League Updates Uncategorized

Exploring the Mysteries of the EFL

I promised yesterday to explain the oddities Jamie wondered about in his post. I’ve already kept that promise twice, but you haven’t read my explanations because WordPress erased bnoth attempts.  The first time was when I hit the dreaded CTRL-Z which, in WordPress, generally erases the entire composition you are working on, and prevents recovery.  The second time apparently happened as I was posting the second version.  It was suppertime, and I suspect I closed my computer before the posting was complete.  This morning I discovered the problem and, once again, the entire posting had disappeared, even though I had saved it several times while writing it.

I am writing this update in Word, and will copy it to the website only when it is completely done.  I should have been doing this all along, but it does introduce some complexities I am too lazy to endure willingly. 

There were four questions in Jamie’s post, regarding the Tornados, Pears, Dragons and Kangaroos.  I will attempt for the third time to answer them in each team’s section.

 

In exchange, I post several new mysteries so Jamie can answer them. If he wants. 

 

EFL Standings for 2021
EFL
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB RS RA
Old Detroit Wolverines 66 30 .692 544.3 362.4
Flint Hill Tornadoes 64 32 .669 2.2 496.1 344.8
Peshastin Pears 60 35 .636 5.5 475.5 365.6
D.C. Balk 58 34 .630 6.5 506.4 388.9
Kaline Drive 60 37 .614 7.3 508.6 403.5
Haviland Dragons 58 39 .593 9.3 492.2 418.9
Canberra Kangaroos 54 38 .591 10 471.6 398.3
Cottage Cheese 51 46 .530 15.5 548.2 529.3
Bellingham Cascades 49 47 .512 17.3 403.9 395.2
Pittsburgh Alleghenys 49 47 .510 17.4 479.2 467.3
Portland Rosebuds 41 54 .426 25.4 479.9 563.9
 

Old Detroit:  W, 3 – (-2).  ( 43 PA, .211, .279, . 316;  13.7 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA).  Now we’re talking.  Marcus Stroman stopped his string of mediocre outings and re-asserted his claim to being the Wolverines’ #2 starter by putting together the best start of the day, according to Baseball Reference.  His 8 shutout, 1-hit, 1-walk, 7-strikeout innings merited an 86 game score.  But he wasn’t alone: Chris Paddack ended his string of 9.00 ERA games with 5 shutout innings of his own.  And Craig Kimbrel cleverly concealed the run he conceded behind an error, making it unearned. 

That’s more great pitching than even the Wolverines deserve, but it was needed badly.  The offense was thin and weak.  Carlos Correa went 0 for 4 again.  Since July 5, Correa has gone 1 for 32, with one walk  The hit was a double on Tuesday, making his batting line over that span .031, .060, .062.   How can the light go out so suddenly and dramatically?  Is something going on in Carlos’ life?  I’m puzzled, and worried.   So – there’s one new mystery. Jamie can solve it tomorrow.

 

Flint Hill: W, 6 – 3. (52 PA,. .200, .308, .400;  10.3 ip, 3 er, 2.62 ERA).  Julio Urias pitched well last night, surrendering only 1 run to the Giants in his seven innings of work. Three relievers completed 2.3 more innings scorelessly, but then Tanner Scott trotted in and got tanned in his allotted slot (2/3 of an inning, two earned runs).

Not to worry, however.  The offense doesn’t look impressive as presented above, but once you take into account that John Nogowski has been DFA’d, Brad Miller and Tyler Naquin are on the bench 100% and Nick Gordon joins them there 67% of the time, that removes 11 AB with no hits attached to them.  It also removes 4 walks, which isn’t has happy news, but still, the resulting effective batting line is  .265, .324, .529, which is plenty to account for almost 6 runs scored.

This is the opposite of what happened yesterday when Jamie wondered how Flint Hill could lose 8 runs on an off day when the team batted .139, .184, .222.   Nogowski, Miller and Naquin went 2 for 9 with a homer and two walks on Tuesday.  Removing those three cut the team’s production to  .111, .111, .111 over 27 plate appearances. That daily rc/g of 0.34 cut the team’s average rc/g from about 7.5 to about 6.9, which multiplied by 14 games comes to a difference of about 8.4 runs.

 

 Peshastin: “L”, 9 – 6.  (25 PA, .333, .440, .714; 2 ip, 0 er). What a day!  A tiny bit short on hitting, but anytime your team can slug Babe Ruth’s home run total, you are having a great day.  Ryan Mountcastle and Mitch Haniger made the biggest contributions to that 714 with a homer apiece, but everyone in the lineup contributed by reaching base safely at least once (including pinch hitter Mike Zunino, who walked).  Tom Murphy did manage to undo his contribution with a GIDP, but still…

The pitching was outright sparse, but it was excellent. Those 2 innings were the work of three relievers, whose sole imperfection was a single walk.

The Pear-related question yesterday was how the Pears could be credited for allowing no runs when their pitchers allowed 5 in 13 innings.  Here’s how: of those 13 innings, 6 were replacing replacement innings.  Replacements pitch to a 7.50 ERA, meaning they allow 7.5 earned runs for every 9 innings they pitch, or 7.5/9 of a run for every inning.  7.5/9  times 6 innings is 5.0 runs.  So they added 5 runs to the team’s total, but also subtracted 5 runs, which makes a nice, neat 0 runs total.

That’s a pretty result but suspect it only works out so neatly on days off.  We’ll see if that’s true when we get to the Dragons.

 

DC:  DNP, 1 – 1.  (37 PA, .258, .378, .355;  8 ip, 5 er, 5.63 ERA)  On a day off, which they do NOT need, the Balk hit better than average (especially with that nice OBP), but pitched almost equally worse than average, leaving them abot where they were when the day started.  Five walks and a HBP added 6 safe trips to the bases to the 8 hits the Balk collected,  5 singles and single doubles by Bryce Harper and two catchers (Danny Jansen and Jorge Alfaro).  These highly democratic Balkans spread the 8 singles among 8 hitters, with a ninth hitter getting one of the walks, leaving only the not-very-Balkan-Caribbean Xander Bogaerts bereft any safe trip to the basepaths.

There is a mystery surrounding Balkan reliever Garrett Crochet.  No, it’s not why his parents named him “Crochet.”  It’s why Baseball Reference ranked his pitching performance the 132nd best of all 132 pitchers who appeared yesterday.  Granted, it was not a gem: 1 inning, 1 hit, 1 so, 1 er.  The hit was a one-out double by Jorge Polanco, who then stole 3rd.  Polanco came home on Nelson Cruz’ sacrifice fly.   But this was clearly NOT the worst performance by a pitcher pitching one inning yesterday.  Keynan Middleton opened for the Mariners with 1 ip, 5 earned runs in which he walked a batter, gave up 4 singles and finished things off with a bases-clearing double.

Sure, Middleton was starting. (He somehow got a Game Score of 23 for that mess! There’s bonus mystery for you.) Crochet was relieving. But there were guys who pitched an inning of relief and chulked. One even triple chulked.  So why was Crochet’s outing deemed worse than all the others?  That’s the new mystery #2 for the day.

 

Kaline: “W”, 5 – 6. ( 57 PA, .226, .281, .679; 2.3 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA)  The third EFL team to post a 0.00 ERA so far, including Garrett Whitlock’s 1.3 ip outing without allowing a run… that ranked 131st out of 132 (Mystery #3 for today!) .  He was down there, I suspect, just to support the other Garrett.  A garrison of Garretts living in a basement garret, if there is such a thing.  But it only redoubles my mystification at Baseball Reference’s ranking “system.”  ‘

Not a mystery, but a delight:  the Drive only batted .226 because they went 12 for 53 on the day.  But they slugged .679, for an astounding isolated power number of .453.  This was because 7 of the 12 hits were homers (distributed among 7 Drives: Hunter Renfroe, Jose Altuve, Michael Chavis, Dalton Varsho, Akil Badoo, Zack Short, and the Wilmer Flores’ two-run  blast that broke the Dodger’s back because it was (1) a shock and (2) brought the Giants from behind to ahead, on their way to victory.  Of the remaining 5 hits, three were doubles (Varsho and Altuve again, plus Willson Contreras).  

 

 

Haviland:  W, 4 – 4.  (39 PA, .229, .282, .343;  3 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA) This was a real win because the Dragons scored 4.1 runs but allowed only 3.7.  Spencer Howard only pitched 3 innings, but they were strong ones.  The hitting was ample, but not very robust, highlighted by a Brendan Rodgers triple. 

Jamie noted yesterday that the Dragons also were credited with 0 runs scored even though their pitchers had allowed 8 earned runs in 16.3 innings pitched.  Similarly to the Pears, the Dragons have a load of replacement innings – still at 25 after Tuesday’s games.  That means the 16.3 innings they pitched Tuesday covered seven innings for that day’s games, and 9.3 replacement innings.  Erasing  9.3 replacement innings erases 7 runs.

(I have not fully explained this case, nor Peshastin’s. I’ve just shown the numbers are in the right ballpark.  I will take me some time to do a complete explanation – I have to calculate team ERA’s before and after Tuesday’s games. I am running out of time to do this update now. I’ll get to that last step when I get a chance.

 

Canberra:  DNP,  2 – (-2).   (25 PA, .211, .400, .526;  2 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA).  Canberra has a remarkable pair of relievers: Emmanuel Clase, and James Karinchak.  They are not perfect – they’ve each had some bad games.  But 9 times out of 10 they do what they did yesterday: turn in scoreless innings.  Since it was a day off, the ‘Roos didn’t miss those other 5 innings we need each tame.  They just loved the way those innings reduced the team’s monthly ERA and erased runs surrendered.

On the hitting side, the Cannies did a mini-version of the Drive’s huge slugging show.  Of the four Canberran hits, two were home runs, accounting for the nice .315 isolated power  But Canberra’s numbers are even better than Kaline’s because the Kangaroos walked 5 times in 25 PA whereas the Drive walked only twice in 57 plate appearances.  

Yesterday Jamie wondered about how Canberra scored 7 runs batting .286, .323, .586.  I entered the Kangaroo line (PA, AB, H, etc.) from Tuesday in one of my old league spreadsheets.  It report their hitting should produce about 6.73 runs per game.  The ‘Roos actually scored only 6.7, taking the math to the first digit right of the decimal, which is all we keep track of in our standings.

 

Cottage:  L, 5 – 6.  ( 35 PA, .250, .314, .438;  2 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA)  Collin McHugh delivered those two pristine innings, and Randy Arozarena blasted two homers and a single to lead the offense.  But it wasn’t enough pitching, and two few of Arozarena’s comrades followed his offensive lead to secure a win. 

Cottage’s biggest mystery, in my eyes, is about Arozarena.  He dominated so stunningly last fall, starting in the last weeks of the season and then right on through the postseason.  How did he do that? And why is he just a normal human being now (OPSing “only” .817 in July at the moment)?  I had nightmares of Arozarena and Ohtani blowing us all away this season.  Ohtani is basically doing that, but not Arozarena. (Mystery #4)

 

 

Bellingham:  L, 3 – 5.    (33 PA =, .208, .344, .250;  5 ip, 3 er , 5.40 ERA).   A modest day at the plate, with only Ha-Seong Kim being at all conspicuous (2 for 4 with a double and a sacrifice fly).   And also on the mound, where Michael Wacha covered 5 innings but not all that well. 

Bellingham was roaring early in the month, but lately they’ve flattened out.  I’m not a statistical moron.  I’m at the median age in this league, so as a first approximation I am probably at about the median grasp of statistics.  But my own experience with the W’s and my observation of the Cascade surge and its subsidence, is this: the whole team seems to be affected. But our players have no links to each other except in our brains. In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut posits we all are linked to seemingly random others by being in the same karrass (sp?).  Do we create karrasses for our players, so they become subject to unseen common causes, so their random results can be bent by common experiences like a real team’s can?  Philosophers and mathematicians, earn your keep!  Answer this question!  (Mystery #5)

 

Pittsburgh:  W, 5 – 3. (35 PA, ..242, .286, .485;  9.7 ip, 3 er, 2.78 ERA) A trio of young Allegheny pitchers covered 9.7 innings admirably. Logan Webb (age 22) had the “worst” ERA on the day – 3.60 – for his 5 ip, 2 er effort. Kyle Muller (age 23) was next: 4 ip, 1 er, for a 2.25 ERA.  Then came Keegan Thompson (a relatively elderly 26 years old., 0.7 ip 0 er).  That’s how the A’s nailed down the pitching so they’d have a good chance to win.

And they did win, squeezing 5 runs out of a line a little short on OBP.  It might have been more except Webb stifled his teammate Max Muncy to help him go 0 for 3.  Still, homers by Dominic Smith and Jorge Soler produced the needed boost, and the Alleghenys won to put them in position to pass the Cascades today.  I don’t have mystery in mind for the Alleghenys. But why is there no mystery about the Alleghenys?

Oh oh. Now there IS a mystery about the Alleghenys, so I can’t ask that question anymore…

 

Portland:  W, 8 – 7. (46 PA, .282, .391, .513;  8 ip, 5 er, 5.63 ERA).  High ERA but still got a real win because not only did Jorge Polanco double, he also homered, singled and walked in 5 plate appearances. .  And Max Kepler homered, too, with a single and a walk.

On the pitching side, Eric Lauer (!!) led the staff with 5 innings, 2 runs, but 0 earned runs. Bryse Wilson nearly tossed it all in the trash with his 2 ip, 5 er chulk, but Bryan Abreu saved the day with a scoreless inning.

The mystery here is plain: how did the Rosebuds turn the sow’s ear of Eric Lauer this spring (with ERA’s in double digits, as I recall, while he was still a Wolverine through spring training) into this silky purson whose July ERA is 1.04?   And how do I get him back? And should I even try since it’s plain Eric and I are in conflicting karrasses and we spoil everything for each other.

At least Luis Urias only walked twice in 4 plate appearances yesterday, so he’s not a blazing superstar yet.

 
 
Combined MLB + EFL Standings for 2021
AL East
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB
Old Detroit Wolverines 66 30 .692
Flint Hill Tornadoes 64 32 .669 2.2
Boston Red Sox 58 38 .604 8.4
Tampa Bay Rays 57 39 .594 9.4
New York Yankees 50 44 .532 15.4
Toronto Blue Jays 48 44 .522 16.4
Baltimore Orioles 31 64 .326 34.9
NL East
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB
D.C. Balk 58 34 .630
Canberra Kangaroos 54 38 .591 3.6
New York Mets 49 43 .533 8.9
Philadelphia Phillies 47 46 .505 11.4
Atlanta Braves 46 47 .495 12.4
Washington Nationals 45 49 .479 13.9
Miami Marlins 40 55 .421 19.4
 
AL Central
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB
Chicago White Sox 58 38 .604
Cleveland Indians 48 45 .516 8.5
Bellingham Cascades 49 47 .512 8.9
Pittsburgh Alleghenys 49 47 .510 9
Detroit Tigers 46 51 .474 12.5
Minnesota Twins 41 55 .427 17
Kansas City Royals 39 55 .415 18
NL Central
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB
Milwaukee Brewers 56 41 .577
Cottage Cheese 51 46 .530 4.6
Cincinnati Reds 49 47 .510 6.5
St. Louis Cardinals 49 48 .505 7
Chicago Cubs 47 49 .490 8.5
Pittsburgh Pirates 36 60 .375 19.5
 
AL West
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB
Kaline Drive 60 37 .614
Houston Astros 58 39 .598 1.6
Haviland Dragons 58 39 .593 2
Oakland A’s 55 42 .567 4.6
Seattle Mariners 51 45 .531 8.1
Los Angeles Angels 46 48 .489 12.1
Texas Rangers 35 61 .365 24.1
NL West
TEAM WINS LOSSES PCT. GB
Peshastin Pears 60 35 .636
San Francisco Giants 60 35 .632 0.4
Los Angeles Dodgers 59 38 .608 2.4
San Diego Padres 56 42 .571 5.9
Colorado Rockies 42 54 .438 18.9
Portland Rosebuds 41 54 .426 19.9
Arizona Diamondbacks 30 68 .306 31.9

Jaime’s post today noted some results that were hard to understand.  Since we need to have confidence in our results, I thought I’d try to explain how they work out. 

It is true that our league’s scoring is complex.  I prefer the explanation that the complexities are a result of the underlying premise of the league — that we are competing with MLB teams as well as with each other — and our attempt to simulate the dynamics of the major leagues in a simulation that is not supposed to be a daily obsession.  (Or, for some of us, is a voluntary daily obsession for hopefully limited amounts of time).  So we have rules (like the 7 innings pitched per game, or the 3.1 plate appearances per game for every position player) that are intended to make up for our lack of control over players’ actual playing time by giving us a cushion to work with.  But those rules require wrinkles in how results are calculated that add some fuzziness or obscurity (or both!) to the link between stats in the box score and outcomes for the league.

But I am not going to try to cover all the bells and whistles in our system. Some were designed almost two decades ago to make the league work on a spreadsheet, and others devised along the way to fix problems, and I can’t guarantee everything is coherent as it might have been.  

Today we’ll just answer Jamie’s questions.

  1. How did the Kangaroos score 7 runs from their .286, .323, .536 batting line?

Their full line: 

PA AB R H 2b 3b HR RBI BB IBB HBP SO SB CS SH SF GDP
31 28   8 1   2   2     6 1     1  

comes to .286, .323, .536, and is worth 6.73 rc/g.  But the ‘Roos are oversupplied at 3b,  suppressing more than 1/6 of their 3b plate appearances.  Wander Franco and Nate Lowe are the allocated 3b.  They combined to go 1 for 6 with 2 strikeouts, a single, and a sacrifice fly.  Franco is 100% at 3b, Lowe (who had the hit) is 50% there.  If we          take away 1 PA (and AB), the runs created per game jumps to 7.3.  That score erodes some because the ‘Roos are using all replacements at 2b — but then they also erased about as many replacements at c and OH with an unusual bounty at those two positions. 

2.  How did the Pears and Dragons accumulate 0 runs when their pitchers surrendered lots of runs (5 for the Pears, 8 for the Dragons)?

Both teams got lots of innings, so they were erasing replacement innings and the runs allowed associated with them. 

In the Pears’ case, it was elegantly done.  All 5 Pear pitchers are 100% active.  With their first 7 innings they met the quota for yesterday’s game.  With the last 6 they erased replacement innings.  Replacement pitchers have 7.50 ERAs meaning every inning they are surrendering 7.5/9ths of a run.  Those 6 innings that got erased were worth (7.5*6)/9 earned runs, or exactly 5.  So the ‘Roos added five runs allowed, and then they subtracted them.

It’s a little messier with the Dragons.  Those pitchers got their 7 required innings, then went 9.3 more for 16.3 total.  9.3 innings of replacement ERA is worth only 7.75 runs  (7.5* 9.3/9).  That’s just short of the 8 we’re looking for. 

But the Dragons are also carrying 10 penalty innings because they’ve used only 8 pitchers this month.  That leaves 2 penalty pitchers each being assigned 1/3 of an inning and 1/3 of an earned run for every game the Dragons play.  We already assessed them for a 7.50 ERA as replacement innings. Boosting those 10 penalty innings to an ERA of 9.00 yields 1.5 extra runs per 9 innings, or 1.667 for the 10.  Divide by 15 and you get .11 more runs, bringing us to 7.86.        

 

3. How did Flint Hill lose 8 runs on a day off with a batting line of .139, .184, .222?  

According to the database, the Tornado after yesterday’s games were creating 6.9 runs per game.  My old spreadsheets disagree — they think it’s “only” 6.83 runs created per game.  (Dave and I are working on figuring out the discrepancy, although it won’t affect our game outcomes because we agree on the raw data.) 

Here’s Flint Hill’s batting line as of this morning: 

PA AB R H 2b 3b HR RBI BB IBB HBP SO SB CS SH SF GDP
533 485   142 28 1 24   43 2 5 109 5 2   5 1

That comes to a slash line of .293, .356, .503 (although the database calls is a .441 SLG — which, again, is cosmetic since the game outcomes are computed elsewhere, and we agree on the raw data). 

Flint Hill’s lineup yesterday, as reported on the game report, included John Nogowski (not on the roster), Brad Miller (100% on the bench) and Tyler Naquin (also 100% benched).  Deleting those three from the stats yields this as yesterday’s real batting line: 

PA AB R H 2b 3b HR RBI BB IBB HBP SO SB CS SH SF GDP
27 26   3   0     1     9          

That’s a .114, .147, .114 slash line, worth 0.50 rc/g.   

If we subtract that line from this morning’s stats we get this line as of yesterday

PA AB R H 2b 3b HR RBI BB IBB HBP SO SB CS SH SF GDP
506 459   139 28 1 23   42 2 5 100 5 2   5 1

That’s .303, .368, .525, worth 7.46 rc/g.  

Multiply 6.83 rc/g by the T’s 14 July games and you get 96 runs scored. But multiply 7.46 by those 14 games and you get 104 runs.  So that’s how you lose 8 runs on an off-day.