Counter-point

Far be it for me to display a contrarian side, but I can't resist the opportunity provided by my partner to take issues with one of those mental habits that come so easy but which, in my opinion, lead to false conclusions.

That being, the tendency to analyze a baseball team or player's performance by what calendar month it occurs in. I understand this temptation because any site which hosts sports stats offers us an easy breakdown of results by month. But there is NO logical reason to assume that the turning of the calendar page has anything at all to do with what happens on the field.

The actual truth is that players and teams go through a number of "phases" (feel free to use another word there if it suits you) in the course of a season and it is sheer coincidence if those phases ever sync up with the beginning or end of a month.


In the case of the 2008 Jays, we have seen at least 4 phases so far. The two recent losses may or may not be the beginning of a fifth - you can't really tell immediately when you are in a new phase. Observe:

April 1 - April 15:
Record 8-6;
RPG - 5.43
RAPG 3.71
Dif: +1.72

Actually, one could argue that in this phase the Jays got unlucky a couple of times along the way. that big a differential is probably more worth of 10 or 11 wins than 8.

April 16 - April 30:
3-11
2.86
4.29
-1.43

As you can see, there is an astounding difference between the first 14 games and the second 14 - what logical sense does it make to put all those games in the same pile and try to analyze the whole simply because they both took place in April?

May 1 - May 12 (game one):
6-5
2.64
3.73
-1.09

The reason we won more here than the differential would indicate is because 12 of the 41 runs in this phase occurred in one game. in the other 10 we allowed 2.90 runs per game which is close enough that the record isn't that far off.


May 12 - May 30:
14-4
4.89
2.78
+2.11

If you include the last two games in those figures (since it's unclear if we are in a new phase yet) you still get a record of 14-6, 4-65-2.85 (+1.8). And in both cases the runs against is skewed by the disastrous start of David Purcey but I don't feel like arguing for excluding that from the sample set because it's so impressive anyway.
Again I move the previous point - who should we dilute the outstanding results of 18 games by marrying it to the mediocre results of the previous 11 simply because they occured in the same month?

One could argue, perhaps, that phase 2 and phase 3 are all the same period because of the similarly pathetic offensive output but the half run better pitching (and the better results) seem to me to indicate a potential divide. It seems to me patently obvious that Phase 2 was a period when almost everything went freakishly wrong. I prefer to assume Phase 3 was different but I would not argue against the other position.

That internal debate aside, I strongly maintain that the coincidental timing of Phase 3 and Phase 4 within the same calendar month tells us exactly NOTHING about the Jays offense or overall performance.

If you take the Jays offensive output over the past 20 games and extrapolate it to the 59 games they have played in all, they would have 274 runs right now - good enough for third in the AL. We have far fewer reasons to assume this is a flukishly high output for this group of players than we do to assume the 25 games with pathetic offense was an abberation.

I, for one, would be driven to madness by the improbability that the Jays hitters would return in June to the level that they achieved during the late offensive drought.

I cannot of course argue that the jays will continue to win 3 out of 4 games, but I will argue that this offense is perfectly capable of producing between 4.5 and 5 runs a game the rest of the season and should be expected to be reasonable observers.

~WillRain