Seattle’s Offense
The Seattle Mariners hit 160 home runs last season, the fourth lowest team total in the American League, ahead of only Oakland, Kansas City, and Baltimore. Those three teams combine to average a little under 70 wins. Seattle won 85 behind brilliant defense and the long arm of Felix Hernandez. Naturally, Seattle looked to add some power this off-season, right? Well, not quite.
Russell Branyan, the lone Mariner over 30 homers in 2009, is elsewhere, replaced at first base by Casey Kotchman (career high amount of homers in one season: 14). Jose Lopez was the only other Mariner to hit more than 20, and he’s now at third base, replacing Adrian Beltre and making way for the Mariners’ big free agent acquisition in Chone Figgins (career high: 9). The M’s did add some guys with pop, like Milton Bradley (career high: 22), Ryan Garko (career high: 21), and Eric Byrnes (career high: 26), but clearly the Mariners are not going to win because of the long ball. That raises the question: Do you need home runs to win ball games?
The answer is no, even in the modern era.
From 1998, the last time expansion took place, through the 2008 season, 85 teams won at least 90 games. The average amount of homers hit by the 90+ win teams is 192, the average amount of homers hit per team across the league from 1998-2009 is 174. Nearly 30% of the 90+ win teams between 1998 and 2009 hit fewer than the team average during that time period. It makes sense that most playoff quality teams hit more homers than average because most playoff teams are better than the rest of the league; whether it’s at scoring runs or preventing them.
The correlation coefficient for team wins and team homers between 1998 and 2009 is a not insignificant .19. That’s stronger than the correlation coefficient associated with doubles and wins (.078), triples and wins (.015), but not stronger than the relationship between walks taken and wins (.22). Seattle was second to last in walks last season. They’ve added quite a few patient batters, like the aforementioned Figgins (the only player in the American League with more than 100 walks last season). Despite walks evidently having a stronger relationship to wins, we won’t hear about it. *
In the end, homers and walks are really just means to scoring runs, and scoring runs is just a means to winning ballgames.
*Inevitably, someone will point out the obvious by saying that one walk is worth far less than a homer. That’s absolutely true, but it’s not the argument. I’m not arguing that teams should focus on walks instead of homers or that walks are more valuable than homers, I’m simply showing that walks correlate better with winning games than homers do. There are ways to win without doing either. Just ask the 2007 Angels who didn’t do much walking or homering and still won 94 games.
Good read. I’m not as concerned with Seattle’s offense as I am with their infield and pitching depth. Do you have a link to the math behind the win coefficients with homers, doubles, triples, and walks?
Based on the direction Seattle has been going, I predict they’ll beat their Pythagorean expectation handily. They’ll win as many 2-1, 3-2, 4-3 games as they’ll lose big. Of course, that’s assuming Griffey’s WAR doesn’t start with – .
Joe Posnanski did a really interesting blog post last night in this vein (http://goo.gl/qrjP). He runs a whole bunch of numbers to determine what factors are most predictive of which team will win a baseball game. Not surprisingly (well, not surprising for anyone who reads Fangraphs) teams that hit more home runs than they’re opponent won 75% but teams that had a higher OBP won 83% of the time.
My favorite stat tho: Counter intuitive to baseball CW, the team that left the most men on base last year won 58% of the time. I guess getting them on there, not just hitting them in, is the real goal.
Good stuff.
In reality, Seattle did look to add some power but didn’t find any real good deals. To bring back Russell Branyan early in the off-season, the team would’ve had to have given him that multi-year contract that he’d been dreaming about. And what else was out there….Jason Bay? No thanks.
The offense has definitely improved over the off-season, even though it won’t translate into more HRs.
Imagine what Adrian Gonzalez would do for them. Would think Lopez, Bradley, even Gutierrez all fall into more appropriate slots.
Not sure how much it’s been analyzed, but just as some pitchers thrive in the 8th and not the 9th, some guys are probably best suited as #5 hitters. Putting the simple label of “cleanup hitter” next to their name generates more pressure. (One of the reasons I think Beltre will do well in Boston.)
I doubt this is very important. For example, Beltre has a higher OPS for his career hitting clean-up than any other position in the batting order. Obviously there are selection issues there (more likely to hit 4th in years that you are hitting well or against certain pitchers), but it doesn’t exactly support the idea that he’ll hit much better in Boston as he moves down in the order.
Beltre will do well in Boston, but it has everything to do with Fenway being great for RH pull hitters and Safeco being awful for them, and nothing to do with his position in the batting order.
The 2007 Angels also had a pythag of 90-72, and played in a division with two pretty bad teams and one really overrated team. I mean, granted the Mariners play in a bad division, but you guys are nuts if you don’t think the offense is a concern.
” Jose Lopez…he’s now at third base…making way for the Mariners’ big free agent acquisition in Chone Figgins.”
Figgins will play 2B and Lopez 3B? I checked the ST boxscores for confirmation, cool.
It’s not a done deal yet — they’re still evaluating it. But that’s the positions they’ve played in the ST games so far. At the start Wakamatsu said they’d make a decision relatively late in ST after they’d given the experiment some time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an announcement one way or the other happened this week (today was an off day, which often is an opportunity for the brain trust to meet and make a decision). The thinking is that a rangy SS helps the 3B more than the 2B, so having Jack Wilson on Jose’s left mitigates the latter’s range issues and makes the infield stronger overall — assuming Lopez can otherwise perform adequately at 3B: he’s got a good arm but he’s not going to make anybody forget Beltre fielding balls down the line or barehanding bunts.
This positional flexibility does potentially make Lopez, and to a lesser extent Figgins, more valuable to you Fantasy folks, though.
At age 23 Lopez hit 11 home runs. At 24 he hit 17. Last year at age 25 he hit 25 home runs and averaged 5 home runs per month for June, July, August and September. Now the projections for this year have him regressing at age 26 to less than 20. My question is, is it likely that a 26 year old who has progressed for each of the last 3 years will regress at this age? Somebody is going to have to present some pretty strong evidence to support that.
dbuff I agree with you completely. I don’t care if Jose Lopez doesn’t walk. He grinds out at-bats (did you see the one where he fouled off 13 balls in one at-bat last year!?) and his power numbers have been progressing like crazy.
I get so sick of all of his detractors talking about walks and how he is going to be traded. I hope he drops bombs all year and hits 40 hrs coming into his physical prime. Can anyone say Adrian Beltre 2004??
it wouldn’t be a bad idea to note that the mariners have done a fine job, not just of constructing a team, but constructing one around one’s stadium. a home run hitter will have less value in seattle than in most towns because of safeco’s pitcher friendly environs. so it makes no sense to pay a premium in free agency or trade for those players. by contrast, the value of high OBP will be basically unaffected by safeco.
If you look at the record of teams that do not hit home runs, you will find the average is well below 500. I think the Angels had the best record in games without a HR last year, something like 22-23.
Especially in a low run environment, such as in a pitchers duel where runners are hard to come by, HR’s tend to be more important to the games outcome.
Over the course of a 162 games season, where more walks mean the difference between scoring 6 or 8 runs in a game, the HR may not seem as important and the walk more so. I understand the importance of OBP and theoretical runs scored, but lets stop dissing the 2 events (sometimes 1) that cause the scoreboard to change in a game, and that’s the RBI and HR.
I wish someone would develop a stat for players showing the percentage of a players BB that led to him scoring a run, advancing a runner who later scored as a result of his BB and the runners advancement, or walking with 2 outs and runs scoring after the walk. That might do more to boost the walks value and players value (those who walk a lot) than anything. Theoretical runs are all well and good, but how many of JD Drews BB’s (as an example) contribute to runs actually being scored.
In the meantime, no team has won a World Series this century without a 30 HR hitter. Balance is the key, OBP and SLG are both needed in a lineup, one without the other is playing with fire.
This may seem intuitively true, but lots of things that seem so turn out to be false. How many “pitchers duels” were ultimately decided by a HR, vs some other sequence of events that led to a run scoring? Without some kind of data you’re just making assertions that, plausible as they might sound, have no support.
The 1965 Los Angeles Dodgers won the N.L. pennant and the World Series. Their top home run hitters, Jim Lefebvre and Lou Johnson, hit 12 home runs each. The Dodgers hit 78 home runs, the fewest in the National League. The Dodgers staff, which included hall-of-famers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, gave up 49 more home runs than the Dodgers hit. They didn’t have a slugging percentage over .400 except for pitcher Don Drysdale.
That is sooo 20th century. Clearly, he said THIS century, or since 2000. Hardly a bold statement however.
So what? I didn’t claim to rebut his statement about no team winning the series this century without a 30 home run hitter. I was pointing out an extreme example of a team that won consistently while being heavily out-homered over the course of a season (and other seasons as well).
I didn’t claim that you did claim that. I was pointing out the disclaimer “this century” is a SSS. Lighten up, Frances.
Interesting article, but I have what may be a dumb question. Is the correlation coeffecient negative for walks taken and wins, that is how I am interpretting the (.22) ? Does that imply that more walks lead to less wins because the negative value shows a decreasing linear relationship?
Did you happen to try to find the relationship between wins and team homers above the league average? That might lead to a higher correlation coeffecient, but of course, correlation does not imply causation, but its still an interesting article.
A correlation of .19 is pretty insignificant imo. It shows nearly no correlation between the two. Despite the fact that it may be higher than other factors, that does not make it relevant. It just goes to show that many, many factors go into a team’s ability to win ballgames.
Home run hitters are walked a lot.
You can’t win in the modern game withou hitting HRs. The small ballparks put a premium on guys who lift the ball. What were once outs are now HRs, and what were once line-drive singles are now often outs as OFers are in much shallower.
Except if the crackdown on PEDs continues, perhaps what were once outs, and then became HRs, are outs again.
And, since we’re talking about the M’s, it’s worth noting they play half their games in something that does not play like a “small ballpark” (especially for RH hitters).
It would be nice to see that quantified, if you’re going to make that argument. I’m not sure where you want to draw the line on a “HR Hitter” (25 per year? 30? More?) But I guess you’re asserting that the guys in that category have a higher BB% than other players with similar contact rates?