Legends of the Fall

Baseball experts knew it for a long time, and Billy Beane made it well known: teams generally spend the first third of the season discovering their greatest strengths and weakness, the second third trying to fill their holes, and the final third pursuing a playoff spot. It stands to reason, then, that we would have a pretty good idea of which teams are good and which teams are bad by the 90 game mark. Nonetheless, every season sees its share of teams starting strong and fading into oblivion after promising starts. Last year, the Orioles and Nationals looked like legitimate playoff contenders, but various midseason monkey wrenches- Rafael Palmeiro’s sabotage job, Baltimore’s pitching meltdown, and the collective injury plague in DC- prevented either team from even finishing with a winning record. As it turns out, a 75-80 win team can masquerade as an 85-90 win team for half of a season without anyone noticing, but the chances of regression to the mean remain eminently overwhelming. Sometimes, a handful of fortuitous bounces will give a team a disproportionate number of one-run wins. Other times, the right players will all get hot simultaneously, making the team look better than it really is. In determining which teams are primed for a second half not in line with their first half success, several factors are important to consider. Teams with records out of accordance with their run differentials are prime suspects, but great records in one-run games, unsustainable individual contributions, and tougher schedules are all considerations. With those criteria in mind, here are two teams who may not be able to sustain their first half success.

Cincinnati Reds

Early in the season, the Reds success seemed so unreasonable that I put no stock in it, but as the team remained well above .500 for a few months, I started to warm to the idea that the Reds might not be such a bad club. I automatically root for those affiliated with the Twins, so Wayne Krivsky is a personal favorite, and not just as a receptacle for the Twins trash. Griffey, Dunn, Harang and Encarnacion are all good players, and the team built itself from the ground up. That said, I think the Reds are the team most likely to fall apart in the second half of the season. Currently 47-44, the Reds lead the NL Wild Card race and trail St. Louis by only four games in the NL Central. Their 460 runs scored are best in the division and third best in the league, trailing only New York and Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the Reds continue to struggle preventing runs, much like they have for the past several years. The rotation has not been great after Bronson Arroyo and Aaron Harang, but keep in mind that the pitchers’ ERAs will naturally look suboptimal when they have to pitch half of their games in the Great American Bandbox and in front of the seventh worst defense in the majors in terms of defensive efficiency. The bullpen has been a big part of the team’s failure to prevent runs, ranking in the bottom 10 in the majors in every meaningful category, and looked to be getting worse when Todd Coffey lost his mojo earlier this month. Indeed, relief pitching and defense were problems, but until recently, Krivsky was addressing them with appropriately measured restraint. Joe Mays and Rick White failed as pitching experiments, but Esteban Yan was cast off by the Angels and his given up a reasonable 7 runs in 15 innings pitched. Even picking up the version of Eddie Guardado that is more “every now and then” than he is “everyday” was worth a mildly intriguing pitching prospect. All of these moves seemed to hint at Krivsky’s proper understanding of building a bullpen out of cheap or spare parts. That is, until he became the latest victim of Jim Bowden’s transactional hyperactivity. Bowden continues to make bold move after bold move, much like the guy in your fantasy league who constantly proposes horrible trades in hopes that someone will either find one inexplicably attractive or else accept a trade to make him stop proposing them- call it management by erosion of the opposition. In this case, Bowden preyed on Krivsky’s lack of confidence in his bullpen, convincing the Reds to give up two of the pieces that make their offense as dangerous as it is by giving up some merely adequate bullpen innings. Replacing Austin Kearns and Felipe Lopez with Chris Denorfia and Royce Clayton substantially downgrades two spots in the lineup, changing it from a championship offense to one that is only slightly above average and heavily reliant on Griffey’s cranky legs. A bullpen consisting of Coffey, Kent Mercker, David Weathers and in-season pickups Guardado, Yan, Bill Bray and Gary Majewski should be a small but meaningful step up, but the losses on offense definitely outweigh the benefits. For this trade to look reasonable 10 years from now, Bray will have to become a big time reliever, possibly even a near-star level closer, which is highly unlikely. Already outscored on the season, the Reds do not look like they are on the cusp of improvement. Instead, they could be one pulled hamstring (Griffey) away from a Baltimore-like second half tank job.

Oakland Athletics

Like with last year’s Dodgers, we will eventually have to stop talking about how good Oakland will be once they get all of their players on the field and start acknowledging that Beane built a team that is extremely injury prone. Yes, Frank Thomas, Milton Bradley, Mark Ellis, Rich Harden, Esteban Loaiza, and Justin Duchscherer have all missed time with injuries, but almost every one of those players could reasonably be expected to miss time with an injury. In the A’s defense, there is are strong arguments to be made that Bobby Crosby is not a .235/.298/.350 hitter, that Mark Kotsay will get on base at a better clip than .308 the rest of the way, and that Loaiza (6.34 ERA) has better days ahead. Still, the A’s are another team that has been outscored by its opponents on the season, and their second order record- equivalent runs scored and runs against, adjusted for player performance- is six games worse than their actual won-loss record, according to BP’s adjusted standings report. Overall, it is not so much that I think the A’s are about to start playing much worse than they are, but that without their best players playing well or at all (such as Crosby and Harden, and perhaps Zito after 7/31), they are going to have a hard time keeping pace with the rest of the division. Seattle has been better than anticipated, and the Rangers and Angels both have better adjusted records than the A’s today and stand to make gains with some roster turnover in the near future- Adam Eaton coming back for Texas and Howie Kendrick replacing Adam Kennedy for LAA. With their current run of performance, the A’s could finish with 83 or so wins, but they will have to be quite a bit better than that to win the division, especially with Mark Texeira and the Angels’ rotation showing signs of life. Before the season, I picked the A’s to win the World Series, a prediction that looks less and less likely unless Billy Beane works of deadline magic for a real outfield bat to stand in for Jay Payton or some pop from behind the plate instead of the slap-happy softballer formerly known as Jason Kendall. In any case, I do not believe that the lineup the team used to pound Boston yesterday is one that can win the AL West this year.