2013 Preview: Oakland Athletics

Oakland may have been a little bit lucky in how it converted its offensive production into runs – to the tune of a 17 run benefit (713 – 696, see above) but they should still be able to overcome that hurdle and score more runs in 2013. That’s because, with the exception of 33 year-old Coco Crisp, every starter and virtually every offensive contributor will be on right side of 30. (Seth Smith is 30.) No one had a truly outlier season last year, so there is no reason the team that scored 407 runs in the second half of the year should regress meaningfully. (The A’s were the only team in baseball to score more runs in each successive quarter last year.)

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2013 Preview: Texas Rangers

The cumulative nature of baseball standings masked the fact that while the Rangers were the dominant team in all of baseball during the season’s first quarter, for the remainder of the year, they were not much better than league average. In its first 40 games, Texas played .600 baseball and outscored its opponents by a whopping 80 runs. However, over the remaining 121 games, their run differential was just 21 runs. Meanwhile, over those same last three quarters of the season, the eventual division champion Oakland A’s outscored their opponents by 113 runs. The final standings and the drama of the last series of the season suggested an unlikely champion but the fact is the Rangers were convincingly outplayed by Oakland for a majority of the season.

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2013 Preview: Los Angeles Angels

The Angels scored 767 runs in 2012. However, they played half their games in a ballpark that suppressed offense by 9%. Taking their entire schedule into account, the Angels recorded a 2012 Park Factor of 96. This means, to normalize their runs to a league-neutral context you must divide their 767 runs scored by .96 resulting in 799 runs. Do that for every team and it turns out the Angels had the highest-scoring offense in baseball. So where are they going to find improvement this year?

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Let's Level the Replacement Level Playing Field

According to Warren Buffett, the record for mathematical lunacy in the name of simplification has been held by the Indiana House of Representatives for more than one hundred years – a reign threatened only once by a misguided 2004 committee bill regulating stock options in the United States Congress. In 1897, in attempt to make life easier for its citizens, the Indiana House passed a bill which decreed that pi, or Π, would be equal to 3.2 as opposed to the infinitely extending, and presumably difficult to remember, 3.14159 . . . . It’s quite possible that by wading into the debate on the various sabermetric calculations of Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, I will unseat the Indiana House of Representatives for that distinction and a heaping dose of derision will be my reward for this piece. If so, Sam Miller is to blame.

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An Excerpt from Trading Bases - 2012 Postseason Wrap-Up

The end of the season also brings to an end the 2012 edition of the Trading Bases newsletter. Shortly after Spring Training opens next March, Trading Bases, the book will go on sale. It's impossible for me to say at this point whether there will be a newsletter next year as the success of the book is impossible to predict. Currently, advance copies of the book have been circulated to various members of the press for pre-publication reviews; it will be at least a month until the publisher gets any feedback. In the mean time, I thank you for reading this year's newsletter, especially those of you who have sent feedback that's led to many additional discussions about baseball. As a thank you, I leave you with an excerpt from the book -- an excerpt which sums up my thoughts on the 2012 postseason. Of course, I hope it also serves as an enticement to order the book.

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