All told he's having about an equivalent year to last. He is, as they say, what he is.
June;: Red Sox discussion, observations and trend tracking...AKA It's not all about the Benjamins
- Thread starter YTF
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In theory I get that this approach works. In real life, I can't think of a scenario where it has, relative to the players in the locker room (I'm sure there has been one, but the closest I can think of was Seattle last year moving Sewald, and the Ms still missed the playoffs). At least not when talking about moving "top of the depth chart" players, so to speak. Or, I don't think it would work in the clubhouse dynamic to sell Jansen or Pivetta for prospects, replace him with Hendricks (or Criswell / Fitts) and then flip 40 man clutter for other pieces.
I will certainly cede that there is a "path" to do both, like they did in 2022, I sincerely hope that they don't chose that option. If they chose not to buy (with the 40 man clutter) or bigger, then sell and sell hard (O'Neill, Jansen, Pivetta, Martin). We can respectfully agree to disagree on the "both options" path.
Though, I hope they buy.
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They have 2 3 game series that are good opportunity to keep playing at least at a .666 clip. Taking 2/3 from both the Padres and Marlins before heading into the Bronx isn't asking for too much. The Yankees are collapsing due to injuries now while the Sox are almost fully healthy. They then have the A's coming into town and then 3 games against direct competitors at home. The next two weeks leading into the All Star break could and should see this team gain even more ground.
Yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with waiting until the All-Star break to make a buy or sell decision. That schedule should confirm buy, but if they crash and burn over the next two weeks it is probably better to focus on continuing to develop the kids.
You need to learn how to dream. It's entirely possible for the Red Sox to stay hot and the Yanks to collapse.
Catching both is highly unlikely sure. But these things happen and they make sports glorious.
Realistically, very few teams are in a position where they can clearly decide their buy/sell positions before the All Star break. Teams more than 10 games out of the 3rd wildcard right now are almost definitely sellers (which is only four teams in MLB...White Sox, A's, Marlins, Rockies). Teams 5+ games up on WC3 are almost definitely buyers (Guardians, Yankees, Orioles, Phillies, Dodgers, Brewers). Everyone else is a hot week or two (or cold week or two) from clearly contending (or clearly pretending). They're all best served waiting until a couple weeks before the deadline to make the call.
I'm with you on this one. As much as I like fangraphs I'm not as sold on their playoff odds. I don't fully understand how they crunch their numbers, but I get the sense that even at this point they are heavily weighted toward pre-season projections. For example, Fangraphs projects the Rays for a .509 pace for the rest of season and the Red Sox for a .497 pace. Given what we've seen so far this year I just don't see how that makes sense. The Rays have a slightly harder schedule and, while they are only 3.5 games back of the Sox, the Sox are 2 games under their pythag while the Rays are a massive 6 games over their pythag. Pre-season projections matter, but I don't think it's reasonable to project the Rays with their -56 run differential being better than the Sox for the rest of the year at this point. It could happen, for sure, but I don't think it's the expected outcome.
IMO Fangraphs is underrating the Sox, although I can see one strong argument for their pessimism: the possibility of the Sox rotation hitting an IP wall and collapsing as a result.
Yeah. And last year at midseason, Zips still projected the Mets to have more wins that the Red Sox, which was absolutely ridiculous. Even with the late season collapse, we finished 3 games above them. ZIPS 2023 midseason predictions.
I'm fully strapped in for a WC slot and then get hot and do some things, but I
No need to not underderstand when you can get their breakdown on the number crunching here - https://www.fangraphs.com/standings/playoff-odds/about -
Nothing to do with pre-season projections at all.
Short part:
Then it goes into breakdown the 4 projection modes they use
Last year at midseason the Mets hadn't traded nearly every one of their pitchers away.
So, ZIPS failed to predict the Mets would ditch expiring contracts of star pitchers (Verlander, Scherzer) when they were 36-45 at the halfway point? That's not a good look.
Neither of those contracts were expiring. They each were signed through this season for north of $40M each. It's not unreasonable to expect they weren't going anywhere.
Still doesn’t make sense regarding the more optimistic projection for the Rays over the Sox….. especially considering the Rays will likely be dumping their good players
https://www.statmuse.com/mlb/ask/what-is-the-red-sox-record-by-day-of-the-week
They’re just a lousy team at home.
Home: 19-22, -17 run differential
Road: 24-16, +54
Even during a month when they’ve been playing good baseball and have one of the better records in the league, still just 7-6 at Fenway.
Home: 19-22, -17 run differential
Road: 24-16, +54
Even during a month when they’ve been playing good baseball and have one of the better records in the league, still just 7-6 at Fenway.
The models have no way of predicting who and who won't be traded and for whom. They build on the roster as they are and predict playing time from there. They do update once trades happen though.
Even without considering potential trades…. Why are they more optimistic about the Rays?
It is essentially a one game difference between the Rays prediction and the Sox - it could be noise in the system or it could be lack of track record for our starting pitching to continue doing things they've not done before.
Pretty sure the FG playoff odds are based at least in part on preseason projections, so the computers still “expect” the Rays will be as good - and the Red Sox to be as meh - as they thought they were back in March/April.
Or you could read the link just a couple of posts above where I disproved that theory.
Preseason projections though could have a carryover effect in terms of how they relate to the team's projected strength. It looks like a significant input in two of their four models uses various predictive models for player performance and combine those with expected playing time to get a projection of a team's overall strength (and thus, likely winning percentage). However, I don't know how often they update individual player's projections. For example, let's take Duran.
The projection systems did not believe that his improvement last year was completely "real", so it looks like they overall expected less from him this year. Despite that, his actual stats this year are more or less in line with last year (with a slightly lower BABIP).
So here is where I think that preseason projections could indirectly affect in-season "playoff odds" calculators---in these situations you're basically trying to predict future wins and losses based off of projections for all of the players (weighted by playing time), the same as th4ey did in the preseason. But what version of the players are you using in your projections? The preseason projections, which would severely undersell what Duran has done so far? His current stats? A mix of both?
This is a long way of saying that if a projection system believed a player was going to be better or worse than they have actually played, then any future forecasting using those projections will likely assume that underperforming players will improve and overperforming players will come back to earth a bit.
Let's say that now, given Duran's season-to-date production, that they use a revised series of projections that splits the difference between his actual and predicted wRC+ and predicts that he will be a....roughly 110 wRC+ going forward. That will still have an affect on the team's predicted playoff odds.
Or maybe to more generally summarize----I think that playoff odds simulators will generally overestimate the odds for teams with many players underperforming their preseason projections and will underestimate the odds for teams with many players outperforming their preseason projections.
Preseason projections are perhaps not accurate exactly, but the "each team's projected performance" model is based on ZIPS and Steamer. These models are updated with season-to-date performance, but they are still weighting based on prior performance as well. This makes a lot of sense in general and will do a good job of predicting player regression for players that are either lucky or unlucky in season-to-date performance. However, they aren't going to do nearly as good a job at picking up on players that are breaking out due to significant skill development. For example, the FGDC projections predict Houck and Duran to be way worse for the rest of the season than they have been so far, while they predict Devers to be only a bit worse. These predictions make sense in that Devers has a long track record of success and is therefore more likely in a vacuum to continue that success. If you believe that Houck and Duran's breakouts are due to actual skill changes rather than luck, then FGDC is probably severely underrating them.
So no, it's not using preseason projections, but it is using projections that substantially factor in previous performance.
And you're right, I could have looked that up and would have if I had time, but was posting between work appointments and didn't have time to confirm the specifics. Apologies for that.
Being based on algorithms and data, prediction models tend to not overreact to a team having a 2-week hot streak.