Prelude to the 2009 MLB Team Previews
All 30 teams have a story.
Although some stories are similar in context, none are exactly the same. A few, but not all, of these stories will tell the familiar tale of the pursuit of a championship. Some stories about returning to glory, and some are just about taking those first few steps on the path to redemption. It’s that time of year again. The hot stove is just cooling down, and the gloves are about to start to popping down in Florida and Arizona. Wide-eyed phenoms will compete with grizzled journeymen for that 5th spot in the rotation. Players fresh off the surgeon’s table are limbering up to prove that they haven’t lost any bat speed. Can the Cinderella team from 2008 carry their new found success over to 2009? Will the highly-paid free agent thrive in his new unfamiliar environment? Does that once-great franchise have any chance at ending their streak of futility with a season of hope and respectability?
30 stories. Let’s try to predict their ending.
A few notes on this spring’s previews: I’ll be testing out a new system, something I’ve been tinkering with for a while. It’s a grading system, where I assign a grade to each team in 4 categories: Offense, Rotation, Bullpen, Fielding. I give each category a letter grade, from A+ to F-. Each letter grade has a numerical score, based on a scale from 100-1. Please note that these scores are not really based on the scholastic model you might be accustomed to (i.e. a “C” isn’t 75). My scale looks more like this: A+ = 100, C+ = 60, F+ = 27, so on and so forth. Evenly spaced integers, from 100-0.
An overall score is then computed using 4 variables, based on weights that I assigned (rather arbitrarily):
Offense = 50%
Rotation = 30%
Bullpen = 15%
Fielding = 5%
My rationale here: we can agree that 50% of baseball is scoring runs and 50% of baseball is preventing runs, right? Scoring runs consists solely of offense, so that 50% is the easy part. Now, we need to break down what it takes to actually prevent the other team from scoring. The 5% for fielding is the most arbitrary number I have ever pulled out of my ass in my entire life. I wanted to keep it small and relatively insignificant, because of the difficulty we have in evaluating defense. The other 45% is pitching. In modern Major League Baseball, starters will average roughly 6 innings per start, or two thirds of a game. Therefore, I’ll assign two thirds of the pitching weight to the starting rotation. Maybe some more weight could go to the bullpen when you consider their importance in extra-inning games, but I’m fine with the weightings as they stand.
As you can see, this isn’t an exact science. I’m not even sure how it will look once I’ve done this for all 30 teams. It will be an interesting case study to see how my scoring method stacks up against the final results of the 2009 season.
The first team on my agenda is one we’re very familiar with here in the AL East…those pesky birds from up north. Stay tuned.
I think your formula probably underestimates the importance of the bullpen, and that the “Rotation” number should be split into two numbers, one for the top two starters and another for the other members, in an ideal world anyway. Complicated, yes it is. My ideas are much more often than I wish they were.
Both good points. I felt more comfortable with s smaller weighting for bullpen due to the high variability of bullpen performances (guys like Javier Lopez can look like Dan Quisenberry in a 60 inning stretch). I like both ideas, it’s something I’ll consider going forward.