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!