The Stats That Matter Most (2002 Season Final)
Many moons ago, trendsetting sabermetrician Bill James demonstrated a relationship between runs scored, runs allowed and wins which, because of the necessity of squaring the elements, he dubbed the Pythagorean Theorem (of baseball). The formula is that the square of runs scored divided by the sum of the square of runs scored and the square of runs allowed equals a team's expected winning percentage. From there, you simply multiply the winning percentage and games played and you have a projected win total. The measure works remarkably well, and, obviously, the more games a team plays, the better the relationship ordinarily is.
Here are the numbers at season's end:
| AMERICAN LEAGUE | |||||||||||
| Team | R | OR | R DIFF | G | R/G | OR/G | DIFF/G | PW% | EXP W | ACT W | W DIFF |
| Anaheim Angels | 851 | 644 | 207 | 162 | 5.25 | 3.98 | 1.28 | .636 | 103 | 99 | -4 |
| New York Yankees | 897 | 697 | 200 | 161 | 5.57 | 4.33 | 1.24 | .624 | 100 | 103 | 3 |
| Boston Red Sox | 859 | 665 | 194 | 162 | 5.30 | 4.10 | 1.20 | .625 | 101 | 93 | -8 |
| Oakland Athletics | 800 | 654 | 146 | 162 | 4.94 | 4.04 | 0.90 | .599 | 97 | 103 | 6 |
| Seattle Mariners | 814 | 699 | 115 | 162 | 5.02 | 4.31 | 0.71 | .576 | 93 | 93 | 0 |
| Chicago White Sox | 856 | 798 | 58 | 162 | 5.28 | 4.93 | 0.36 | .535 | 87 | 81 | -6 |
| Minnesota Twins | 768 | 712 | 56 | 161 | 4.77 | 4.42 | 0.35 | .538 | 87 | 94 | 7 |
| Toronto Blue Jays | 813 | 828 | -15 | 162 | 5.02 | 5.11 | -0.09 | .491 | 80 | 78 | -2 |
| Texas Rangers | 843 | 882 | -39 | 162 | 5.20 | 5.44 | -0.24 | .477 | 77 | 72 | -5 |
| Cleveland Indians | 739 | 837 | -98 | 162 | 4.56 | 5.17 | -0.60 | .438 | 71 | 74 | 3 |
| Baltimore Orioles | 667 | 773 | -106 | 162 | 4.12 | 4.77 | -0.65 | .427 | 69 | 67 | -2 |
| Kansas City Royals | 737 | 891 | -154 | 162 | 4.55 | 5.50 | -0.95 | .406 | 66 | 62 | -4 |
| Tampa Bay Devil Rays | 673 | 918 | -245 | 161 | 4.18 | 5.70 | -1.52 | .350 | 56 | 55 | -1 |
| Detroit Tigers | 575 | 864 | -289 | 161 | 3.57 | 5.37 | -1.80 | .307 | 49 | 55 | 6 |
| 10892 | 10862 | 30 | 1132 | 4.81 | 4.80 | ||||||
| NATIONAL LEAGUE | |||||||||||
| Team | R | OR | R DIFF | G | R/G | OR/G | DIFF/G | PW% | EXP W | ACT W | W DIFF |
| San Francisco Giants | 783 | 616 | 167 | 162 | 4.83 | 3.80 | 1.03 | .618 | 100 | 95 | -5 |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 819 | 674 | 145 | 162 | 5.06 | 4.16 | 0.90 | .596 | 97 | 98 | 1 |
| Atlanta Braves | 708 | 565 | 143 | 161 | 4.40 | 3.51 | 0.89 | .611 | 98 | 101 | 3 |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 787 | 648 | 139 | 162 | 4.86 | 4.00 | 0.86 | .596 | 97 | 97 | 0 |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 713 | 643 | 70 | 162 | 4.40 | 3.97 | 0.43 | .551 | 89 | 92 | 3 |
| Houston Astros | 749 | 695 | 54 | 162 | 4.62 | 4.29 | 0.33 | .537 | 87 | 84 | -3 |
| Montreal Expos | 735 | 718 | 17 | 162 | 4.54 | 4.43 | 0.10 | .512 | 83 | 83 | 0 |
| New York Mets | 690 | 703 | -13 | 161 | 4.29 | 4.37 | -0.08 | .491 | 79 | 75 | -4 |
| Philadelphia Phillies | 710 | 724 | -14 | 161 | 4.41 | 4.50 | -0.09 | .490 | 79 | 80 | 1 |
| Chicago Cubs | 706 | 759 | -53 | 162 | 4.36 | 4.69 | -0.33 | .464 | 75 | 67 | -8 |
| Florida Marlins | 699 | 763 | -64 | 162 | 4.31 | 4.71 | -0.40 | .456 | 74 | 79 | 5 |
| Cincinnati Reds | 709 | 774 | -65 | 162 | 4.38 | 4.78 | -0.40 | .456 | 74 | 78 | 4 |
| Pittsburgh Pirates | 641 | 730 | -89 | 161 | 3.98 | 4.53 | -0.55 | .435 | 70 | 72 | 2 |
| Colorado Rockies | 778 | 898 | -120 | 162 | 4.80 | 5.54 | -0.74 | .429 | 69 | 73 | 4 |
| San Diego Padres | 662 | 815 | -153 | 162 | 4.09 | 5.03 | -0.94 | .398 | 64 | 66 | 2 |
| Milwaukee Brewers | 627 | 821 | -194 | 162 | 3.87 | 5.07 | -1.20 | .368 | 60 | 56 | -4 |
| 11516 | 11546 | -30 | 1294 | 4.45 | 4.46 |
Orioles Comments: It was, as we all know, another dreadful season for the Orioles, punctuated by the team's abject 4-32 closing. The WDIFF mark ended up at -2; so the Pythagorean Theorem implies that the team "should" have lost "only" 93 games rather than 95. Whoopee. As anticipated, the Orioles finished seventh in the league in OR/G, roughly at the the league average. Pitching/defense was not the reason that the Orioles finished the season with the league's fourth worst record. If you're looking for a reason, search no further than offense--the Orioles finished 13th in the league in runs scored, behind every team other than woeful Detroit. Yes, that's right, the Baltimore offense scored fewer runs than that of the Devil Rays...and Tampa Bay played one less game than the Orioles. It's fairly easy to identify the extremely weak link in the Orioles' chain.
Notable Numbers: Take a look at the two league leaders in run differential per game and take note--the two teams that will meet in the World Series were the two teams with their league's best run differentials, Anaheim and San Francisco. As Mel Allen might have said, how about that?
The American League is full of WDIFF oddities. The Angels, who had the AL's best OR mark and finished a solid fourth in R/G finished at -4 in WDIFF, projecting to 103 victories.
The team with the largest WDIFF was Boston at -8, a very, very large number. The Red Sox were running a large WDIFF all year long and never really recovered. Boston's 13-23 one-run game record had an awful lot to do with that and almost certainly cost the team a postseason berth.
The Chicago White Sox finished -6 in WDIFF and projected to 87 wins...the exact same win projection as that of the Central Division champion Minnesota Twins (more on them below). The other team with a large negative WDIFF was Texas. The Rangers finished at -5, but still only projected to 77 victories, far and away the worst mark in the West. Like Anaheim, Kansas City finished -4 in WDIFF but it's difficult to get much more excited about a 66-win season than a 62-win season.
On the other side of the AL ledger, we start with the aforementioned Twins. Minnesota finished at +7, projecting to 87 wins, exactly the same number as the White Sox, as stated above. The 13-game projected/real life gap here is staggering. For all the jumping up and down and finger pointing, it's difficult to reach a conclusion about the Twins other than that they're not as good as this year's record made them appear. The club ran an overachieving bullpen and some luck to a 29-16 one-run game record, and that's very unlikely to happen again next year. Barring legitimate improvement on the part of its existing roster and/or the acquisition of better players, Minnesota is not at all likely to duplicate 2002's win column success in 2003.
The Oakland A's finished +6 in WDIFF in 2002. While the A's were a good team this year, they weren't nearly as good as last year--not surprisingly, the loss of Jason Giambi (especially) really hurt--nor were they as good as the Angels. Despite finishing second, Anaheim was 62 runs better than Oakland in differential. The Angels scored more runs than the A's and gave up fewer tallies and Anaheim was sabermetrically speaking, with little doubt, the best team in the AL West this year despite the second place finish.
The other +6 WDIFF AL team was Detroit, which is truly remarkable. The Tigers, after all, did finish 55-106 this year. The Pythag projects a 49-112 mark, which is beyond awful. Detroit was outscored by 289 runs this year, the worst mark in all of baseball by a good, wide margin. Tampa Bay, after all, was second worst at -245 runs. I was born in 1964 and this season's Tigers entry is surely one of the worst big league teams assembled in my lifetime. Detroit scored an incredible (in a bad sort of way) 575 runs this year, far and away the lowest total in either league. They also allowed the second largest number of runs in the AL. But the offense was really noteworthy, in an automobile wreck sort of way. The second lowest scoring major league team in 2002 was the Milwaukee Brewers. The Tigers scored .30 fewer runs per game than the Brewers, despite having the "advantage" of the designated hitter.
Six AL clubs--Toronto, Cleveland, New York, Seattle, Tampa Bay and Baltimore--all finished within +/- three wins of their expected totals.
In the National League, things were much less variable.
The Chicago Cubs were, by far, the biggest variant, finishing eight wins below their expected total, but like the Rangers, we're still talking about a relatively mediocre win total (in this case 75), so the Cubs were lousy, just not quite as lousy as their overall record made them appear. As usual, an aberrant team's one-run game record speaks volumes; Chicago was 18-36 in such contests.
Interestingly, one of the other notable "underachievers" was San Francisco. The Giants finished five wins below expectations, but made the postseason anyway. Like the Angels, the Giants were the sabermetric divisional champs.
Both the Brewers and the New York Mets were -4 in WDIFF, but neither team was going anywhere anyway. The Brewers were a 100-loss club either way and the Mets fell short of the .500 mark even with the four-win bump. The Brewers were, easily, the worst team in the National League this past season, finishing dead last in the 16-team circuit in runs scored and second from the bottom in runs allowed.
On the flip side, the Florida Marlins were the league's biggest group of overachievers (+5 WDIFF), but 79 wins wasn't worth much more to them than 74 would have been. Cincinnati and Colorado both finished at +4 WDIFF, but again, this was of little matter ultimately. Both teams finished under .500 even with their added bonuses.
All the other clubs--Los Angeles, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Arizona, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Montreal and Houston--were within three wins of their Pythagorean projections.