Did the Rays Bats Get Tired?
Remember when the Rays had the most runs in either league? Remember when they were the best offense in the game? Yeah, it's been awhile since we've seen the dynamic offense that carried our beleaguered staff earlier in the season. With guys like Longoria, Zobrist, Bartlett, and Crawford getting off to hot starts it was easy to bank on runs in bunches. We knew they would regress more in line with career numbers, but we figured that other guys like Burrell, Upton, Navarro, and Pena would play up to their historic numbers. For your viewing pleasure:
This chart goes to THIS workbook. A table showing some of the particulars:
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The mean is based on the average of each game so it most likely will not line up perfectly with their overall wOBA. St. Dev. is the Standard Deviation of their game-to-game wOBA. The larger the number, the more variation from game-to-game. Slope is the slope of the trendline in the above chart. As you can see Dioner Navarro was the only player to show a positive slope over the course of the season. Carl Crawford is virtually flat with Carlos Pena, Evan Longoria, and B. J. Upton playing at a consistent level across the season.
Remember that these are linear trendlines. The attempt is to create a best fit line between the data points. The R^2 generally was pretty low, which can be confirmed by the St. Dev. I offer this so that the reader does not literally interpret the trendlines. For example, Ben Zobrist was not a .470 wOBA hitter at the beginning of the year while falling off a cliff to be a .335 wOBA hitter in the most recent games.
So my question is, what happened? Is this a team-wide hot start with regression to the mean over the course of the season? Did last season's 16 extra games into late-October sap our strength this year? Is it a lack of focus? I'd be very interested to hear what you guys (and gals?) think is the reason.
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This isn't all that high level, thanks for the thought though
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 26, 2009 4:24 PM EDT up reply actions
Follow the bouncing BABIP is all you really neeed to look at
Interesting point on Barty, while he’s in a slump his SO rate is well below Aug where he hatted 353
It's an interesting thought. I've added each players correlation between wOBA and Babip to the chart:
Player Mean St. Dev. Slope Correl
Bartlett 0.373 0.247 -0.0008 0.701
Longoria 0.369 0.249 -0.0002 0.575
Pena 0.362 0.263 -0.0001 0.384
Zobrist 0.360 0.336 -0.001 0.673
Crawford 0.349 0.245 -0.00008 0.763
Aybar 0.305 0.312 -0.0009 0.808
Burrell 0.302 0.239 -0.0004 0.681
Gross 0.286 0.305 -0.001 0.777
Upton 0.281 0.235 -0.0002 0.718
Navarro 0.238 0.245 0.0003 0.763
As a team we have N of 1270 with a correlation of .673 So there might be something to that idea. Just quickly looking at the numbers it seems like the lowest correlation was with the guys that strikeout and homer on the high side, which makes sense since Babip throws out both of those things. I’m going to look at your beloved Yankees and see how their data looks.
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 26, 2009 8:57 PM EDT up reply actions
As for the Yankees, their workbook is
The Summary:
Player Mean St. Dev. Slope Correl
Teixeira 0.399 0.272 0.0002 0.569
Rodriguez 0.398 0.268 0.0003 0.499
Matsui 0.388 0.340 0.001 0.582
Posada 0.384 0.317 0.0003 0.561
Jeter 0.373 0.230 0.0003 0.735
Cano 0.372 0.273 0.0002 0.744
Damon 0.370 0.258 -0.0003 0.591
Swisher 0.367 0.272 -0.0004 0.426
Cabrera 0.327 0.269 -0.0003 0.268
And the Chart:

LINK to Chart
As you can see, most of their players have gotten better as the year has gone along. They have a bunch of good hitters, so I may cherry pick some other teams to check this on. Notice their correlation is much lower as a team at .589 Any requests on other teams?
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 26, 2009 10:07 PM EDT up reply actions
I don't think it is a result of the playoffs
But that’s just me thinking out loud. I know pitchers who pitch a career high in innings in a season will often times have injury and other pitching problems the following year. I haven’t heard that for batters. I would imagine that we are seeing this for a different reason.
Isn’t this the normal trend for most batters though? Most batters by August and September tend to cool off, where-as pitchers tend to get stronger. I always thought that was the common wisdom.
I agree that it's unlikely that the root is from the playoffs
On your second thought, I thought the same so I looked at Pujols to see what his looked like. It was a pretty steep positive trendline, but thats Pujols. I’d like to take a look at more players to see if this is normal. Anybody else is welcome to play with the numbers since it’s pretty easy to follow.
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 26, 2009 5:21 PM EDT via mobile up reply actions
Batters struggling
I think a good explanation for this year’s batting woes is that some of our guys sucked all year, while others just sucked at the end.
Gary Williams for President!
Put Rose in the Hall of Fame
Compared to the Yankee graph, yeah
We have 5 above-average batters, and 5 that are below average.
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 27, 2009 9:27 PM EDT up reply actions
Thanks for dumbing it down for me.
I didn’t say they all sucked, just some, and that was enough for this season. I’m in a weird mood. It must be the Buc hangover. BTW you are mighty quick on that reply button.
Gary Williams for President!
Put Rose in the Hall of Fame
Bored, I liked this post and feel it has more potential going forward, I'm just glad someone felt strongly enough to comment
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 27, 2009 9:32 PM EDT up reply actions
This is interesting, but what does it say about the cause? Lack of leadership, maybe???
Gary Williams for President!
Put Rose in the Hall of Fame
Can't tell without looking at more teams, luckily the off-season is coming.
If it turns out that this is the norm, then it might mean nothing. I think that a big part is that guys were playing over their heads early (Zobrist & Bartlett) which we pretty much knew, but other guys never got it going. If Beej puts up a .375ish wOBA like I’m sure he was predicted we look at quite few more runs on offense. Same with Navi, Gross, Aybar, and Burrell. All of these guys underachieved while less guys over-achieved. I’m not going to look into this any further until the season is over so that I have all the games instead of 9-10 short.
Embrace Eternity
by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 27, 2009 9:48 PM EDT up reply actions
You didn't take my bait
After our leadership discussion last week, I thought I was being funny. Your reply was straight Sandy, and I was looking for smart-ass Sandy. But of course, your answer is also on target. Personally, I doubt you will see a fall off as a rule for hitters later in the year. You will likely see just as many heat up as fall off, IMO. But I’m sure you will have some fancy shmancy graph that says I’m wrong again. See that was a joke again.
Gary Williams for President!
Put Rose in the Hall of Fame
I think it's more of a imbalance that's come to light here in the final months
Think about it, last year, the offense was really balanced. Some production from everyone. This year, it’s basically half the team just trying to cover the lack of production of the other half. Obviously guys like Zobrist & JB have declined so much because they just balanced out, but unless like Longoria has a big night, the team struggles a lot. No help from the bench this year is where the issue is.

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