Note: The stats below were current when this was drafted on 6/1. Since then, Texas has split its last 4 games while being outscored 23-18.
It's the burning question in the AL West this year: Are the Rangers for real? Texas swept the Angels in Arlington last month, in what ultimately proved to be a fairly non-competitive series. Angels fans have watched the standings nervously ever since. Currently the Rangers are 30-20, 4.5 games up on the 25-24 Angels. Can it possibly last?
My unprofessional opinion is, in a word, No. Allow me to explain.
It's the burning question in the AL West this year: Are the Rangers for real? Texas swept the Angels in Arlington last month, in what ultimately proved to be a fairly non-competitive series. Angels fans have watched the standings nervously ever since. Currently the Rangers are 30-20, 4.5 games up on the 25-24 Angels. Can it possibly last?
My unprofessional opinion is, in a word, No. Allow me to explain.
- Park factors. This may come as a bit of a surprise, but the Ranger offense, at this point in the season, is a fake, a mirage created by their infamous hitters' park. Consider their offensive home/road splits:
Home: .292 / .362 / .526 (.888 OPS)
That's a 147 point swing in OPS. Just how big is that? It's almost the difference between Todd Helton at altitude (1.049 OPS) and Todd Helton at sea level (.872 OPS). According to ESPN's park factor report, Rangers Ballpark is currently generating 20% more offense than the average park. That's a lot, but it's not unheard of for this field. It was 22% above average in 2003 and 2004, and almost 25% above average in 2002. Last year it came in 14% over average--the highest in MLB. Only once since 2002 has Rangers Ballpark come in below average, and then it was just 2% below the mean.
Away: .249 / .294 / .447 (.741 OPS)
This stuff is real. Check out the career home/road splits for some current Ranger franchise players:
Michael Young (5620 PA)
Hank Blalock (3543 PA)
Home: .324 / .372 / .483 (.854 OPS)
Away: .280 / .324 / .409 (.733 OPS)
Ian Kinsler (1869 PA)
Home: .303 / .370 / .530 (.900 OPS)
Away: .246 / .300 / .412 (.711 OPS)
Pretty extreme stuff. All three of these guys have an OPS of at least 120 points higher at home than on the road, enough to turn a mediocre hitter into an All-Star. And with Kinsler, the split is almost twice as big. These aren't small samples either, there are almost 10,000 PA between them. Just for fun, let's see how Ranger posterboy Josh Hamilton did over his first full season in Texas:
Home: .329 / .401 / .554 (.955 OPS)
Away: .250 / .320 / .413 (.734 OPS)
Home: .345 / .408 / .611 (1.019 OPS)
In Arlington, he was Albert fucking Pujols. Away from Arlington, he wasn't much better than average. But park factors work both ways. Ranger pitchers must do worse at home, right? Well, that's not the way it's played out so far this year. Check out their pitching splits:
Away: .263 / .331 / .448 (.779 OPS)Home: 4.73 ERA, 1.462 WHIP
Almost exactly the same, what's up with that? Do Ranger pitchers have some magical ability to pitch an extra 20% better at home to make up for the park factor? Of course not. The distribution of quality innings is not evenly split between home and away right now, but that will even out as the season goes along. Here's what the Rangers' pitching splits looked like when 2008 was all said and done:
Away: 4.71 ERA, 1.437 WHIPHome: 5.47 ERA, 1.547 WHIP
There's a little oddness in the higher road WHIP, but the ratio of total runs allowed at home, 511, to runs allowed on the road, 456, is about 12%. Even if Texas has a better staff this year than last, which I am willing to grant, they can't continue to perform equally well at home and road.
Away: 5.26 ERA, 1.606 WHIP - Strength of schedule. According to ESPN's Relative Power Index, the Rangers have played the third easiest schedule in the American League. The Angels, by comparison, have had the hardest. This will also even out as the season goes along, and Texas will finally have to meet New York and Boston, who have had their number over the years, instead of beating up on Oakland and Houston.
- Injuries. The Rangers have been fortunate to have just about everyone healthy this season, but teams rarely enjoy that for an entire season. Already Josh Hamilton looks like he's going to be on the shelf for awhile, and they'll be in real trouble with a few injuries to their pitching staff, which brings us to...
- Nolan Ryan. Seriously, this guy is insane. The curmudgeonly, senile. you-damn-kids-have-it-so-soft-I-did-it-this-way-when-I-was-your-age kind of insane. No pitch counts? Is he trying to serially murder his pitching staff, or is that just an accident? Not everyone can throw 125 pitches a game, most of them over 95 mph, for 40+ games a year the way that Grandpa Nolan did back in the day. But modern pitchers also pitch longer and more effectively over their careers too, with less risk of exploding their arms like Sandy Koufax and Frank Tanana. They have a young staff as it is, but if they work them the way the old fart wants them to this year, they're in for some hurt over the long haul. And that's not just for this year.
Also -- I wouldn't be too quick to jump on the pitch-count bandwagon. What evidence do we have of injuries being prevented because of them? Everything I've read indicates that there's no compelling data either way on pitch counts.
The fact that pitch counts are measured at all is an indication of how the game has changed in the last 10-15 years; a pitcher's workload used to be measured purely in innings pitched. The sabermetrics people are completely responsible for the new doctrine of pitcher management, but not everyone believes in it. There's a good summary of the "pitcher abuse point" system here. Apparently there is a statistically significant correlation between abuse and injury. Just looking at the 30 most abused pitchers from last year according to BP, I can spot six off-hand who have had health problems either at the end of last season or the beginning of this one. Obviously you can't predict who is going to get hurt, but by now managers should know when they're rolling the dice. Unless you work for Nolan Ryan.
"What Pitch Counts Hath Wrought" in THT provides a rebuttal of the BP piece. If Bill James says pitch counts aren't helping, I tend to believe him.
I've been torn about what to think about Bill James in recent years. Judging from the essays in the last few BJ Gold Mines, he seems to have lost some of that critical "edge" that made him such an effective pundit back in the 80s. But you're right, the pitch count issue is more complicated than I let on. The BP people look purely for statistical correlations; they're don't really care about the biomechanical "causes" of pitcher abuse. In that sense, all sabermetrics is pretty much child's play compared to the kind of analysis engineers or even financial experts use. But I really do believe that baseball today is so different from the game played 30 years ago that the old wisdom just doesn't apply anymore. It seems to be the slider that really wrecks a pitcher's arm, particularly the elbow, and that pitch didn't even catch on until the 70s. Today's pitchers throw them more often than ever. Comparing the modern era with past eras is too much like comparing apples and oranges. I do agree that the five-man rotation could probably go, but dropping the single-game pitch count without also changing the way pitchers pitch (more fastballs, fewer sliders) seems like a great way to flirt with injury.
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