MONTHLY PITCHING DATA SPECIAL EDITION: STRENGTH/WEAKNESS INDICATORS FOR POST-SEASON TEAMS

WE'll publish the full season's worth of the monthly team pitching performance data (for both starters and relievers) after the World Series. A smidge of it will appear in this special report, where we look at the best team months for starters and the worst team months for relievers.

Some of this is prompted by the dogged distortions still being compiled by dear old John Clay Davenport, the original mastermind of the Baseball Prospectus "statitude adjustment cadre" (as we used to call it back in the day of BBBA). We recall being temporarily impressed with Davenport's efforts, but a closer look confirmed that it was just another form of reverse engineering that had no added value to our understanding--a feature that, for the most part, has continued in the field of "neo-sabermetrics" as practiced from ca. 1995-2005, then codified with new ideological fervor once these folks had penetrated into the mainstream, and finally overbaked thanks to the monomaniacal brigade marching to the chowdery chiliasms of the Tango Love Pie™.

In this instance, Davenport was quoted by Joe the P. for his eye-rolling "third order standings," which, in this instance, purported to tell us that Clay's centripetal engineering of the Pythagorean Winning Percentage (PWP) contained heretofore hidden insight that the Texas Rangers were the second best team in the AL and really should have won 97 games.

As is almost always the case with Clay, this sounds very impressive until you realize that the original PWP projected the Rangers to win 96 games. But this didn't stop Joe from giving it a ham-fisted place of prominence in his attempt to explain why the Rangers were doing so well in the playoffs, while teams with more actual wins (and fewer "projected" wins) were not.

IT was all "expiration date" glibberish that happens in the baseball media's silly season, but it made us realize that our monthly data--customarily derided by the lock-jawed lock-steppers in the (post)-neosabe world, could give us some actual insight into potential vulnerabilities that might crop up in the short-series mode that defines (and often makes strange) the post-season.

AND so we present the best starting pitching months based on the stat breakouts collated from Forman et soeur's team pitching splits data for 2023. First up is the AL data, which shows us that six playoff teams in the league--O's, Astros, Twins, Rays, Rangers and Jays--all had a least one month where their starters were collectively ten percent better than the league OPS (as measured by OPS+, which here is annotated by bb-ref as sOPS+; remember that since it's pitchers we're examining here, the higher the OPS+ the worse the pitching performance is). 

Oddly, the best team month occurring in the AL in 2023 is the one turned by the Detroit Tigers' starters in September. That could be a harbinger of things to come in 2024, or not--one of their main contributors, Edwin Rodriguez, is a free agent and is unlikely to stay with the Tigers. 

The O's, Twins and Rangers had three "top SP months," while the Rays had two. The Rangers took out the Rays, the Twins took out the Jays, and then the Rangers took out the O's while the Astros--with only one top SP month on us list--eliminated the Twins. (Remember that the Rays were missing their top three SPs in the playoffs due to injury.)

Overall top SP months produce close to a two-out-of-three WPCT for their teams (.656). The embattled Red Sox, who finished last in AL East, had the bad luck of having the only top SP month where the pitchers had a sub-.500 record.

NOW to the NL. Five playoff teams--Braves, Dodgers, Marlins, Brewers and Phillies--had at least one top SP month; the team with the most (Padres, with four) had spotty hitting and a surreal lack of success with their bullpen and missed the playoffs entirely. The Marlins and the Phillies had the best single months from their starters, but the Fish were missing several of those folk in the post-season and Philadelphia prevailed easily. The Brewers' SPs did not carry them in the post-season, and the Diamondbacks (no top SP months at all) pushed past them in the ultra-short Wild Card series. 

The Dodgers, with only one top SP month all year, were also betrayed by their starters, and the Diamondbacks dispatched them as well. After frying the Fish, the Phillies then scalped the Braves (whose pitching was shakier than what its offense-driven 104-win season suggested) thanks to galvanic performances from their 1-2 punch of Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola (and a widely ballyhooed bullpen ambush in Game One).

So weak/thin SP for the Braves and Dodgers masked by other compensating performances during the regular season spiraled out of control quickly in the post-season. 

NEXT up: the worst relief months. Let's begin with the AL, where we'll see that the large majority of bad bullpen months are found amongst also-rans (seven of the ten teams shown here, with just half of the playoff teams--Astros, Rays and Rangers--represented. 

And so the teams with the most vulnerable bullpens--Rangers (three bad months) and Astros (two bad months) managed to bypass that problem until they met for the right to be in the World Series. 

Bad bullpen months don't always produce catastrophic won-loss results: all three playoff teams were at or above a .500 WPCT from their bullpen in those months where the performance was rough. Astros, Rays and Rangers relievers went 33-32 in those months--the sign of good offensive teams that can overcome bullpen meltdowns.. (But the also-rans combined for a 60-98 record from relievers in bad bullpen months.

Moving to the NL, things are more random in nature. We see five of the six playoff teams with at least one bad bullpen month (Diamondbacks, Braves, Rodgers, Marlins and Brewers. The Fish, who won a ton of one-run games and who had a PWP for the year under .500, did the high-wire act with two bad months that still managed to produced a 21-8 record from their relievers!

That anomaly helps to account for the fact that bad bullpen months show an aggregate WPCT for relievers at not that much under .500 (.474 to be exact).

Ironically, the Phillies, with no bad bullpen months, have started to struggle against the Diamondbacks in the Championship Series because several of their relievers have coughed up leads since the series moved to Arizona.

So in short series, starting pitching seems to track well with success, but even teams with a rock-solid bullpen can turn victory into defeat at a moment when it can be most costly--in a short series where one squandered game make all the difference. 

(That said, we're not quite ready to write off the Phillies. They will, no matter what, get to return home for at least a Game Six; they are very hard to beat at home. The Diamonbacks did pick up a solid closer in Paul Sewald, however, and their bullpen had its best month in September: so things look as though they could remain very unpredictable as we lurch our way to the Fall Classic. Stay tuned...