Boston's Built A Better Team
From the New York Sun
The embarrassing brawl between the Red Sox and Yankees this weekend was a low point of the baseball season. Major League Baseball heavily promotes the Boston/New York rivalry as a crown jewel of the game, and when that rivalry descends into clueless, macho posturing and features a bloody, broken-fingered pitcher on the mound, everyone involved should feel shame and express repentance.
Unfortunately, the fight and the drama of Boston’s subsequent comeback against Mariano Rivera obscured the most interesting thing about the weekend series: The victorious Red Sox proved yet again that they’re a better team than the Yankees, by which I mean that they’re more likely to win the World Series.
Since the Yankees are 7.5 games ahead of the Red Sox in the standings, actually being the better team brings little comfort to the team or their fans. But facts are facts.
The most important evidence in favor of the Red Sox is that their record indicates unusual bad fortune, while the Yankees’ indicates unusual good fortune.
It has been known for years that there is a stable relationship between the number of runs a team scores and allows and their record. Going forward from any given point, a team’s winning percentage is more likely to resemble what you would extrapolate from their runs scored and allowed than their actual one.
Given their runs scored and allowed, we would expect the Red Sox’s record to be 56—42, and the Yankees’ to be 54—43. The Sox have underperformed their expected record by two games; the Yankees have overperformed by seven.
This isn’t necessarily luck. The Yankees have an excellent bullpen, some team speed,and a tactically adept manager; the Red Sox have none of these things. Some would say that the Yankees focus better when the game is on the line, and that the Red Sox’s lack of discipline is what causes them to lose the close ones, and there may be something to that. Still, the truth is that the underlying performance of the teams — how good their offense and defense have been — has been essentially indistinguishable this season.
There’s no reason to think that will even out from now through September — the Yankees aren’t likely to go on a massive losing streak that will leave the teams with tied records. It is, though, more likely that the Yankees will play .557 ball than .629 ball for the rest of the season, just as it is likely that the Sox will play somewhat better than they have.This means that the division is likely to be more closely contested than is commonly thought, especially with two series yet to be played between the two teams.
The next argument for Boston is simple: they’ve been better than the Yankees in head-to-head matchups, winning 8 of 13 so far. It’s easy to forget this in light of Boston’s notorious meltdown in last month’s Yankees sweep, but it’s so.
The final argument for Boston ties into the first.The two teams have,in the abstract, played equally well this year; they have both done so with key players either injured or ineffective. The Sox, though, got outright miserable performance in several areas in the first half that is unlikely to be repeated from here on out.
Playing Pokey Reese instead of the injured Nomar Garciaparra probably cost the Sox in the area of three wins in the first half, to judge by such metrics as Baseball Prospectus’s VORP or Bill James’s win shares; pitching Derek Lowe instead of a league-average starter has probably them cost another two wins or so. The first problem has been taken care of; the second should be one way or another, either by Lowe returning to something like his previous form, or by the acquisition of a better starter.
The Yankees’ main flaws are far less easily fixed. The elderly pitching staff is a mess: the Yankees do not, as the Red Sox do, have one hole to fill in their rotation; they have three or four. One can easily imagine some of the club’s mystery pitchers — Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina, Jose Contreras, and Jon Lieber — regaining both health and effectiveness, but certainly not all of them. And first baseman Jason Giambi may miss the rest of the season with amoebic dysentery.
The Red Sox, then, are likely to improve just because their record hasn’t reflected their performance, and also because their main flaws have been or are easily fixed. The Yankees are likely to decline, because their record is better than their performance and because they have too many holes to fill.
None of this means that the Red Sox are likely to win the division. Seven and a half games is a huge hole, and if Boston can come back from it they’ll be known forever more as the Miracle Sox.
What it does mean is that they are not only a nearly certain bet to win the wild card, but likely to come on strong over the last two months of the season and very likely to enter the postseason, whatever their record, as the American League team that played the best during the season. However much luck is involved in getting through the postseason, being the best team in the league is the best insurance there is against failure.
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