Something is amiss in Erebor.
A couple of weeks ago, the fifth-place Dragons were rampaging, marauding against teams in contention, running up huge winning percentages that left their competitors gasping for oxygen and falling further and further behind the Seraphim. They leveled a series of Dales, and were last seen heading toward even bigger municipalities to fry.
But last week the Balk found the Dragons in a pitiful state, and ran up a 5.4 – 0.6 record against the supposedly dreadful beasts. The Balk! They’re not even a thing! Just an obscure, ill-defined concept, a figment of a badly truncated bit of baseball imagination. They’re less consequential than a common cold virus, less tangible than a snub, less the stuff of nightmares than the fear of showing up to teach a class with a shoelace untied. So obviously the Balk could not have been the ones to shoot the black arrow through the Dragonly chest.
I thought maybe it was just a hiccup, a bit of indigestion from gobbling Kangaroos and Wolverines without pausing to chew properly. But it appears to be something far more serious. The Dragons aren’t putting up much of a fight against the Seraphim, either. The Seraphim are coasting this week. Their raw winning percentage is only .616, almost .100 points below their season average. But the Haviland raw winning percentage is a mere .253 this week, low enough to send the Seraphim stratosphereward at an .826 adjusted pace. Sure, Salem has its usual complement of 5 batters at or above 1.000 OPS, but it’s also running what should be a debilitating 5.57 weekly ERA. When I saw newly-acquired Seraphim Blake Snell’s 4 ip, 5 er outing, I thought “Huzzah! An opening for the Wolverines to gain ground!”
The Wolverines gained no ground. They’re still 4.4 games back like they were at the start of the week, despite a robust .741 raw winning percentage and an outstanding .823 adjusted winning percentage wrung from the now ninth-place Alleghenys. All the W’s have been able to do is keep pace, with the Dragons lying there doing nothing. How’s a team supposed to re-create the pennant race when gaining on the leaders is rendered impossib…
… Ouch! Something is poking the Wolverines in back.
What’s this? The Balk are suddenly a mere 0.4 games behind the Wolverines? Inconceivable!
Yikes! The Balk are outscoring their generic opponents 26.3 to 2.5!! Their EFL opponents this week, the Tornados, are infected with the same Kansas coronavirus as the Dragons, stumbling to a .385 raw winning percentage. The Balk grind that record into dust, concocting from it a .994 adjusted winning percentage for the week. This allows them to advance upon the Seraphim, cutting their deficit from 5.1 to 4.8 games. Dylan Cease, George Kirby, and Triston McKenzie did most of the damage for the Balk, combining for 19 scoreless innings. The Balk added the requisite 5 hitters OPSing over 1.000 one needs to play in the Seraphim’s league. (The Wolverines have only 4 such trans-thousandists.).
The Dragons have the 5 over 1.000 hitters. But the team’s ERA this week is up over 7.00.
The Kangaroos are still suffering from exposure the dragonbreath, even though it’s been over two weeks since their last whiff of the stuff. Their .124 raw winning percentage is tied with the Rosebuds’ for the league’s worst. But the ‘Roos are facing the fearsome Pittsburgh Pirates, the second-worst team in big-league baseball, who (of course) are running a .676 winning percentage so far this week. Canberra is plummeting, now 7.6 games out. How they must look back to that day, just a few weeks ago, when they were in second place!
The Drive have the third best record this week in the EFL, and have padded their lead over their erstwhile rival Tornados to more than 5 games. And they are only 5.5 games behind the sickly Dragons. Can the Drive make roadkill of the Dragons? That may depend on whether Albert Pujols can maintain his .909 OPS, his pace this week — or the 1.135 OPS he’s been running since August 1.
The Alleghenys and the Rosebuds continue their dos-e-dos dancing, the Portland team taking 8th place back this week.
I accidentally conducted an interesting experiment with the Rosebuds. I initially wrote this update this morning, before church, with standings and results posted, without entering any of this week’s stats for Portland. I had given them 2 games played like everyone else, but then never got back around to them to add their stats. I only noticed the problem after church. So then I quickly entered all the Rosebud stats — and the only change in the standings was the Rosebud winning percentage dropped from .434 to .433. How did this happen?
- Rosebud pitchers started off poorly, compiling a 9.92 ERA on the week so far. Two pitchers chulked (German Marquez: 4 ip, 9 er; Pablo Lopez: 3.7 ip, 8 er) and another did almost as poorly (Dylan Bundy: 4.7 ip, 7 er). That’s about 65% above replacement!
- Rosebud offense (3.7 rc/g) wasn’t robust, but it was 33% better than replacement.
- With every defensive position covered, except for 6 shortstop plate appearances, Rosebud defense came in at 34.6. That’s about a point below average, but it’s about 25% better than replacement (27).
So if you combine the offensive and defensive improvements of real big leaguers over replacements in this case, they offset a pitching performance that was twice as much worse than replacement as the offense and defense was better than replacement.
Finally: now we have a race at the bottom of the standings! The Cascades have been quietly slinking downward, and are now only 1.9 games from siezing the first EFL pick in next year’s Rookie draft. That pick will probably be the 3rd pick overall, so it’s going to take a little bit of sloppy play from the computer managers to leave Jose Rodriguez available. Will the Pears stiffen their defense of the EFL cellar enough to hold off the hungry Cascades?