What does September Mean Really?

Marcus Meade is a complete amateur with very little knowledge, wisdom, and money. His attempts to write baseball analysis are a blatant display of hubris, and make the people who read him sad. He also likes butter.

Not so fast fellas. We've got to play the games first.

Boy am I ready for the baseball season to get here already. I’ve essentially begun stalking anyone even loosely connected to the Royals, and may or may not have to stay a certain number of yards away from Kauffman this season. But seriously, in an effort to curb my Royals craving, I once again dove into the minefield of trying to figure this team out.

How this time?

Well, I started thinking about how well the team played in September last year and how that might help them build momentum for 2012. Of course, I thought, they’ve done well in Septembers past also. Perhaps, last September was a fluke, the result of playing some weak-ass, call-up competition.

So, I decided to crunch some numbers from the last five seasons (math, not a strong suit for an English teacher, but it was fairly simple). Instead, of using, just September, I decided to use the last 25 games of the season to make the math easier for me. It turns out the Royals are better in the last 25 games than they are during the extent of the regular season (.496 winning percentage in final 25 games, .428 over the course of the last five seasons). In fact, the Royals are only one game under .500, at 62-63, during the last 25 games over the last five seasons.

What does that mean? Hell, I don’t know. It could mean a lot of things. It could mean they thrive against September call-ups, but that doesn’t seem likely because as a team that’s been out of contention in each of these seasons, they played a ton of their own call-ups. In fact, their call-ups faced major league regulars when playing contending teams.

Perhaps the complete lack of pressure that comes with playing for nothing helped spur them to victory more often. That could be it. Not only have they been near average in the last 25 games, the Royals have a winning record in three of their last five home stretches (15-10 in 2011, 13-12 in 2009, and 17-8 in 2008). Maybe they just need no pressure to win (lets hope that’s not the case).

The most important thing to remember is that this late-season success says virtually nothing about winning the following season. Each of these successful stretches was backed up by very bad seasons the next year. The Royals’ average record over the last five years is 69-93. If you’re new to baseball, that’s terrible. Does this mean the 2012 Royals will play poorly? No. It just means that their late success last year won’t necessarily correlate to success in 2012. The same way going to the gym doesn’t necessarily correlate to losing weight (especially when butter is the base of your food pyramid).

If you’re like me, and you spend way too much time reading about this team, you may believe the Royals should have won more games last year than they did, based on the Pythagorean projection formula*, which calculates W-L records from run differential. Using this system, the Royals should have been 78-84 instead of 71-91. Maybe this coupled with the late-season surge equals a winning 2012. I considered that, and it doesn’t seem to be the case either. It turns out underperforming the run differential is not new to the Royals. Their Pythagorean winning percentage in the last five years is .438, 10 points higher than their actual winning percentage. They’ve underperformed their Pythagorean record three of the last five years.

Again, it’s impossible to tell why this is, though I can harbor a guess. It makes sense that, generally speaking, if a team’s Pythagorean record is much better than their actual record, they’ve probably lost many close games. Just thinking back to 2011, I can remember losing a lot of one-run games and winning by large margins a time or two. I’m guessing this sort of thing is typical of teams with poor starting rotations and good offenses. When their starter pitches well and the offense is hot, they win big. When the starter bombs, they keep it close with big run totals.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Royals’ situational play hasn’t been top-notch over the last five years. I routinely watched them miss opportunities to bring in crucial runs with sacrifice flies last season (had to be one of the worst sacrifice fly hitting teams in history. Who keeps stats on that sort of thing?). I know the sabermetric mantra is don’t sacrifice outs, but when you’re down 0-2 and that run means so much, flying out is the right move. The Royals don’t do well with situational opportunities.  

I know a lot of fans are expecting the Royals to be at or near .500 in 2012. Some are even expecting more, and all are hoping for more, even if their traumatized hearts tell them not to. But if you’re looking at the Pythagorean record or the 15-10 September as indicators of 2012 success, you might want to temper the optimism a little. I hope and believe the Royals will be better, but not because they won in September and not because they should have won more games.

Instead, lets think about the improvements of young players, the emergence of new ones, and the addition of helpful pieces as the signs of improvement to come. These seem like more likely indicators (or at least they’re harder to disprove as indicators).

*The Pythagorean record formula is easily one of my least favorite things about statistical analysis and greatly displays the shortcomings of sabermetrics. It ignores baseball as a game of context and reduces it to a game of numbers more so than any statistic. In my very humble opinion, a team should win only the games it does win. Not too tough to pound a pitcher having a bad day and win by seven. Much tougher to scratch for a one-run win against a team that brought their A-game.