WINNERS How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones (and It’s Not the Way You Think) DAYN PERRY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page iii ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page ii WINNERS ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page i ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page ii WINNERS How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones (and It’s Not the Way You Think) DAYN PERRY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page iii Copyright © 2006 by Dayn Perry. All rights reserved Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc. 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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Perry, Dayn, date. Winners : how good baseball teams become great ones (and it’s not the way you think) / Dayn Perry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-471-72174-1 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-471-72174-3 (cloth) 1. Baseball—United States—Miscellanea. I. Title. GV873.P415 2006 796.357'06—dc22 2005015111 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page iv For my Mother and Father ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page v ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page vi Introduction 1 1 The Slugger 5 2 The Ace 36 3 The Glove Man 58 4 The Closer 82 5 The Middle Reliever 106 6 The Base Stealer 118 7 The Deadline Game 143 8 The Veteran and the Youngster 183 9 The Money Player 201 10 A Matter of Luck? 224 Epilogue 229 Acknowledgments 234 Bibliography 237 Index 239 Contents vii ftoc.qxd 12/8/05 12:34 PM Page vii ftoc.qxd 12/8/05 12:34 PM Page viii [...]... team can learn from the winners of the recent past You’d like to know what they’ve got that your team doesn’t The book in your hands attempts to answer the following queries: How do baseball teams win? More specifically, what things are important? What do they tend to excel at? What do they tend to ignore? In essence: How d they do that? 1 cintro.qxd 12/8/05 2 12:35 PM Page 2 WINNERS To cobble together... inclusion So to include playoff teams from the ’81 season in my research would be to pollute the sample with teams that weren’t really playoff teams As for the 1994 season, labor troubles once again fouled up the process, except this time no playoffs at all occurred However, even with those two seasons left out of the calculus, 124 playoff teams remain, and it’s those teams and what they did to be successful,... the baseball stats you’re used to seeing If you like, think of these statistics as an ideological counterweight to the stuff that’s on the backs of baseball cards But moreover think of them as tools that help tell the stories of these great teams Speaking of statistics and those who like to monkey around with them, there’s been a recent percolating controversy over whether it’s better to run a baseball. .. Field in 1998 Numbers must be adjusted to reflect that fundamental tenet of serious analysis At its core, however, this book is about great teams and the players who make them great The numbers will be here, but so will the stories of the flesh-and-blood folks who generate those numbers I’ll examine in great depth the roles and guises that come to mind when you ruminate on this game—the slugger, the ace,... closer, the glove man, the speed merchant, the setup man, the doe-eyed youngster, the salt-cured veteran, the money player—all toward learning what’s really the stuff of winning baseball This is the story of how great baseball teams got that way cintro.qxd 12/8/05 12:35 PM Page 4 c01.qxd 12/8/05 12:37 PM Page 5 C H A P T E R 1 The Slugger (or, Why Power Rules) In 1985 you couldn’t hit in Dodger Stadium... pool of 124 playoff teams depended more on good pitching and fielding than hitting to win games By comparing these teams park-adjusted runs scored and runs allowed totals and comparing them to their respective league averages, we make some interesting findings: • Playoff teams since 1980, on average, ranked 3.85 in their respective league in runs allowed and 4.18 in runs scored • These teams outperformed... • Fifteen teams made the postseason despite below-league-average park-adjusted runs-allowed totals, and 17 teams passed playoff muster despite below-average adjusted-runs-scored totals It’s certainly not a staggering margin, but it is apparent that the teams analyzed were better on the run-prevention side of the ledger than on the run-scoring side As the data above show, on average these teams ranked... still suboptimal The more informative rate stats—the ones that fill the voids left by batting average—are OBP and SLG These tell you how often a hitter reached base and how much power he hit for If you subtract batting c01.qxd 12/8/05 12:37 PM Page 13 THE SLUGGER 13 average from SLG, you’re left with isolated SLG, or ISO ISO is a good indicator of how much “raw” power a hitter has, and it communicates... with winning teams in the contemporary era To do this, let’s first look at how our 124 teams fare in terms of the park-adjusted percentage of the league average for each of these metrics: Statistic Adjusted Percentage of League Average Batting average 100.6 On-base percentage 101.1 Slugging percentage 101.8 Isolated slugging percentage 104.6 These numbers reflect how much our sample of teams exceeded... aren’t in the lineup for their artifice in the field Yet how does this square with the buttoned-down notion that teams, if they’re to be successful, must be strong up the middle (i.e., at the premium positions of catcher, shortstop, second base, and center field)? It’s merely another baseball platitude that, it turns out, is largely fiction Teams winners and losers alike—get the majority of their offensive . iii ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page ii WINNERS ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page i ffirs.qxd 12/8/05 12:31 PM Page ii WINNERS How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones (and It’s Not the Way You Think) DAYN PERRY John. WINNERS How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones (and It’s Not the Way You Think) DAYN PERRY John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ffirs.qxd. www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Perry, Dayn, date. Winners : how good baseball teams become great ones (and it’s not the way you think) / Dayn Perry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical