Phil Watch: I Was Going To Leave It Alone

And then I took about 3 1/2 seconds and thought about it.

First, some context for early season Phil.

What do we know about Phil this baseball year?

We know he's chosen his two players to follow this season to fall back on when column ideas dry up during the course of the year in Chris Carpenter and Joe Mauer.

Again, you almost have to admire the process.  It's so college student writing papers for 100-level courses.  Get a bunch of filler for a couple of subjects that you know about and spread it thin.  Pump in 20% new research and presto!  Paper done in record time.

Last year was Frank Thomas and Kyle Lohse.  See.  He fulfilled the "local angle" requirement with Thomas being an ex-White Sox player and Lohse playing in the Cubs' division.  This year, Phil's found a way to tell us 8,000 times that Carpenter's performance has "playoff implications" and he's typed "sacroiliac joint" 8,002 times in columns relating to the dreamy Mr. Mauer.

So, we here at Phil Watch have skipped such dippy repetitiveness.  Plus, we haven't even done a Power Rankings For Morons this year.  We promise to get to that Monday.  On that note, for a truly funny MLB Power Ranking, check out Larry Dobrow over at CBS Sportsline.  That's good stuff.  

But this Sunday, Phil tells us that hitting for the cycle is a "growing trend" and gives the grand revelation that it probably has something to do with the new, quirky ballparks.  Eureka!    

Further down comes this nugget, though:

Tough to dig out: This may really turn out to be a crazy season. Research by writer Gerry Fraley shows that slow starts carry a bigger impact than you might think in baseball's wild-card era.

Since 1995, when the wild card was added, 161 teams have had losing records through 10 games. Only 21 of those teams recovered to reach the playoffs. That's a 13 percent chance.

Boston, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Cleveland, Arizona and Milwaukee were among the teams starting this season 4-6 or worse. Imagine the angst this factoid could cause in Red Sox Nation.

Holy Smokes!  Phil does attribution!  It's a new dawn in America!

He's most certainly covering his ass here, though.  You know, just in case the research proves to be unbelievably wrong.

But let's take it at face value.  Sounds impressive/daunting/neat-o, right?

Well, no.  

In those 14 seasons, we've had some perennially bad teams by and large, teams that have patently refused to field competitive teams based largely on their own incompetence, bad drafting, stupid contracts and just general weirdness.  

The Pirates, Royals, Devil Rays, Orioles, Rangers, Brewers, Tigers and Nationals/Expos come to mind and all those teams finished under .500 the vast majority of the time since 1995.

The research to precisely figure out the numbers would take too long for me (I got crap to do before going to work) but it would be safe to say that just keeping it at those eight teams and fiddling around with the MLB.com standings on about April 11 each year, you can see it to be largely true.

Now, let's say those eight teams were below .500 through April 11 about 10 of those 14 seasons.  

And now revise Phil's number (through Fraley) of "161 teams" and reduce that to 80 teams (161 - (8 teams x 10 seasons)).  That cuts the 161 teams to 80 and doubles the percentage to 26%.  

And that's just taking the consistently bad, not even the teams that are usually around .500 or teams that are recently good (the Cubs) or recently bad (the Giants).

But all this is rather frivolous and besides the point because the argument against such cute comparisons is stupid in the first place.

Why?  Because in the sample size, you're putting the 2009 Boston Red Sox into the same pool as the 2003 Detroit Tigers.  It's like putting a marathon runner into an Iron Man competition with Aretha Franklin and seriously discussing odds on who will win.  It's a colossal waste of time.  

So, since Francona chose to go with Javier Lopez in game eight of the season against the A's instead of sticking with Papelbon for a second inning, causing the team to drop to 2-6 instead of a possible 3-5.  They won the next two games, putting their 10-game record at 4-6 instead of 5-5 and placing them into Phil's (through Fraley's) "under .500" pool.  

Pack it up, Boston fans.  13% chance.  You lost game eight of the season.  Your year is done.

See.  It's just stupid. 

For further illustration on the inherent dopiness of it all, I would like to give attribution to Jesse Spencer of the New York Daily News: 

Since Major League Baseball went to a six-division alignment and expanded the playoffs to four teams per league, 27 of the 104 teams to make the postseason have done so after sporting a losing record in June or later. This includes half of the playoff teams from the last two years - last season's Cubs, Phillies, Rockies and Yankees, as well as the 2006 A's, Dodgers, Padres and Twins all were under .500 at some point after two months of the season had elapsed.

Which do you see as a better indicator of success after being under .500 at some point of the season?  June and later or after 10 games?

Let's mash them together.  Since 1995, if a team is under .500 after 10 games, they have a 13% chance to make the playoffs.  But of the teams that made the playoffs since 1995, 26% of the teams had a losing record in June or later.

If you can present an argument with even a scintilla of credibility w/r/t the 10 game model, you win my undying affection.