FanPost

What Joe Sheehan is overlooking

Alternate title: Why the Brewers really are a better team than the Cubs.

In his chat yesterday Joe Sheehan answered the following question:

Stephanie (Stepford): Don't you think the Cubs are kind of ritzy??? :)

Joe Sheehan: They don't award playoff spots off of the Adjusted Standings or a team's run differential, but those things are important indicators. They tell me that the Cubs are the best team in the NL Central.

Time is precious, though, and they've wasted a lot of it, to the Brewers' benefit.

(Note, I have added the link to the adjusted standings in the quote.)

Comments like this demeaning the Brewers are nothing new from Joe.  Before the season started he predicted the Brewers to end with a below .500 record and in the bottom 1/3 of the league.  Then, in a chat at the very beginning of the season, he said that the Brewers would not be better than he thought.  In his answer to this question he is basically trying to defend his preseason prediction.  Arguing that he got the preseason prediction correct, but dumb luck has caused him to be wrong.

So is Joe right?  Are the Cubs the best team in the NL central?  First, his second point about run differential.  While the Cubs have had a better differential than the Brewers for most of the year the Brewers currently have the better differential and also when he typed this statement yesterday.  This is first order wins in the BP standings.  They show the Brewers with a slight lead.  But what about the 3rd order winning percentage?  The Cubs are slightly ahead of the Brewers here.  Could this imply they are actually the better team like Joe suggests?

A good place to start when examining a team outperforming (of underperforming) their expected record is David Gassko's excellent article .  Jeff had linked to this article before so this might not be new to you.  Now David's article specifically talks about outperforming the simple runs scored/runs allowed expected record but because BP's 3rd order study just recalculated the runs then plugs into the same formula it stands to reason that David's findings should still be present (though maybe to a slightly lesser degree).

So lets look at his findings and see if we can find an explanation for why the Brewers are outperforming their expected record and why the cubs are underperforming.  First up is a balanced lineup.  With Ryan Braun in the lineup the Brewer's have every starter preforming better than league average according to BP runs above average.  Prince is lapping the field in his output but everyone is contributing.  There are no sink holes in the lineup.  The cubs, on the other hand, are being lead by their three stars and getting very little production elsewhere.  In fact they are getting negative production from 2nd, SS, CF, and RF (way, way, negative from their right fielders).  Gassko found that teams with a balanced lineup tend to outperform their expected record.  Exactly what the data seems to find.

The second thing on the list is "leveraged wins".  Simply put, if you have a strong pen you are likely to win more close games and tend to outperform your expected record.  If you pen stinks you will lose more of those games and underpreform.  Looking at the very simple metric of Bullpen ERA we see the brewers are 5th in the NL (.01 behind the Giants and Braves for 3rd) with an ERA of 3.58.  The cubs have a bullpen ERA of 4.02 good for 10th in the NL.  While half a run may not seem like a lot these runs are being highly leveraged inflicting a large amount of damage.  Again, this seems to be shown in the two team's record.

The third thing on the list is number of games managed by your manager.  This appears to have a small impact.  Uncle Lou has managed more games then Nedly but Ned is getting up there.  This appears to counteract what we see in the team's record.

But wait, we also have a bonus category specific to BP's metric.  3rd order winning percentage is highly dependent on teams batting line, for and against.  Cub pitchers actually have been getting hit lucky and this is borne out in their FIP-ERA which is tracked over at HBT.  The two luckiest pitchers in the NL have been Rich Hill and Jason Marquis with Carlos Zambrano checking in at 13th.  In fact, as a team, the Cubs are turning 72.4% of balls in play into outs.  In the last 5 years only two teams have done better than this (the 2003 Mariners top the list at 72.6%).  Now the Cubs have been a decent defensive team in the past but have experienced a large jump this year.  In fact, about a month ago, they were turning an astounding 74% of balls in play into outs.  So they are coming back to earth and probably will continue as the season goes along.  Short story long, since 3rd order winning percentage greatly leverages these hits it is currently overestimating just how good the cubs are.

The bottom line is that while the Cubs have a better 3rd order winning percentage than the Brewers much of this can be explained by taking a deeper look at the data.  The difference in lineup, bullpen, and balls in play all point to the Brewers outperforming their expected record and the Cubs underpreforming.  While not all of the Cubs misfortune can be attributed to this (they have been getting unlucky some) I fully believe the Brewers are the better team, and probably should have a 4 or 5 game lead over the Cubs right now.