...submitted, as Rod Serling would say, for your approval.
The idea here--shown to you as one-sixth of what the full report would look like (there would be six total components, sorted by MLB's six divisions)--is to give us a bird's eye view of how the two components of pitching play out for teams in their monthly cycles.
We are showing the 2023 results for the AL Central, which has some interesting range of performance to use for purposes of this demonstration. The "sOPS+" ranking, which is the primary performance value summary used in the Forman et soeur report cluster, works in the opposite direction from OPS+ for hitters: anything above 100 is a below average performance.
We've color-coded the good-bad extremes in the monthly date for the five ALC teams, which for the purposes of locating nuance within this data points us directly at the Detroit Tigers, who had a solid (but also extra-lucky) performance from their relievers in May: that 8-1 won-loss record for the bullpen guys allowed the Tigers to put together a somewhat deceptive 16-11 mark.
And there's nothing but bad news to be discovered in the Royals' data--nothing but green-colored cells displaying how deep below league average their pitchers have been since Day One of the '23 season.
Note the SP% and Dec% columns at the right end of the chart. They show you the percentage of IP in each month pitched by the starting pitchers, and the percentage of decisions--actual assigned wins/losses--credited (or debited) to the starters. This data seems a bit random, but we'll track it for awhile and see what it looks like after we have enough of it on hand...
WE'RE going to throw together the full report (all six divisions...) using this same format when we get to the end of the month.
