With the Pirates’ losing streak reaching epic proportions this weekend, stretching to become the first winless 6+ game homstand in the history of the team, there’s been a lot of talk centered on finding what’s gone wrong over the past two weeks. How could a team that was in first place on July 25th be ten games back on August 8th? There are a lot of potential answers that mainly center on the rotation, the defense, and the bullpen, but I’m afraid that my answer to the question is both simpler and more disturbing. The 2011 Pittsburgh Pirates are a bad baseball team and they have been all year.
It would be easy to brush this notion off as an artifact of the losing streak, but I think that doing that would be ignoring a reality that’s been staring us in the face all year. When the Pirates were winning, I did my best to not think about why they were winning and just enjoy it. It’s been so long since the Pirates were worth a damn that it seemed worth it to enjoy it and try and find reasons the might keep winning, even if the reasons they weren’t good enough to were staring me right in the face.
It’s true that the Pirates have tracked just about evenly with their Pythagorean record (Ed. I want to put a footnote or something here to explain Pythagorean record for anyone unfamiliar, but Bill Simmons’ new site has ruined that as a gimmick for internet writers everywhere and so I’ll just put it here. You can estimate a team’s record from runs scored and runs allowed in the same way that you can calculate the length of the third side of a right triangle if you know the lengths of the other two sides. It’s not a perfect estimation like it is in geometry, but in general teams with winning records outscore their opponents, team with losing records are outscored, and teams’ levels above or below .500 correlate with how much they score or are outscored during a season) all season. That’s all well and good, but using a Pythag as canon when it comes to evaluating play assumes that all runs have an equal predictive value. They don’t. Let’s imagine two teams that win a game by a 4-0 score against equal opponents. In one game, the team that wins has four hits: they score once off a single/double combination, twice from extra base hits followed by groundouts/sac flies, and once thanks to a quirky infield bounce that leads to a two-base error. Their pitching staff gives up 12 hits, strikes out two batters, walks three, and generally dances through raindrops all day to narrowly keep runs off of the board. The second team also wins 4-0, but they rack up 17 hits, leave runners in scoring position all day, and their pitching staff annhilates the opponent with a 15-strikeout two-hitter. In the win column, both teams are 1-0. In the RS/RA columns, both teams are 4/0. Which team is more likely to win the exact same game again if they were to play a rematch?
The Pirates, for the better part of two months, were that first team, and that’s fine to an extent. Those wins do count the same as any other win that any other team in baseball has in the 2011 standings and I’m not claiming otherwise. But it’s awfully hard to keep winning like that and that’s why occasionally, Pythagorean record is a bad predictor and estimator of talent. At Baseball Prospectus, they publish adjusted standings every day with three columns, a Pythagorean win estimator, a “Second Order” win percentage with an estimated number of runs scored and runs allowed based on underlying statistics, and a “Third Order” win percentage based on the second order number with the schedule factored in. On July 25th, the last day the Pirates were in first place with a record of 53-47, their adjusted third order record was 44-56 if we round up. By that calculation, they were a 70-win team maquerading as an 86-win team. The 9.5 games between their third order predicted wins and their actual win total was the biggest in baseball in either direction at that time and besides the Twins (+9.1), no other teams were even outside of five wins either way.
The Pirates have been alarmingly bad in the last two weeks (actually, they’ve only managed to shave one win off of the difference between their actual wins and predicted third order wins with this losing streak), but for four months we talked about how the offense was disappointing, how the pitching staff had a large smoke and mirrors component to it, how they seemed to be winning despite making stupid outs on the bases and constantly throwing to the wrong base from the outfield. They kept it going for longer than anyone expected, but Rocco DeMaro has been leading the “Winter is coming” charge on Twitter for most of the summer and if we’re going with Game of Thrones references, well, they always say that the harshest winters come after the longest summers. The Pirates were way better than we expected and they kept it going for longer than anyone could’ve hoped, and now they’re way worse than was imaginable just two weeks ago.
I guess maybe the easiest way to make my point is this: You wouldn’t expect an 86-win team to lose 10 games in a row or 12 of 13, but you might expect a 70-win team to fall into that funk. Even if the Pirates snap their fingers and go back to playing the baseball they were playing on July 25th, there’s no guarantee that the wins will come back.
