Did the Rays Bats Get Tired?

by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 26, 2009 4:02 PM EDT

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:

Player	Mean	St. Dev.	Slope
Bartlett	0.373	0.247	-0.0008
Longoria	0.369	0.249	-0.0002
Pena	0.362	0.263	-0.0001
Zobrist	0.360	0.336	-0.001
Crawford	0.349	0.245	-0.00008
Aybar	0.305	0.312	-0.0009
Burrell	0.302	0.239	-0.0004
Gross	0.286	0.305	-0.001
Upton	0.281	0.235	-0.0002
Navarro	0.238	0.245	0.0003

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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When navarro had the greatest improvement...

Officially now the head of the Lobstein bandwagon.

by P Brady on Sep 26, 2009 4:08 PM EDT reply actions

Please show your Phd before entering

by sternfan1 on Sep 26, 2009 4:08 PM EDT reply actions

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

by sternfan1 on Sep 26, 2009 4:28 PM EDT up reply actions

Thats a lot of hats

Follow Me on Twitter @FreeZorilla

by FreeZorilla on Sep 26, 2009 5:35 PM EDT up reply actions

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

HERE

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

Link fail

CHART

Embrace Eternity

by Sandy Kazmir on Sep 26, 2009 10:09 PM EDT up reply actions

Matsui's

Trend is amazing.

WHOO, LUKE! LUKE! LUKE!
ALSO! NOW THE HEAD OF THE PUFFY-ROD BANDWAGON.

by 4QB on Sep 26, 2009 11:19 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.

by behn on Sep 26, 2009 5:10 PM EDT reply actions

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

by terp12 on Sep 27, 2009 9:23 PM EDT up reply actions

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

by terp12 on Sep 27, 2009 9:30 PM EDT up reply actions

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

by terp12 on Sep 27, 2009 9:37 PM EDT up reply actions

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

by terp12 on Sep 28, 2009 1:28 PM EDT up reply actions

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.

by Transplanted on Sep 26, 2009 6:46 PM EDT reply actions