Numbers Don't Lie
Sabermetrics Deep Dive
Four series. Three predictions nailed exactly. The fourth missed only because the structural thesis underestimated a team with the worst rotation in the league—the kind of error worth living with. The session played out as the thesis demanded: Astleys took three of four in Arlington, Iron Knob banked three more computer wins to separate itself in second place, Huanca won the head-to-head for fourth, and Nicaragua dropped another game it cannot make up. The only surprise was Garth Graham's club sweeping Oak Ridge instead of splitting it, leapfrogging both Huanca and Nicaragua for fourth place. The standings did not merely shift. They clarified.
The prediction was Astleys 3-1. The concern was the power environment—four games in Arlington against the most dangerous lineup in the league. Nolan Ryan struck out twelve Astleys in the opener. Fred McGriff hit two home runs, Paul O'Neill added a three-run shot, and Knockemstiff won 8-4 with such authority that the series briefly looked like the one place a 75-win team could get embarrassed. It was. For one game.
Bryn Smith answered the next night with eight innings of five-hit, two-run ball. Through eight innings, the Astleys trailed 2-0 against Melido Perez. Then Steve Bedrosian came in to close and the door fell off its hinges. Eric Davis singled. Randy Milligan singled. Bedrosian uncorked a wild pitch. Mickey Tettleton's groundout scored the first run. Joe Orsulak walked. Jeff Treadway walked to load the bases with two outs. And Bob Boone—hitting .164, a catcher who appeared in the lineup because someone had to—grounded a single up the middle to score two runs and give the Astleys a 3-2 lead they never relinquished. Dennis Eckersley closed it in the ninth.
That is the Knockemstiff bullpen problem distilled to its purest form. Perez threw 109 pitches of the best baseball anyone had seen at Arlington all season. Bedrosian inherited it and detonated it in nine pitches. Brett Houlberg's club has now lost six of its last seven against human competition, and in almost every case the loss traces to a seventh-, eighth-, or ninth-inning reliever who cannot hold what the starter built.
Game 3 belonged to Jose DeLeon and the Astleys' returning reinforcements. Lou Whitaker played his first game since the injured list, walking twice and scoring once. The Astleys overcame an early 3-1 deficit with a three-run fifth featuring Orsulak's RBI single, Tim Raines's RBI single, and Wade Boggs's sacrifice fly. Eckersley came in for a two-inning save, his 21st.
Game 4 was not close. Robby Thompson homered, Rick Astley homered, and Eric Davis—already the most dangerous hitter in the WLB—launched his 43rd home run of the season, a two-run shot in the fifth inning off John Smiley that followed Glenn Davis's two-run double and turned a 2-2 game into a 6-2 rout. The final was 9-4.
McGriff, for what it's worth, hit four home runs in the series with eight RBI. In a different context, that is dominant. In this one, it was the best player on the losing side of a 3-1 series against a team that simply has more depth at every position and in every inning. The Astleys are 78-31. They are 28-4 on the road since June 11. Their magic number against Iron Knob is 42. The pennant race is not a race.
The prediction was Huanca 2-1. Roger Clemens was Roger Clemens in the opener. Nine innings, three hits, one earned run, five strikeouts, 99 pitches. Don Mattingly provided the offense with three hits and six RBI, including a two-run homer in the fifth. Nicaragua won 6-1.
The other four days arrived promptly. Frank Viola outdueled Mark Langston in Game 2, holding Nicaragua to two runs on fourteen hits—fourteen hits and two runs, a sequence so improbable it borders on performance art. The Crepe Wrappers stranded twelve runners. They put the leadoff man on base in five different innings and scored in two of them. Viola induced four double plays in the moments that mattered. Howard Johnson homered again—his 32nd—and Bo Jackson drove in two with a sixth-inning blast. Lee Smith struck out the side in the ninth to preserve the 5-2 win. For Nicaragua, it was a game that encapsulated the entire season: elite starting pitching, adequate contact, and an utter inability to deliver the hit that breaks a game open.
Game 3 was worse. Bob Welch lasted two innings against a Huanca lineup that had seen Nicaragua's pitching enough by then to sit on what it knew was coming. Jackson hit his 23rd home run, Ryne Sandberg hit his 20th, and Brian Harper—back from the injured list—drove in two with a pair of sacrifice flies. The Wankers scored eight runs. Barry Bonds, returning to the Nicaragua lineup, went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. Tim Belcher threw seven innings of six-hit, two-run ball for the win.
Nicaragua is now 60-49. They entered the session tied for fourth. They exit it in sixth. Chris Carpenter's club has now won one game in this series while watching Fugging sweep three and Huanca win two. Every game was supposed to be precious. Two of them are gone.
The prediction was Iron Knob 3-0. It was Iron Knob 3-0. There is not much to say about three games between the second-best team in the league and the worst, except that Andrew Harris's club did exactly what competent teams are supposed to do against inferior opposition: win without drama, bank the victories, move on.
Except that Game 3 had plenty of drama—almost all of it crammed into one inning. Greg Maddux took a 1-0 lead into the eighth, throwing the kind of surgical, pitch-to-contact masterpiece that the Diamond Mind engine rewards: six hits, two walks, four strikeouts on 113 pitches over nine complete innings. But the Hurricanes tied it in the eighth on a Jordan RBI single and a Leonard sacrifice fly, and briefly it looked like the kind of slip that computer teams manufacture just often enough to cost you a game.
Then the ninth inning happened. Lance Parrish homered. Terry Pendleton homered. Ozzie Smith singled. Rickey Henderson hit a two-run bomb. Steve Sax hit a solo shot. Four home runs in one inning. Six runs. The final was 7-2, and Maddux had a complete-game win despite giving up the lead in the eighth, because his offense decided to turn the ninth inning into a fireworks display.
Henderson stole seven bases in three games. Tony Gwynn went 5-for-14 with a triple and two stolen bases. The Explosions are 71-38, one game clear of Knockemstiff for second place—exactly the separation that the computer-game advantage was supposed to produce.
The prediction was Fugging 2-1, on the theory that even against a 21-win club, a rotation with a 5.80 ERA would cough one back. The rotation did not cough one back. It pitched three of the best games it has thrown all season.
Kirk McCaskill threw a complete-game shutout in the opener—nine innings, eight hits, zero runs, two strikeouts. The Nukes could not get a runner past second base. Game 2 was the drama. Fugging led 3-0 through seven behind Bruce Hurst, and then Oak Ridge scored three in the eighth to tie it. Wilson doubled, Downing singled, Palmeiro hit a sacrifice fly, and suddenly a routine game was 3-3 in extra innings. Bill Landrum was saddled with the blown save.
The game went to the eleventh. Jack Clark homered to put Fugging ahead 5-3. Then Ellis Burks tripled to score two more and it was 7-3. Jeff Montgomery, who has been the one reliable constant in Fugging's bullpen, was unavailable after pitching the previous day. Greg Minton closed it, allowing one run but getting the final out. Game 3 was Doug Drabek's best start in weeks—seven innings, seven hits, one run—and Montgomery returned for a 1.2-inning save to complete the sweep, 4-1.
The sweep pushes Fugging to 62-48. The Honey Badgers entered this session in sixth place at 59-48, half a game behind Huanca and Nicaragua. They exit in fourth—a half-game ahead of Huanca and two ahead of Nicaragua. They did it by sweeping a computer team while the clubs around them split against each other. That is the computer-game cushion doing what it was designed to do. Fugging still has 18 computer games remaining. Nicaragua has eight. The gap is structural, and it is widening.
I wrote last week that the remaining computer-game inventory would reshuffle the standings. It did. In one session. Iron Knob and Fugging each banked three computer wins while their competitors fought each other. The result: Iron Knob separated from Knockemstiff for second place, and Fugging vaulted from sixth to fourth without playing a single human game. The standings are now shaped less by talent evaluation and more by schedule sequencing—exactly the dynamic I projected would govern the final seven weeks of the season.
The updated computer-game inventory tells the story: Huanca has 20 remaining computer games with a projected 17 wins at .87. Iron Knob has 19 remaining with 17 projected wins. Fugging has 18 remaining with 16 projected wins. Rick Astleys have 9 remaining with 8 projected wins. Knockemstiff has 8 remaining with 7 projected wins. Nicaragua has 8 remaining with 7 projected wins.
The top three in the cushion column—Huanca, Iron Knob, and Fugging—are the three teams positioned to gain ground over the final stretch regardless of what they do in human games. The bottom three—the Astleys, Knockemstiff, and Nicaragua—must win their human matchups to maintain position, because they have almost no free victories left.
For the Astleys, this is irrelevant. They lead by seven games with a +301 run differential. They can lose every remaining human game and still finish in the high 80s on the strength of their banked wins and the few cupcakes remaining. The pennant is decided.
For Knockemstiff, it is a slow-motion crisis. The Slap Daddies are 1-6 in their last seven human games. Their bullpen is a sieve. McGriff hit four home runs in the series and it did not matter. Bobby Bonilla is hitting .364 and it did not matter. They have eight computer games left—essentially the same inventory as Nicaragua, a team whose season I declared functionally over two columns ago. If the Slap Daddies cannot reverse the bullpen collapse, they are looking at a third-place finish despite owning the most dangerous lineup in the league.
For Nicaragua, the math is now close to fatal. Eight computer games remain. The hardest remaining schedule in the league, weighted toward human opponents. A 1-2 session against a Huanca team that is not better than them on paper—the Crepe Wrappers outhit the Wankers 33 to 18 across three games and still lost the series. When you outhit a team by that margin and lose two of three, the problem is not talent. It is sequencing, leverage, and an offense that cannot deliver in the moments that matter. Clemens is 12-6 with a 2.84 ERA. It is being wasted.
The prediction scorecard: 4-for-4 on series winners, 3-for-4 on exact game counts. The structural thesis—computer-game inventory as the governing variable of the stretch run—held for one more week. Whether it holds through September depends on whether the human teams can disrupt the pattern, or whether the pattern has already decided the outcome. The evidence from this session suggests the latter.
Bob Boone hit .164 coming into the ninth inning on August 9th. He hit .164 leaving it. But the two runs that crossed the plate on his single to center are worth exactly as much as two runs off the bat of a .364 hitter, and that is the kind of arithmetic that keeps Brett Houlberg awake at night—because his bullpen keeps writing checks his lineup cannot cash.