Glass Half Full

Eighty games into a 162 game season, it seems that one should be able to get a pretty good read on the season’s trajectory. We can start talking about how the Tigers and Reds are having good seasons, perhaps even about how they are good teams, rather than being hot out of the gate. On the flip side, perhaps we oversold the Indians and the Braves might not be as strong on grass in July as they were on paper in March. But that doesn’t mean that a girl can’t dream- or that I can’t dream, for that matter- so today’s column is dedicated to those eminently reachable dreams. As baseball fans, we might not always admit how much we forecast the near and distant futures, sometimes even below the level of consciousness. Scientists may or may not have located the gene responsible for the activity, but even though I do not have so much as a master’s degree in science, I can tell you that baseball fans share a common stimulus-response mechanism that makes them automatically project every possible scenario into the future. Mauer’s hitting .390? That could mean he projects to a .400 season if he stays hot. The Tigers have a .650 winning percentage? They’ll come back to the pack and finish with about 90 wins for the season just by natural regression. And the best part is that even the best of us colors his or her projections with the rosy-hued glasses of fandom. Winning 18 of 19 games is an absurdity, but it seems perfectly natural to any Twins fans. We even have explanations for it. Have you heard this one? “Early on, we just needed to get the starting pitching back on track, and the hitting was already going in the right direction.” Or maybe, “As soon as we got Batista and Castro out of there, the team really gelled.” Stat-head or scout, casual fan or maniac, optimistic or skeptical, we are all subject to perpetually dreamscaping, so I might as well imagine just how sweet the second half will be- I mean, I’ll be thinking about it anyway.

For the Twins, the greatest source of apprehension and worry is the fact that a very strong first half has left them seven and a half games out of the wild card and ten games out of the division lead. If anyone told a Twins fan before the season that the team would have two Cy Young contenders, the major league batting and OBP leader, one of the top RBI men in the biz, the seventh best record in the majors, and eight games on Cleveland, it would sound like a dream scenario for the first 80 games. In reality, it has taken a memorably torrid streak to get on the fringe of relevance- and I don’t mean the fringe at the local chip-n-putt, this stuff is like the British links courses where the fairways and the fringe just kind of blend together. Some sabermetricians subscribe to the axiom that a GM should build a team to win 90 games and hope that variance works them into the Chinese fire drill that we call the playoffs. That variance could mean the team winning a few extra games here and there and beating out the other 90-odd game winners, or it could work against one’s adversaries, such in the case of last year’s Padres clubs.

After tomorrow, the Twins will have reached the half of the season on pace for 90 or 92 wins depending on tomorrow’s result, so Terry Ryan has done his job. As Twins fans, all we need to do is to hope that the point of equilibrium between the recent surge and the early season swoon is something like the conglomerate of the two, leaving the team with a reasonable shot at 90-92 wins, just like in the flush years of 2002-2004. It may seem that the team should stay better with Liriano and Santana dominating and the lineup looking more balanced than it has in years. As much as Bartlett and Kubel seem like big-time upgrades, let’s not forget that we’re getting daily helpings of Nick Punto-com (that’s “dot com” in Spanish) and a far heavier dose of Vitamin R (for Rueben). The offense still ranks ahead of only Oakland, LAA, Kansas City and Tampa in the American league, and having a powerful sucking noise coming from third base and DH every day tempers my exuberance. I still think the Twins look more like a 90 win team than they did before the season started- at least when I squint-, but even in my state of hopefulness, I do not want to imagine 96 wins and prepare for Sisyphusian disappointment.

The real change needs to come from the other half of that variance equation. The Tigers and White Sox are good, but just like last year’s White Sox, I have to keep wondering if they are really this good. I believe in Justin Verlander and Jeremy Bonderman, but how long can Zach Miner and Kenny Rogers keep waving those statistical red flags before the bull figures it out and they get the horns? Todd Jones is terrible- ten strikeouts in nearly 40 IP level of terrible-, but how many high leverage innings can he butcher before it starts to take a more serious toll on the wins and losses? Also, one has to believe that a roster including Pudge Rodriguez, Carlos Guillen, Magglio Ordonez, and Placido Polanco cannot hold together so well for an entire season. Inge and Monroe are sub-.300 OBP starters and Rodriguez and Polanco are both below .330. The Tigers have holes, and in the ideal world, they would start translating into losses and progress toward playoff contention for the Twins.

Having won the World Series gives the White Sox some perverse sort of credibility. Even though I thought they were a fluke all of last year and got incredibly lucky bouncing back from September struggles to dominate the playoffs, I came into this season thinking very differently of the entire team. But the team has been legitimately dominant this season, featuring three front-line producers in the middle of the lineup, a much improved team OBP outside of Juan Uribe, and a decent pitching staff that actually has room for improvement, unlike last year’s squad. On the other hand, the one-sided fan in me says that Jim Thome still runs a ridiculous injury risk, that Jon Garland and Javier Vazquez have hints in their stat lines that legitimate their struggles, that A.J. Pierzynski and Joe Crede just are not .800 OPS guys and that Jermaine Dye and Paul Konerko should not be having career years in their mid-thirties. Moreover, just like last season, the Sox are far outpacing their component stats at 6.1 wins over their third order projection (using individual component stats to project individual performance, individual performance to project team runs scored/allowed and team RS/RA to project record). For the record, the Twins 3rd order record is 42-38, right about where I expected them to be when I projected them to win 83 games for the season.

To be fair, the Twins still only have a 4% chance of making the postseason, according to the playoff odds report. Even the moribund Angels have a 6% chance due to divisional weakness. Primed as they may seem for a fall, the Tigers stand at 88% at the halfway point, far more than anyone expected in March. But that’s the glass-half-empty approach, and as a good baseball fan, I will at least consider the good breaks it will take for the Twins to climb that mountain. I know you have.