THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, August 14, 2008

How much does losing Longoria and Crawford hurt the Rays?

Tampa Bay is my new favorite team, if only because I bet some money on them to win the pennant and WS, at 75-1 and 150-1, respectively.

Losing Crawford and especially Longoria seem to be devastating to their chances, but remember, we have shown that adding or subtracting major talent at this point in the season is not generally going to make or break a team, on the average.  Even acquiring or losing stars or superstars is only worth a win or so with less than 1/3 of a season remaining.

Let’s briefly look at how losing Crawford and Longoria, presumably for the rest of the season, impacts the Rays.

I ran everything though my sim.  The sim expects that Crawford is around +7 runs per 150 in offense and the same in defense.  Longoria, according to the sim, is +15 in offense and zero in defense.  There is an argument that Longoria is a plus defender, say +5, and I will get to that in a second.

Luckily for the Rays, the replacements for Crawford are pretty good players, despite the fact that they are “no-names.” Eric Aybar is zero in offense and defense, and is a switch hitter.  Gomes in left field is a very good hitter, +12, and a poor fielder, at -7.  Floyd in left is zero in offense and -5 in defense.

Again, these are the numbers the sim uses.  As well, the sim uses baserunning and speed ratings on all the players.

Putting aside platoon issues for the moment, we would expect that with Aybar at third rather than Longoria, we lose at least 15 runs per 150, and with Gomes in left, we lose another 9 runs, for a total of 24 runs plus, say, 3 runs in baserunning and speed for Gomes/Crawford.  That is 27 runs per 150 over the remaining 43 games for TB.

That is a loss of 7.74 runs or around .8 wins, nothing to write home about.

If I run some sims though, it actually comes out to around 1.28 win over 43 games (for some reasons), assuming that Longoria is an average defensive player.  If he is a plus defender, add in another .25 wins.  I’ll even concede another .25 wins due to the fact that the bench is considerably weaker now.  So we have a total of around a 1.75 win loss for the Rays, fairly substantial I guess with 43 games remaining.

There is one hitch to the story, however.  Sometimes we have everyday good players on teams that bat left-handed (against LHP as well as RHP). Crawford is one of those players.  We (at least the teams) just assume that it is correct to play them every day (and I realize that you have roster and ego issues to contend with when it comes to platooning).  However, when push comes to shove, it does not take much of a RHB to be better against LHP, and you can make a good argument for many of these everyday good but not great left-handed batters to be platooned, at least against tough lefty pitchers.

In fact, plugging Gomes into the sim rather than Crawford against a LHP is a gigantic upgrade.  Around 3.5 wins per 150 games!  So versus lefty starters, which we assume will occur around 10 times over the remainder of the season, it is actually a blessing in disguise for the Rays that Crawford is out.

So, if we redo the whole analysis using the sim results, we get that losing Crawford and Longoria only costs the Rays around a win rather than the 1.75 wins we got with no regard to platoon issues.

Not that a win is not significant with 43 games to go, but I don’t think it is anything to panic about (not that they are panicking).

Let’s see what it does to the chances of making the post and winning the pennant and WS.  As of a few days ago, they had a 94.6% chance of making the post, a 22.2% chance of winning the pennant and 11.6% chance of winning the WS.

With a 3.5 win reduction per 162 games (1 win in 43 games), the new numbers are:

91.5, 19.5, 9.6

I won’t say whether that is a small or large reduction in their chances of making the post and winning the various awards.  Those are only words which don’t really mean anything.  One man’s “a lot” is another man’s “not so much.” The numbers are what they are.