Rangers Team Win Values

Yesterday, we talked about team win value totals, and how they won’t always match up with pythag win projections due to their context neutral nature. Today, I want to look at an example of why this is useful information, and how conclusions about a team’s true talent level based on RS/RA can be faulty.

Let’s talk about the 2008 Texas Rangers. They won 79 games, finishing nearly at a .500 record, despite the fact that they were outscored 967 to 901. Using the pythagenpat formula, you’d get 75 projected wins, so an analysis based on pythag might say the Rangers were lucky to win 79 games based on how they played. However, the total win values of their roster for 2008 paints them as an 84 win team. That’s significantly better than both their pythag and their actual record.

The difference, as usual, is situational performance. The Rangers allowed 98 more runs than the second to last AL team in run prevention, the Baltimore Orioles. Even when you include a park factor to make up for the environment they play in, they were still clearly the easiest team in the league to score runs against.

Now, it’s true, their pitching wasn’t very good. But it wasn’t far and away the worst in the league either. Their 4.83 FIP is actually substantially better than the Orioles 5.14 mark. Yes, Baltimore had a better defense and played in a less offensive-friendly park, but those don’t explain a 100 run difference in runs allowed when Texas’ pitchers posted a FIP of .3 runs better.

The difference can be found in situational pitching. The Rangers were unbelievably terrible at stranding runners – their LOB% of 65.7% was 3% worse than the next worst team, the Colorado Rockies. Look at these situational lines.

Bases Empty: .766 OPS, 5% below average
Men On Base: .874 OPS, 12% below average
Runners in Scoring Position: .891 OPS, 13% below average
Bases Loaded: .878 OPS, 8% below average

With no one on base, the Rangers were just not very good. Put a runner on, though, and they become disastrously terrible. Rallies just piled on top of rallies, and the runs came through like a flood.

There’s good news for Texas fans in this, though. FIP is more predictive from year to year than situational performance, so while their inability to leave runners on base hurt them in 2008, we shouldn’t expect that to repeat itself in 2009. They’re still not likely to be good at stranding runners (their pitchers aren’t really good at anything else, either), but they likely won’t be historically bad again.

This is one of the things that the team win values can highlight for us. The Rangers might have given up a lot of runs, but the way they went about giving up those runs shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as an indictment on the future abilities of their pitching staff. With a better expected situational performance, we can expect Texas to do a better job of keeping runs off the board even if their pitching and defense don’t improve at all.