Astros might be best team since 1927 Yankees

It is .167 thru Friday, Sept. 27. Their team OPS is .847 and they have allowed .680. If they finish with that, it will be the 2nd highest since 1908, trailing only the 1927 Yankees. The Astros will easily have the highest differential of any team since 1939.

In the first half (90 games), their differential was .123. In the 2nd half (70 games) it has been .222. The 1927 Yankees had .201 for the whole season.

Here is a link to the rankings I compiled using the Baseball Reference Play Index.

https://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2019/05/historical-team-ops-differentials.html

Update Sept: 30: The Astros finish with .167. Just to make sure they are still above the 1913 A's, I did OBP and SLG to several decimal places (to check rounding issues). The results are in the table below, although it looks like Baseball Reference does not count sacrifice hits in PAs in 1913 but does include SFs in 2019 (back in 1913 there was not distinction). The Dodgers finished with .149, which will make them the 7th best team since 1908 (but I did not look for rounding issues to compare them to the 1922 Browns to see if they might be better).

1913 A's	OBP	SLG	OPS
Hitting	0.35646	0.375767	0.732227
	OBP	SLG	OPS
Pitching	0.306238	0.260057	0.566295
Diff.			0.165932
2019 Astros	OBP	SLG	OPS
Hitting	0.352453	0.495457	0.84791
Pitching	OBP	SLG	OPS
	0.283278	0.397363	0.680641
Diff.			0.167269

 

Why 538 is wrong about Verlander and the Hall of Fame

I strongly disagree with this 538 article saying "Everyone Thinks Justin Verlander Belongs In The Hall Of Fame. So Why Don’t The Stats Agree?"

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everyone-thinks-justin-verlander-belongs-in-the-hall-of-fame-so-why-dont-the-stats-agree/?

It says he is a bit below the average for starting pitchers in the Hall in JAWS rating

Here is the comment I left there

You have a couple of guys, Walter Johnson (164.3) and Cy Young (163.6) that make that average JAWS very high. Then Clemens is at 139. So we need to take that into account.

Then if you look, Verlander is actually 36th all-time in JAWS with no revision. That seems like a pretty high rank, maybe good enough for the Hall.

At Baseball Reference he is 30th in career WAR for pitchers while having had 3 first place finishes, a 2nd and a 3rd. And this year will be 1st or 2nd.

He is a definite Hall of Famer

Here are 3 guys who Verlander is ahead of in JAWS and their vote % in their first year of eligibility. They all made it in easily

Palmer 92.6%
Hubbell 87%
Marichal 83.7%

Update: My friend Jerry Miller pointed out that Marichal got in his 3rd year. He got 58% in his first year. Hubbell got voted in in 1947 with his last year in baseball being 1943. Here is what it shows at his Baseball Reference page. It seems like the voting schemes were going through some changes then.

1945 BBWAA ( 9.7%)

1946 Final Ballot (28.5%)

1946 Nominating Vote (50.0%)

1947 BBWAA (87.0%)

How Did The Cubs Do Statistically In 1969 When The Mets Passed Them To Clinch The NL East Title?

At the close of play on Aug. 13 1969, the Mets were 10 games behind the Cubs in the NL East. The Mets clinched the division on Sept 24, being 6 game ahead of the Cubs with both teams having played 157 games. The Mets went 34-10 while the Cubs went 16-24 in that stretch.

In my last post I showed how the Mets did in their 34-10 stretch. Their hitters were no better or worse than they had been previously. But the pitching (and maybe defense) were much better.

But the Cubs did much worse in both hitting and pitching in their 16-24 stretch. Here is how the Cubs did in their first 118 games and then the next 40.

Stat	First 118	16-24
Runs	556	164
OPS	0.733	0.636
AVG	0.264	0.225
OBP	0.336	0.290
SLG	0.398	0.346
GDP	80	33

 
Runs per game fell from 4.71 to 4.1. Even though their OBP fell 46 points, their GDPs per game rose from .678 per game to .825 per game.

Now for the pitching. The picture is pretty ugly.

Stat	First 118	16-24	% Change
ERA	3.10	4.19	35.16%
Hits	8.110	9.275	14.36%
HRs	0.686	0.900	31.11%
BBs	2.763	3.475	25.78%
Non-HRs	7.424	8.375	12.81%
GDP	0.712	0.775	8.87%
HBP	0.144	0.300	108.24%
ROE	0.508	0.625	22.92%
SO	6.483	5.575	-14.01%

They gave up, including ROEs, about 1.8 more base runners per game, exclusive of HRs, which went up .214 per game. Strikeouts were down about .9 per game. Their ERA went up a little more than a run while it went down 1.32 for the Mets.

Up through Aug. 13, the Cubs were 74-43. They had outscored their opponents 556-407.  In the 40 game stretch, they were outscored 188-164.