The Nats? GREAT!
It was a good Opening Day and a good weekend as the Nats took the series from the Cubs and started the year with one of these for the first time since... 2018? Wow. I mean it's close to a 50/50 thing. ok.
The hero of the series is Joey "Enjoy it while you can" Weimer 6-6 with two walks and 2 homers. MVP! On the other side Wood looked really lost in the series striking out 7 times. The starting pitchers were mediocre but good enough while the pen alternated between great and terrible as you'd kind of expect from 1-2 outings a piece. But just one series. We START to even THINK about looking at these guys two weeks in and even then that's just a quarter of the way to a real evaluation around Memorial Day.
This week is Philly and LA so one more series win would be nice but not expected.
Baseball!
Remember the basic fan rule: all positive performances are not sustainable and can be dismissed. All negative performances are harbingers of disaster and everyone should be fired.
ReplyDeleteSnark aside, I'm just happy that the Nats have pocketed two wins at the start of a brutal opening season schedule. On the Fangraphs' playoff odds the Nats have increased their playoff chances by 62.5% (from 0.8% to 1.3%)! And they are now on the board with a 0.1% chance of winning the division, up from 0.0%! I realize that it likely means they crossed the rounding threshold of 0.05%, but I'll take it. So you're saying there's a chance!
Projections and Joey Wiemer aside, a big takeaway here is the success of the different team management style. Given the so-called "fully-stacked" status of the outfield, some of us were scratching our heads with the moves that brought in unknown outfielders-- and utility infielders and relievers. Clearly, the new group is scanning MLB cast-off lists to find players whose strengths cover team weaknesses. They struck sabermetric gold -- at least for two games --with Joey.
ReplyDeleteNo playoff expectations here (yet). But definite appreciation for the new approaches.
When Joey hits a single, his OPS goes down.
DeleteI'm pretty confident that there's nothing that can happen in a 3 game series that justifies meaningfully changing one's priors, but, wow, Joey Wiemer is doing his best to prove that wrong.
ReplyDelete13-2 over the Phillies tonight seeds more confusion. How many wins makes it real? A bunch more I guess.
ReplyDeleteIf the full season were a single game, our 3-1 record probably equates to a 3-1 count on the first batter
DeleteRe: 3-1 record as a full season of baseball remark
ReplyDeletePardon the geekery, but this idea was too fun for my brain to walk away from. Not knocking the OP at all here. Probably took a WAG without much thought and arrived generally well.
- 162 real games turned into one make believe game (MBG) of 9 innings = 18 real games per MBG inning
- 4 real games played thus far out of 18 for one MBG inning = 22.2% of an inning
- per baseball reference there were 75.2 plate appearances per game last season or 8.36 per inning or 4.18 per team per inning. 22.2% of 8.36 = 1.857 plate appearances
- so we're in the top of the first with roughly 2 PAs in the books and a success ratio of of 75%.
- Maybe a runner on 2B with the second batter in a 0-2 hole?
Well, I'd prefer to have the Phillies roster, but failing that it's better to be 3-1 than 1-3?
ReplyDeleteRe: is this real, there are really two different questions you could ask. One is whether this team is good, and for that as many have said we're getting no information. The other is whether the team is better than we thought, and for that question we might be learning something (although it depends a bit on how confident you were coming into the season that this team was terrible). Speaking for myself, I might have put this as a 65 win team before and maybe now I've updated to 70 wins?
Just to elaborate on my prior point because many people have a good sense about proper sample sizes but not how to properly update priors. Say you have a guy like Wiemer who you see OPS 2.446 in 13 plate trips. Of course that's not the expected full season performance. But, if you hid the name on the jersey, you'd be very confident that he's not a bum off the street since the probability a bum puts up a line like that in as many as 13 plate appearances is for all intents and purposes literally 0. How far you update depends on the prior distribution, and there are a lot more fringey mlb guys than clones of peak mike trout in the pool so the probability he turned into trout is still very low, even conditional on that performance. But you still update positively!
ReplyDeleteI think the new regime may bring ads to this site
ReplyDeleteCan Wiemer play 1B? Just wondering why the guy is sitting 2 straight games. Does he only play well when on the road sleeping in hotel rooms?
ReplyDelete@JE34: hey cut it out with that whole trying to win baseball games ideology. We don’t want folks to get the wrong idea!
ReplyDelete