in roughly 5 hours.

Just because it's listed in a column on Baseball-Reference doesn't make it a useful stat. Aside from the perfect example provided by the Twins above (which could have been prevented by removing their 0-7 record against the Yanks), there are plenty of good reasons not to take much stock in team's play against other squads with "winning records".

For one, the teams are divided based on their cumulative record for the season, which for various reasons doesn't always accurately reflect their strength at various points within it. For instance, the Yankees took 5 of the 6 games they played against the Mets this year, but going into that 6th game, the Mets were 37-36. Now, after putting $85M on the DL, they are a shell of their former selves and 13 games below .500 so it looks like the Yankees were beating up on a cupcake.

A while back, (actually while debunking a piece on WSJ.com that claimed having a losing record against teams over .500 was actually a good thing) we determined that the average winning percentage against teams over .500 is around .430. This means that an average team would be 27-36 against teams with winning records through 63 games. Using that as a benchmark, even the 33-30 Steve was working with is quite a healthy showing.

As we have more recently discussed, the fine folks as Baseball Prospectus have studied what makes a team likely to succeed in October and at no point was the team's record against opponents with winning records even factored into the equation.

For better or for worse, over the next month, more and more emphasis is going to be placed on the Yankees odds in the postseason. There will be countless theories proposed about why the Yanks are poised to return to World Series glory or be bounced in the first round. The truth is that there are a myriad of variables that will ultimately determine how they fare, and the most important one is luck.

Winning Against Winners

Perhaps you've noticed that the Yanks have struggled against the better teams they've faced this year. You'd be on to something, because they are only 24-29 against teams with winning records. Maybe you think that is a bad thing since those are the teams they are likely to face in the playoffs. Would you be wrong? (h/t Shyster @ CTB)

This actually isn't a bad sign at all, though. In fact, it's the mark of a champion. In recent years, winning the World Series has had nothing to do with being good against good competition. Five of the nine champions this decade posted losing regular-season records against opponents that were .500 or better, including the 2008 Phillies (43-46).

Conversely, teams that excel against tough opponents tend to flop in the postseason. Not since the 1995 Braves has the team with the best record against .500-or-better competition won the World Series that same season. The Los Angeles Angels keep demonstrating this: They dominated such opponents in 2007 (.594) and 2008 (.605), yet lost in the first round both years.

Our pal Craig goes along with this theory and throws out an admittedly "untestable yet moderately-satisfying hypothesis" comparing baseball teams to marathon runners. He proposes some interesting ideas, but I'm not buying the original premise of the article.

First, let's point out the sketchy logic from the quote above.

1. I wouldn't say winning a World Series has "nothing to do" with how teams play against good competition. Five of the past nine champions is A) a limited sample size and B) only one Game 7 (in 2002) away from saying 5/9 had winning records against opponents that were .500+.
   
   
2. Why would the author, Darren Everson, break it at 2000? What happens when you go back from 1995-1999? Every single World Series Champion had a winning record against winning teams during the regular season. So from 1995-2008, nine out of 14 have fit that mold. Kind of undermines the point of the article, huh? Don't let the facts...
   
   
3. "Not since the 1995 Braves has the team with the best record against .500-or-better competition" - Eight teams make the playoffs and one can have the best record against +.500 competition. Do you know how many times the team with the best record overall has won over that span? One (and a half). The 1998 Yankees (114 wins) and the 2007 Red Sox who, along with the Indians, won 96 games that year.
   
   
4. "The Los Angeles Angels keep demonstrating this..." - By doing it twice in a row? Not much of a trend when looking at 14 years of data, is it?

One further point that I would like to add is that by definition, the entire league plays under .500 ball against teams with winning records.

Starting with 1996 (so as to include only 162 game seasons) 191 out of a possible 386 team seasons have ended with winning records. In total, those teams are 17,321 - 13,611, which equates to a .570 winning percentage. So on average, teams can expect to go 35-46 if they play 81 games against teams with winning records. That makes .500 against those teams look pretty good, right?

Is it imperative that a team plays well against winning teams during the regular season? No, but if you take an objective look at the data and go a little further back, it certainly appears to be a good sign.

OPS w/RISP

Over at Circling the Bases, Matthew Pouliot's stat of the day yesterday was team's OPS with runners in scoring position. Overall, the Yankees ranked 18th, but in realtion to the total OPS, they had the third largest lag in the league with .53, behind only the Diamondbacks and the Nationals (those numbers have obviously changed as of today).

I think as fans, we have all at a certain point been frustrated with the Yankees' recent inabilty to get "clutch" hits and drive runners home, so I decided to try and get some historical perspective on this. 

Using Baseball-Reference, I took it all the way back to 1989 and charted the team's OPS, OPS w/runners in scoring position and winning percentage.

Here are a few things that jumped out:

• Between 1989 and 2007, there were only three years in which the team's OPS w/RISP was lower than the team's overall OPS. However, that was the case last year and is so far this season as well. Is this more than a small sample size fluke? Is it a trend developing? 
  
  
• Total OPS has a fairly strong correlation to winning percentage, with the expection of this year. 
  
  
• Take a look at the increase in total OPS from 89-94. Sure, the team was getting better winning percentage-wise, but can you think of another thing that was starting to happen throughout baseball at that time?  
  
  
• Interestingly, the 2009 Yanks have almost the exact same OPS as the 1998 team (.817 to .818), however in '98 that number with runners in scoring position was .860 compared with .793 this year.
  
  
• That .860 figure is not the highest on the list. That would be the .862 belonging to the 2002 Yankees, who scored almost 100 fewer runs that the '99 team due to a lower total OPS. 

Any other observations?