ALDS Game Two Preview: Texas

by
October 6, 2010

It was a nice win for the Rangers today and they look to go up 2-0 with another win tomorrow. The only major change from game one to game two is that James Shields and C.J. Wilson get the call as the starters.

One knock against Shields is that he has been inconsistent this season. To see how consistent Shield’s and Wilson’s starts were across the season, I decided to graph both starter’s Game Scores from best to worst.

shieldWilsonGraph

Wilson has put up better Game Scores across the entire season when compared to Shield’s starts. Wilson had fifteen Game Scores over sixty, while Shields only put up six over sixty. Besides have more good games, Wilson’s bottom 5 performances don’t drop off like Shield’s bottom 5.

Each game that a starter does better, he gives he team a better chance of winning, no matter if he offically gets the win or the loss. Here are the team’s Win/Loss records when each pitcher pitched to a certain level of Game Score:

shieldWilsonGSchart

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The pitcher’s team usually won when the pitcher was able to achieve a game score of 56 or higher. If Shields can post Game Scores like his regular season numbers, he has about a 25% chance of throwing a great game, 50% of the time the game will be a toss up and 25% of the time it will be clunker. Wilson on the other hand had 50% of his game great, 30% in the toss up range and 20% in the bottom range. Shields season was consistently inconsistent over the season, while Wilson was generally consistently good.

The chances for the Rangers to win tomorrow’s game look good considering the scheduled pitchers. The Rays need to hope the “Good” Shields shows up to have a chance to even up the series.





 

Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

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My echo and bunnymen
15 years ago

Reminds me of a Modest Mouse lyric

How can someone inconsistent mess-up so consistently?

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