The Red Sox and the Big Inning

[MyDaughterLovesTomGordon]

One sometime criticism of Farrell I've seen thrown around (and even uttered myself) is that he doesn't seem to be able to limit the damage. That the Sox have a tendency to give up the big inning, and thus be out of contention for the rest of the game. So, I thought I'd see if that were true. 
 
I went through every game thus far this season involving an American League team, and tracked how many times a team gave up anywhere between 4 and X runs in a single inning. Turns out the most anyone has allowed is 10 in an inning, and that would be by your New York Yankees. I picked 4 relatively arbitrarily, but mostly because 3 is much, much more common than 4, and as you can see, 4+ run innings are relatively rare. 
 
Here's the chart:
 
[tablegrid= Allowing a REALLY crooked number ]Runs 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total big innings BAL 9 2 2 0 0 0 0 13 BOS 5 2 6 1 0 2 0 16 CHW 10 5 1 3 0 0 0 19 CLE 9 1 5 1 0 0 0 16 DET 8 6 4 1 0 0 0 19 HOU 6 4 0 0 0 0 0 10 KCR 5 4 0 0 1 0 0 10 LAA 7 4 0 0 0 0 0 11 MIN 6 2 3 0 0 0 0 11 NYY 10 6 2 1 1 0 1 21 OAK 11 1 1 1 1 0 0 15 SEA 8 3 1 1 1 0 0 14 TBR 6 0 2 1 0 0 0 9 TEX 6 1 4 1 1 0 0 13 TOR 11 3 1 1 0 0 0 16 [/tablegrid] 
 
The Sox are lower half, it turns out, while the Yankees are the absolute worst. However, the Sox have given up 9 innings of 6 runs or more, which is the worst in the league. You can see that the best AL teams (other than the Yankees) definitely keep their big innings to a minimum. Which makes sense.
 
Thoughts on the data? I'm not sure how interesting it really is, as the numbers aren't all the big and these big innings are somewhat flukey, but I thought I'd put it out there.

 

[alwyn96]

I wonder how many big innings occured very early in the game, like the first 2-3 innings or so. A manager is going to be reluctant to start warming a reliever up in the early innings because he may already be dealing with a tired bullpen from the last blowout and the starter might be able to turn it around. It also takes what, 3 batters or 5 minutes or so to warm a guy up? I have no idea. Maybe the damage is done by the time you could get a different guy in there.
 
It's also possible a big inning is happening when the game is so far out of reach that the 12th man in the bullpen is just taking one for the team.
 
Or relievers are letting a bunch of inherited runners score - they can't get that key strikeout when they need it and it leads to bunches of runs. The Red Sox bullpen has one of the worst strikeout rates in baseball. And even a 3-run inning early can feel huge when the offense can't get anything going.
 
It may also be a function of having middling pitching. Lousy pitchers = more big innings. If a manager leaves in a starter to give up 9 runs, that's probably on the manager, but if he's going through 3-4 guys and none of them has anything? That's just a crappy pitching staff.
 
Those are my scattered thoughts, anyway.

 

[Rasputin]

I also think it would be useful to compare the definition of a big inning to the average number of runs scored by a team. The idea being that a four run inning is a much bigger inning for a team that scores 3.9 runs per game than one that scores 4.1 runs per game.

 

[MyDaughterLovesTomGordon]

....and there's another six-spot. Hard to win games when you give up innings that big, but not sure if there's really a way to avoid them in the moment. Could just be relatively random, but 7 total 6-run innings is starting to look like a trend. 

 

[AB in DC]

As a very crude estimate of big-inning-ness, I took BP's adjusted standings and subtracted D2-D1.  A positive number would mean that the team has been really good at clumping hits into runs, and preventing other teams from doing so (e.g. by scattering hits evenly throughout the game).  This should correlate with a larger number of "big innings" than expected on the offensive side, and a smaller-than-expected number on the pitching side.
 
At -3.1 wins, the Sox are the third-worst team in MLB :
 
-4.0 Cleveland
-3.6 LA Dodgers
-3.1 Boston
-2.5 Detroit
-2.3 Miami
-2.2 NYY
-2.1 Chi Cubs
-2.0 Houston
-2.0 Seattle
-2.0 Cincinnati
-1.4 San Fran
-1.4 Washington
-1.2 Oakland

 

[Plympton91]

Thanks for pulling these together AB and MDLTG, very informative stuff.  The number of 6+ innings is really amazing.  I was thinking of correlating it with overall ERA to account for the "the pitching just stinks" factor.

 

[Mighty Joe Young]

It could be a chicken and egg thing. Because of all the big innings, Farrell is reluctant to have a quick hook when a starter is blowing up early (that is he doesn't want to over tax the bullpen). But the starter stays in .. Continues to suck and gets pulled anyways .. Thus overtaxing the bullpen - and reinforcing the slow hook.