                        Team Wins and Losses
                        --------------------


It goes without saying that wins and losses are the most important things to
consider when judging a team's performance.  They are, after all, what the 
game is all about and what determines who gets to keep playing until there's
only one winner left.

But there is luck in baseball, and sometimes a team's win/loss record 
doesn't reflect the true strength or weakness of a team.  A team may fail to
score as many runs as usual given the walks and hits and stolen bases they
compiled, possibly because they didn't hit in the clutch or just because 
they happened to hit line drives right at people in key situations.  In a 
similar fashion, a pitching staff may allow fewer runs than normal given the 
number of runners they put on base and the homers they allowed.  And there
are times when a team will win 15-1 and lose 2-1 and 3-2, ending up with a 
losing record even though they outdid their opponents statistically.

We're not going to argue that these statistical achievements are more 
important than wins and losses, because they're not.  But they can shed some 
light on what happened in the past season and how the team is shaping up for 
the coming year, because luck does tend to even out in the long run.

To evaluate the statistical performance of each team, we've computed two 
numbers.  The first is OPS, the sum of on-base average and slugging 
percentage, a good measure of overall offensive production.  The first 
column in the following table shows the difference between the OPS generated 
by the team's hitters and the OPS of the hitters that faced its pitching 
staff.  We've stripped out the decimal points in the hope that the table is 
easier to read that way.  The second measure is TBW, the sum of total bases 
and walks, another good measure of offensive production.  

Neither is a perfect measure, to be sure, but they have the advantages of 
using data that's widely available, being easy to compute, and capturing 
the most important events that produce runs.  And because we're presenting 
the differences between offense and defense, park effects are eliminated 
from the equation.

So, for each AL team, the following table shows how their offense and 
pitching compared using OPS and TBW.  Baltimore, for example, had an OPS 
78 points (.078) lower than its opponents, and it produced 397 fewer total 
bases and walks than it allowed.  Both figures ranked 12th in the league.

        --- OPS ---    --- TBW ---
        Diff   Rank    Diff   Rank

  Bal    -78    12     -397    12
  Bos     51     4      253     4
  NYA     53     3      261     3
  Tam    -90    14     -475    14
  Tor    -19     9      -44     8

  ChA     24     6      132     6
  Cle     50     5      237     5
  Det    -88    13     -415    13
  KC     -70    11     -363    11
  Min      7     7       22     7

  Ana    -12     8      -62     9
  Oak     96     2      534     2
  Sea    126     1      603     1
  Tex    -41    10     -193    10

In the East, it's interesting to see that Boston and New York were almost
identical at this level.  But the men in pinstripes were far more adept
at turning their accomplishments into wins, and it cost one Boston 
manager (Jimy Williams) his job and left his replacement (Joe Kerrigan) 
scrambling to maintain control of the team.

The Central division standings were a pretty close match for these 
rankings.  Minnesota managed to hold onto second place by two games over
Chicago despite ranking lower on both of these measures.  Similarly,
Detroit took fourth despite being outranked by Kansas City.  But these
differences were reasonably small.

In the West, there were no surprises, with both Oakland and Seattle
coming up with dominant performances.  Seattle's real-life margin of 
victory -- 14 games -- was quite a bit bigger than these stats suggest.

Using something called the pythagorean projection, which was developed
by Bill James, it's possible to predict a team's win total from the 
number of runs they scored and allowed.  This method projects Seattle
for 111 wins and Oakland for 106.  But the Mariners were very strong in 
the clutch and churned out five more wins than normal, while Oakland 
came up four short.

Here's the data for the senior circuit:

        --- OPS ---    --- TBW ---
        Diff   Rank    Diff   Rank

  Atl     38     4      165     4
  Flo      0     9      -34    10
  Mon    -65    15     -362    16
  NYN    -23    11      -90    11
  Phi    -10    10      -25     9

  ChN     47     3      175     3
  Cin    -52    14     -273    14
  Hou     36     5      156     5
  Mil    -46    13     -253    13
  Pit    -72    16     -336    15
  SL      23     6       88     6

  Ari     68     2      389     1
  Col      7     8        1     8
  LA      14     7       71     7
  SD     -45    12     -149    12
  SF      70     1      384     2

As in the other league, the power was in the west, where Arizona and
San Francisco outpaced the rest of the teams by a large margin.  
Looking at these numbers, it's no surprise that the division race 
went down to the wire.

Interestingly, San Francisco had the least efficient offense in baseball
this year.  Their offensive OPS of .802 was 19 points better than Arizona's,
but the Giants scored 19 FEWER runs than their division rivals.  Had they
been able to turn their hits and walks into the normal number of runs, San
Francisco likely would have won the division.  It's possible that their
lack of balance -- they led the league in offense at LF, 2B, and SS but
lagged badly at all other positions -- contributed to their inefficiency.

The fact that San Diego finished ahead of Colorado was a big surprise.  
San Diego had by far the most efficient offense in baseball this year,
managing to rank 6th in the league in runs despite finishing 13th in OPS.
That was enough to vault them into fourth place over a Colorado team that
outscored its opponents by 17 runs but still lost 16 more games than they
won.  San Diego hyper-efficient offense and a much better record in one-
run games kept them out of the basement despite an underwhelming set of
team statistics.

If you purchased our 2000 Season Disk, you may have noticed that Houston
was last year's version of Colorado -- a team with a disappointing record
despite a respectable run margin and pretty good underlying stats.  That
Houston team performed better in our simulations than they did in real
life.  And by sharing the division lead in the real-life 2001 season,
Houston showed that it almost certainly was just a run of bad luck that
held them down a year ago.  Likewise, you can expect Colorado to perform
better in your DMB simulations than they did in real-life this year, and
if they don't dismantle the team during the off-season, it's a good bet
that the real-life Rockies will bounce back very nicely next year.

The late-season collapse of Chicago (26-31 after the trading deadline) 
ruined what was shaping up as a terrific season.  As you can see, they 
outhit and outpitched their opponents, but weren't able to translate 
that into enough wins.  As it was, they were only five games back of 
the co-leaders, but they could easily have taken the title.

St. Louis was a model of pitching efficiency.  Opposing hitters posted an
OPS of .756 that was only one point lower than the league average, yet the
Cardinals allowed the third fewest runs in the league.  Put another way,
they yielded 78 fewer runs than the average team despite allowing hits and
walks at about the average rate.  Brilliant use of the bullpen?  Yes, to
a degree, since the St. Louis relievers allowed the lowest percentage of
inherited runners to score in the NL, though this probably only accounts
for about 18 runs saved.  Clutch pitching?  The staff's numbers were not
impressive in the late innings of close games, though they were very good
with runners in scoring position.  Luck?  Probably.  Regardless of the
reason, if you go through the Component ERA section of the STATS Major
League Handbook, you'll see that Darryl Kile and other Cardinal pitchers
gave up fewer runs than normal given the hits and walks they allowed, and
those differences don't usually persist from season to season.

The East was downright strange, at least in the middle.  Atlanta wasn't
very good this year, but they were still the best team, both in terms of
wins and their underlying stats.  And Montreal was clearly the doormat of 
the division.

But Florida finished ten games under .500 despite putting together enough
hits and walks to finish with 80 or 81 wins.  Philadelphia was outhit and
outpitched, though not by much, but managed to score 27 more runs than
they gave up.  Statistically speaking, New York was the division's fourth-
best team but almost stole the pennant in an emotionally-charged stretch
run.
