The Angels and the Irrelevant Improbability
Every week, for the Effectively Wild podcast, we solicit listener emails and questions. The questions lean heavily toward the hypothetical and absurd, and an email we got last week asked what it would look like if some given eccentric baseball team owner cared only about winning the most games in spring training. What would the preparation be like? What would the strategy be like? How, in general, would the baseball team look?
You could argue that baseball team would look a lot like the Angels. Last Friday afternoon, against the Brewers, the Angels rallied back from an early 3-0 deficit. They tied the game in the fourth, and after they eventually fell behind again, they rallied again, before walking off in the bottom of the ninth. A player named David Fletcher singled against a player named Tyler Spurlin, and the single scored a player named Matt Williams, but not that Matt Williams. The Angels stretched their spring-training record to 7-0. They stretched their spring-training unbeaten streak to 18.
There’s an important specificity in there. It was an unbeaten streak, and not a winning streak, because last March 28, the Angels tied the Cubs, and last March 29, the Angels tied the Indians. Last spring, roughly 8% or so of all the games ended in ties. Still, a tie is not a loss. On March 22, 2016, the Angels beat the A’s, and on March 3, 2017, the Angels beat the Brewers. Over the duration of the streak in between those bookends, the spring-training Angels went 16-0-2. Such an achievement is mathematically amazing. Here’s the MLB.com headline after game 18:
Shoemaker returns with two innings; Street exits
Williams scored the winning run. He might as well have been looking for dried apricots in an unfamiliar grocery store.
Fletcher drove in the winning run. Teammates surrounded him as if to say, we support you, and are sorry you got stung by a wasp.
The Angels demonstrated a replacement-level emotional investment. It’s not difficult to explain why that is. Individual spring-training games don’t matter, not, at least, as far as the results are concerned. Links between spring-training games are scattered, and especially when you’re recalling games from the previous March. And, of course, in between the 2016 and 2017 spring trainings, there was the 2016 regular season, in which the Angels lost an awful lot. It’s iffy whether you can connect the two springs while ignoring all the other baseball. But spring baseball is different, yes? Specifically because it doesn’t matter. Players perform differently, and they’re used differently, in different numbers. The meaningful-baseball Angels, of late, have been bad. The exhibition-baseball Angels, on the other hand, looked downright unbeatable.
You cannot directly compare an unbeaten streak to a winning streak. Where an average team wins 50% of the time in the regular season, an average team *doesn’t lose* about 54% of the time in spring training. The rough odds of the spring-training Angels going undefeated for 18 games are 0.0016%. That’s basically the same as the odds of an average team putting together a 16-game regular-season winning streak. Since the turn of the millennium, the 2002 A’s own the longest regular-season winning streak, at 20 games. The next-longest streak is 15. We haven’t seen one of those in well more than a decade.
If you’re willing to separate spring ball from the regular kind, the Angels’ streak was something extraordinary. It was also, at the same time, something extraordinarily irrelevant. The Angels finally lost last Saturday. Here’s all the related coverage from MLB.com:
Walks, errors undo Angels in first Cactus loss
[…]
The Angels lost for the first time in Cactus League play after seven straight wins.
So much of our time is spent searching for the exceptional. We’re constantly on the hunt for fun facts and otherwise meaningful indicators, because we’ve become conditioned to embrace the unusual. But said embrace is dependent upon the presence of stakes; there are no stakes in spring training. The Angels did something you probably won’t see again for years, but then, no, you probably won’t see it again in your lifetime, because nobody’s paying attention. It can happen completely under the radar. I only even know about this streak because of a listener email follow-up. 18 games. 18 games! The A’s got a book and a movie. The Angels are getting this blog post.
As seemingly always, it comes down to this: Spring training, results-wise, barely means anything. Here are team spring-training winning percentages and regular-season winning percentages since 2006:
There’s not literally no relationship. This isn’t a picture of complete and total randomness, and the better a team actually is, the better it has tended to perform in March. But this is *basically* randomness, with just enough hint of a signal for various fans to justify crossing their fingers. As anecdotal evidence, just look at the Angels! Last year’s Angels were not good! We’re also coming off a year in which the regular-season results were less correlated with the spring-training results than ever (over the previous decade). Last year’s best Cactus League record belonged to the Diamondbacks. The Angels were in second. The White Sox went 17-13. The Mets were 8-17. The Twins were 19-11. The Cubs were 11-19. It’s nothing. Effectively, it’s nothing. We want so badly for it to be something, because spring-training numbers are the first numbers of the new year, but, overall, it’s nothing. Within that context, the Angels did something truly remarkable.
I don’t have a profound, overarching point to make. About once per 62,428 opportunities, an average team in spring training will pull off what the Angels did through to last Friday. Just in terms of rarity, and how the numbers work out, the Angels’ streak is one of the funnest of modern-baseball fun facts. And yet, it’s not, because nobody cares, because none of it matters. You might not have realized before that fun facts are conditional, but some degree of relevance is central to the fun. My apologies to the Angels, and to their statistical miracle.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Just another example of how the Angels are bad in an entertaining way.
Kudos for even WANTING to graph regular season vs spring training
An article about the Angels without a single mention of Mike Trout is like a day without sunshine.
It’s also quite an achievement, given that he’s almost literally the only thing about them worth talking about!
A mention of Trout would have been very relevant to this story. They put together their ST winning streak this year without a single RBI or run from their best player. He’s had only two hits so far.
Jeff Sullivan is one of the funnest of modern-baseball fun writers.
“The A’s got a book and a movie. The Angels are getting this blog post.” had me lol’ing.
You might want to check ST run differential vs. reg. season win pct.
As usual, Jeff Sullivan writes a mostly very well written article. What I cannot seem to figure out is why, in virtually every article he writes, he insists on including terrible writing such as this:
There’s not literally no relationship.
The purpose of language is to convey ideas, and ideas are effectively conveyed by clarity. These double negatives are deliberate attempts at being unclear, for no discernible gain. That sentence is an abomination.
It used to be that I read every article posted on Fangraphs every day of the year. Then Carson Cistulli and his absolute lingual homicide started writing, but luckily he now rarely posts. It sucks when great subject matter (like Cistulli always found) is destroyed by terrible writing.
The quality of the writing on Fangraphs has deteriorated over the years. Jeff Sullivan is arguably the best writer they have left. It is a shame that every article is polluted with deliberately poor structure masquerading as style.
Jeff I absolutely love the way you write. You can turn a phrase with humor and insight, and do so regularly. I look forward to all of your new posts, in large part because I will enjoy reading it due to its style (and usually subject!).
Tung, I’m a bit of a grammar nerd too but this is not English class and writing a blog to an audience of casual readers is not the same as writing a peer-reviewed article for a law journal. Lighten up man.
Consider “literally no relationship” a noun phrase. This removes the “no” from double-negative consideration, rendering the whole thing a sad little single-negative. There are always one or two those buzzing around here.
Jeff’s sentence is actually not the same as saying “there is a relationship”, you know? Soak up some constructivist math, my friend, and let the good man write.
I couldn’t disagree more. (See what I did there?)
“He might as well have been looking for dried apricots in an unfamiliar grocery store.” Please, show us an example of better writing today’s sports universe. I’ll wait…
Jeff is a national treasure and I hope be keeps giving us the gift of his best-in-class writing for many, many years.
With that kind of attitude, I don’t know how you could enjoy ANYTHING.