While We're Waiting: 2008 Tampa Bay Rays Splits

by Steve Slowinski on Apr 5, 2009 11:00 PM EDT

For some reason, I've always loved split stats. I think part of it is because I was enlightened to the world of FanGraphs and sabermetrics, I would pour through them endlessly on Yahoo! Sports, trying to find some clue or hint that could help my fantasy team. It almost never worked, but it sure as heck was fun to see the random little trivia questions you could find, like who was better in day games versus night or who really, really raked against certain teams. Looking back on it, a lot of that data suffered from small sample sizes, but every now and then you'd find a hitter that was a dominant second-half player over the course of their career, or someone that really turned it on in the month of June randomly.

Anyway, in looking through Baseball-Reference's new site, I couldn't help but notice their splits buttons. I think they'd been there all along, but I'd simply never seen them before, so I decided to take a peek. Here are some pretty cool, pretty pointless things that I just got a kick out of looking at:

Okay, since we used a platoon at DH and in RF last year, how exactly did we do? I feel like this has been covered before, but platoons are not evil...

AL Average:

	H	R	2B	HR	RBI	SB	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
RF	163	87	34	20	83	11	59	110	0.282	0.351	0.459	0.810
DH	145	81	29	23	85	4	67	123	0.256	0.339	0.435	0.775

Tampa Bay Rays:

	H	R	2B	HR	RBI	SB	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
RF	139	79	18	28	76	3	67	152	0.244	0.330	0.442	0.771
DH	141	72	32	24	78	8	56	132	0.246	0.322	0.428	0.751

So it's not perfect, but we really didn't do half bad, especially when you consider that for the most part, our RF and DH slots were made up with players that other teams had cast off as spare parts. And this isn't even including defense out in RF, which at least with Gross, we made out on like bandits.

Next up, remember that slump we hit around the All-Star break? Here's what it looks like from a splits point of view...

	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS	BABIP
April/March	0.256	0.333	0.398	0.731	0.295
May	0.269	0.338	0.402	0.739	0.315
June	0.266	0.349	0.457	0.807	0.294
July	0.232	0.311	0.370	0.682	0.276
August	0.277	0.360	0.476	0.836	0.316
Sept/Oct	0.258	0.343	0.424	0.767	0.308

Man, which one doesn't belong, huh? That rough BABIP certainly didn't help at all, which makes me wonder how much of that losing streak was a result of a pronounced team-wide run of bad luck. I haven't looked at the pitching side to this though, so our pitching could have been suspect during that slump as well. We certainly regressed to the mean, though, so nothing to complain about there.

Okay, and now one last split for good luck. I love this one...it may seem weird to others, but I really think this collection of numbers is beautiful. I call this work of art, "An Ode to Evan and our Defense".

AL Opponent Splits (BABIP):

LAA	0.303
BAL	0.304
BOS	0.293
CHW	0.309
CLE	0.301
DET	0.305
KC	0.301
MIN	0.307
NYY	0.308
OAK	0.289
SEA	0.310
TB	0.281
TEX	0.319
TOR	0.285

That's just really, really pretty. Yay for having a defense that actually catches things...and a lot of them!

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Comments

"Spring training for us isn’t as much about the results as it is the process, and there were certain things that we’ve talked to him about going back to last year.

-Friedman, talking about Niemann…but cue process/result chart.

by walkoffwalk on Apr 6, 2009 1:42 AM EDT reply actions

.

by R.J. Anderson on Apr 6, 2009 7:21 AM EDT up reply actions

this should be next year's 9 > 8 or whatever stupid stuff gets hung in the locker room.

by walkoffwalk on Apr 6, 2009 8:33 AM EDT up reply actions

10=09

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

-Al Lopez

by Sandy Kazmir on Apr 6, 2009 10:03 AM EDT up reply actions 1 recs