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Halfway Point: BoSox Sit Atop The East … BarelyJune 30th, 2008
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Eighty-one games down, eighty-one more to go. Only the Red Sox can say they have played half their regular season schedule as of June 26—just one of the several perks of starting a season a week earlier than the rest of major league baseball.
So faux halfway points be damned. There’s no need to wait until July 15 when the Midsummer Classic bids adieu to the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium. The Sox have reached the epicenter of the Marathon, and the battle for American League East supremacy hangs in the balance, with a familiar rival Empire stealthily drawing nearer from the flank, while a new and unforeseen usurper continues to flex their muscle as they seek to dethrone last year’s victor.
Overdramatic much? Hell, yeah! But it’s our natural right, as both writers and baseball enthusiasts, to allegorize and sensationalize this glorified little game of stickball.
Sox Status
When a assessing a team’s performance, one of the most often used comparative tools is as simple as looking back to a year ago, seeing how this season’s rendition of a club stacks up versus last season’s squad. In the case of the Red Sox it’s particularly interesting since the previous baseball year proved to be a fruitful wire-to-wire act for the franchise.
As a result, the 2008 club has some high standards to live up to—but the mid-season return, at least, hasn’t disappointed.
Sitting atop the AL East at 49-32 with a .605 winning percentage—the second best mark in the AL, trailing only the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Orange County, California, USA—the Sox find themselves just one win off last year’s pace.
Using the simplified Pythagorean expectation formula, an equation that estimates how many games a team should have won based on the number of runs they scored and allowed, the Sox—with 406 runs scored and 336 runs allowed—own an expected win-loss record of 47-34. For comparison’s sake, the 2007 team—with 400 runs scored and 318 runs allowed through 81 games—aligned perfectly with their theoretical standing.
But then there are second- and third-order wins—with the abovementioned aptly falling under the category of first-order wins.
Sabermetricians can also use a formula called Base Runs (BsR), which calculates the number of runs a team should have scored based on component offensive statistics (i.e., singles, doubles, walks, etc.), and then plug the results into the baseball Pythagorean theorem in order to compute second-order wins. To go one step further, third-order wins then account for strength of schedule.
In short, since the innovation of second- and third-order measures, predicting a team’s actual winning percentage in the future has grown far more reliable than simply relying on first-order wins.
Now, let’s get on with it, already. According to the good folks over at Baseball Prospectus, the Sox have 51 second-order wins and 52 third-order wins, tops in the league with the upstart Tampa Bay Rays trailing closely behind.
The lack of deviation in Boston’s actual and theoretical records doesn’t make for much of a discussion—the team stands right where they should be, perhaps even underperforming ever so slightly. However, the “adjusted standings” linked above do show that the Rays, any way you slice it, are legit while the Angels—with a mediocre run differential—have a third-order record barely above .500, implying that the numbers foresee a reversion to the mean awaiting in the future.
But back in the real world, far away from the numerical land filled with blooming WARP flowers and an overabundance of Base Run trees, the Sox stranglehold on the AL East has been in a perpetual state of slippage.
At the midway point a year ago, Boston held a seemingly insurmountable 10.5 game lead over the second-place Toronto Blue Jays (the Rays, by the way, were in the cellar, 15 games under .500, and 17 out). This season tells a much different tale as the Sox, despite a similar record, retain a slim lead over Tampa as they lag behind in the standings by just a single game in the loss column.
Yet, while the Rays continue to tailgate the Sox, not to be ignored in the rearview mirror are the resurgent New York Yankees, 5.5 games back but closer than they appear—only four out in the loss column. And even the picked-for-dead-last Baltimore Orioles remain in the hunt. The Blue Jays … ah, not so much.
Second-Half Outlook
Beyond getting David Ortiz healthy and swinging again, the Sox appear to be in good shape for the next 81 games due to the depth assembled by general manager Theo Epstein. The team’s offense tops the league in on-base and OPS while ranking second in runs scored to the Texas Rangers. But above all, the quality of their rotation, even beyond the current starting five, must be the cause of some envy among GMs around the league. Boasting a collective earned run average of 3.81, the Boston rotation, with a perfect blend of youth and experience, maintains the highest strikeout ratio and the lowest opponents batting average against in the AL.
The real question, however, is how the competition fares. Or rather, how the Rays and Yankees fend off each other (eight games left between them with the teams splitting the first ten) and then perform against Boston head-to-head.
So far the Sox-Rays season series has been a story of sweeps, with Boston taking all six at home, but dropping three in Tampa. The two clubs will meet at the end of the month, yet the six games scheduled between them for mid-September could end up deciding the fate of the AL East.
Then there are, of course, the slow-starting, late-charging Yankees, 9-3 in their last 12 games and 22-11 overall since May 21. The loss of Chien-Ming Wang, expected to be out until September, certainly hurts the Pinstripes, but Joba Chamberlain’s smooth transition into the rotation has, in fact, revealed the team’s true ace, while the talented but so far ineffective Phil Hughes is set to return in July.
While there’s little to question about New York’s offense, even despite the struggles of Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera (struggles mostly negated by Jason Giambi and the potency of his 70’s porn ’stache), the Yanks’ bullpen does have its inconsistencies and inexperience beyond the invulnerable Mariano Rivera. It’s an area general manager Brian Cashman will undoubtedly look to improve upon as the trade deadline nears.
In a twist, the Sox and Yanks have only played each other five times this season, with Boston grabbing a 3-2 edge in the season series. A twist because it seems as if past season schedules have had the adversaries matched up early and often, leaving a lone series or two late in the season. But this year, the teams will go helm-to-helm seven times in July and then exchange a home and away series at the end of August and September, with Boston and New York facing off at Fenway Park for the final three games of the regular season.
So while not as wide-open as the AL Central, the AL East could turn into quite a pennant race down the stretch, with both old and new blood in the mix—just the way it should be.
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