Looking Towards The Future

I agree with you that knowing average contending team production numbers could be helpful, but some teams (such as the 2007 Padres) contend on pitching, not hitting, rendering those numbers less meaningful.

I like to look at the average numbers for each position and increase them a bit—not to be more like a contending team, but in order to more closely approximate the average numbers for STARTERS at the positions, throwing out the reduction in the average caused by bench players.

I then figure that if I can have a higher OPS at each position than the average starter at each position, I should have an above-average offensive team. If I have a player or players who are below that average, those players aren’t carrying their weight offensively and are usually guys I would look to replace first.

If I am good at evaluating players, I can build a model of what a team’s OPS is likely to be, based on projections of plate appearances and performance from its players. If I weight each player’s expected performance by his appearance of plate percentages for OBP and his percentage of at bats for SLG, I can estimate the overall team OPS.

I then can apply the rough formula of taking .600 and subtracting it from the expected team OPS, multiplying that difference by 200 and adding the product to 450. If I have done a good job of estimating the team OPS player-by-player, that should give me a fairly close approximation of how many runs the team will score.

If I can make a good estimate of how many runs the team will yield, I can subtract runs yielded from runs scored, then divide the difference by 10. If I add the resulting quotient (which could be negative) to 81, I should have a decent idea of how many wins to expect from my team.

Unfortunately I find pitching more difficult to predict than hitting, but at the very least I should be able to do a decent job of predicting offense. And if I can do a good job of predicting the pitching - which is usually more variable - I can often do a nice job of predicting how many wins that team will indeed win.

This year’s Giants team has an OPS of .732. That would project to 714 runs scored. Because of their very slow start in scoring, they are on pace to score only 666 (an ominous number) runs. That means if the Giants keep up their .732 OPS the rest of the season, they should continue scoring more runs.

The bad news is that it doesn’t appear the Giants will be able to sustain their .732 OPS the rest of the way. The following key hitters appear unlikely to be able to sustain their BABIP’s: Aaron Rowand (.391 vs. .328 career), Bengie Molina (.339 vs. .283 career), Ray Durham (.367 vs. .309 career) and Freddie Lewis (.363).

So my guess would be that the Giants’ team OPS will go down the rest of the way, but their run scoring may not suffer quite as much as would normally be expected (since it shows signs of bad luck now).

It will be intriguing to see how it all turns out at year’s end.

And the friendships he has built up on the team. If Tim performs as he would seem to be capable, he’ll make plenty of money no matter where he plies his wares.

My guess two summers ago was that Tim might earn half a billion dollars in his career. That would be “only ” four Barry Zito contracts. :)