that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action. As CKD pointed out below, 6 straight times (and we’re well on our way to #6) means there’s something wrong with the system you’re using.

I don’t find anything mysterious about it either. For the last five years or so, the Angels have had very good late-inning relief pitchers (K-Rod, Fuentes, Shields, Arredondo, Oliver) but very bad middle-relief pitchers (Speier, Bootcheck, Carrasco, Romero, everyone on the 2009 team). Scioscia never changes his bullpen strategy, which is to save his good relievers for the late innings of a close game at all costs. So when his team gets ahead by even a small margin, they tend to win. When they get ahead by a large margin, it tends to turn into a small margin. And when they get behind, they get really behind. Thus their wins tend to be close wins, but their losses tend to be big losses.

The Pythagorean formula is an empirical law, there is no theory behind it. But in a sample of 30 teams over many seasons, the average margin of victory will be the same as the average margin of defeat. The Angels are an outlier that don’t have this symmetry, so they shouldn’t be expected to fit the model as well as other teams. I haven’t yet put this up to a statistical test over the long run, but this is my suspicion of what’s happening. It’s not luck as much as it is a very “polar” bullpen.

not all runs are created equal. 1 run in a 1-0 game is far more valuable than 2 runs in a 5-0 game.

The real question is in what ways is being able to score a run when needed a skill (or preventing a run)? (And, I suppose, for what reasons would a team stop scoring runs when not needed or give up more runs)?

Obviously, a stronger than average bullpen, will prevent runs at the right time, which has consistently been a strength of the Angels. Some have argued that their style of offense scores more consistently, which tends to make more of the runs scored important. You can also be more willing to keep in a crappy starter or put in crappy relievers when the game is out of hand. That doesn’t seem like an Angel thing, though.

What else? What else explains being able to control the timing of runs?

Which is useful information! The un-useful part is the interpretation, which tends heavily (and inaccurately) toward the word “luck.”

“RESISTANCE POWER: How the Most Luminous Owner and GM Ever Put Together the Luckiest Team in Baseball, and How to Study Every Their Match,” BY LEWIS MICHAEL.

nice signature! you took my suggestion

Rec’d

…it gives you a way of establishing the length of the sides of a right angled triangle. That’s where these eejits are going wrong…

at what point does BP maybe consider that theres a hole in their little system

When the East Coast teams start to play “The Soth” way

I do believe the Halos would be looking at something like 76 wins at this point if the Grand Slam Specialist and Co. hadn’t wreaked their havoc in those first two months…

But that’s not what the point is at all, whether or not you agree with the premise.

If you flip 7 out of 10 heads, you were lucky to get two more heads than expected. But you can’t tell me which two flips were the lucky ones. (Yes, it’s a soft analogy.)

Of course, Sky Kalkman is an A’s fan. But that means nothing, it’s all numbers… >_>;

for why the last two years have been so crazy is the ever-widening disparity between the best relievers in our bullpen and the mop-up guys who fill in. Since the mop-ups only come in when we have a giant lead or are behind by a lot, our pythag is naturally manipulated by the variance. The other thing that seems to be true is that both of the last two Aprils the Angels have been forced to throw out a bunch of AAA-guys who have subsequently been completely lit up, yanking the Angels pythag down. However both seasons they have managed to keep enough average-above average starters in the rotation to stay competitive in the short run. Over the long haul, it would catch up to you, but in the short run you can keep your head above water.

But the big problem with the “lucky” mantra that we Angels have isn’t really based on Pythag. It’s more about the way predictions always seem to completely undershoot the real potential of the players the Angels put on the field. It’s the way the the current models seem organized to underrate the Angels not as a one-time fluke, but year after year.

A good example would be the adjusted standings mentioned above. You take the Angels (who even if they are 7 games over Pythag, are still the second-best team in the AL according to run-difference) you put their numbers into your calculations, and somehow arrive at the mind-boggling conclusion that in a less random world, the Blue Jays, currently +29 in run difference, are a better team. Almost 60 runs of difference over the course of two-thirds of a season of play are discarded to arrive at this conclusion. At THAT point, most Angels fans feel totally justified in shrugging their shoulders and flipping the bird at the whole school of thought.

That i

It has more to do with the attitude towards it and, even more to the point, the third order wins of Baseball Prospectus and other advanced sabermetric ranking systems. In my opinion, Pythagorean wins are an interesting snap shot of where a team would be were all runs created equal. When I see a team whose Pythagorean wins are signifcantly above or below what they actually have, I am intrigued. I ask myself why this team or that team is so far from what the numbers say, what cause it could have.

Increasingly, however, I find Pythagorus and other saber-rankings used by others to say that this or that team has gotten unlucky, or that team over there is overperforming and bound to regress. In other words, when the numbers and reality disagree, REALITY IS AUTOMATICALLY WRONG. The numbers SHOULD be right, and the fact that they aren’t is simply proof of the whims of chance and bound to come around under the law of averages. I find this to be arrogant and dismissive of a sport played not by numbers but by real people, people who are subject to emotions, fatigue, injury and attitude.

By the way, I’d point out that Pythagorus isn’t the mechanism telling us that the Blue Jays, Rangers and White Sox are better teams than the Halos.