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Cardinal Frustration Level

Posted on April 11, 2011 at 12:38 PM
Filed Under: St. Louis Cardinals
Watching the Cardinals so far this season has had a lot of elements of frustration.  So often base runners get on, but either are erased on a double play or left stranded.  This happened so often that I got to thinking, is this really abnormal?

I'm not a sabermatrician by any means, leaving that up to the the experts like Pip and the guys at Gas House Graphs.  I'm just a kid playing in the sandbox here, with my conclusions about as solid as anything built there would be.  But I did want to see if there was any sort of correlation between how efficiently a team scored its baserunners and how well the team did as a whole.

Going over to Baseball Reference, I got data on team batting from 1980-2010 (save, of course, for the expansion teams that came in during that time.  I got all the years they had been in existence.)  That gave me 868 records, which seemed reasonable enough for a starting spot.

My rough calculation for scoring efficiency was to add up hits and walks and divide that total by the number of runs a team scored.  It doesn't count players that were hit by a pitch or reached on an error, though I expect those numbers are low enough that it wouldn't skew the numbers by a lot.  Playing with the numbers, here's what I found.  Again, most of this is fairly intuitive and I'm not sure it advances anything much, but it's worth talking about a little bit.


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First off, I took the totals for each first place team and averaged them to get one total.  I did that for second through seventh (yes, youngsters, there used to be two divisions with seven teams back in the day) to see what we got.  Logically, it would seem that a team in first would score their baserunners more often, and that did track out.

First place: 2.602 baserunners per run
Second place: 2.644 BPR
Third place: 2.685 BPR
Fourth place: 2.725 BPR
Fifth place: 2.799 BPR
Sixth place: 2.903 BPR
Seventh place: 2.900 BPR

So far so good.  We're not looking at how many baserunners get on, just how often they score.  So, in theory, a bad team could still do well in scoring efficiency because they would have fewer baserunners to drive in.  However, that doesn't seem to be the case.  A bad team is less likely to get the baserunners they do have in than a good team is.  Makes sense.

For what it's worth, there seems to be a strong correlation between scoring efficiency and runs per game in this regard.  Again, it makes sense, but it's not completely a given because a team that gets four hits and a walk and scores 2 runs out of it has a SE of 2.5, while a team that gets 8 hits and four walks and scores four runs has an SE of 3.0.  You'd rather have the four runs, but it's not as efficient.

Anyway, here's runs per game, averaged out per divisional placement:

First place: 4.93 RPG
Second place: 4.80 RPG
Third place: 4.63 RPG
Fourth place: 4.51 RPG
Fifth place: 4.31 RPG
Sixth place: 4.09 PRG
Seventh place: 4.00 RPG

For fun, I averaged each team over that span to see if there's anything we could gain from that.  Again, there's a strong tie to RPG as well.  Here are the top 5 teams in scoring efficiency over the past 30+ years.

Colorado 2.498 SE 
Boston 2.604 SE 
New York Yankees 2.604 SE 
Texas 2.608 SE
Chicago White Sox 2.608 SE

As you can see, we have four American League teams and an expansion team that spent the first half of its existence being an offensive haven and still is to some extent.  I think this shows that these are teams and ballparks that are conducive to the extra-base hit, allowing multiple runs to score on a single stroke.

This holds up (in reverse) for the bottom five teams as well.

San Diego 2.871 SE
Los Angeles Dodgers 2.830 SE
Washington/Montreal 2.823 SE
Pittsburgh 2.809 SE
Houston 2.795 SE

It's a bit of a surprise to see Houston on this list, until you remember that for at least half the sample, Houston played in the cavernous Astrodome, which would have held down a lot of home runs.

Where do the Cardinals rank?  Well, they are 24th in SE over the span with a 2.762 mark.  Again, the larger Busch Stadium dimensions probably come into play here.  Interestingly, they move up to 18th in RPG over the span with 4.52 mark, perhaps a reflection of the Whiteyball style where, even with the big ballpark, it could take just one hit (and a couple of steals and a sacrifice) to get a run across.

All this is well and good, but we're talking about the 2011 Cardinals.  Surely they've been frustrating, no matter the measure?

They have.  Even after this weekend's games, the early season mark for the Cards is 3.86.  Which actually means they improved in San Francisco, because it was a 4.4 mark beforehand.  Still, it's taking close to four base runners for a Cardinal run to be tallied.  That's not good.  For comparison's sake, the worst full season team mark is the 1982 Cincinnati Reds, who had a SE of 3.39 and finished sixth in the seven-team NL West.  Last year's Seattle squad was runner up with a 3.38 SE.  (Best ever? At the top is the 1996 Colorado Rockies, who finished third but not because of their 2.22 SE.  Second best is the 2000 White Sox, who won their division with a 2.26 SE.)

So I'm drawing two things out of this.  One, it's a matter of time before the Cardinals start scoring those base runners.  The average SE score is around 2.71.  The Cardinals are a full baserunner off that mark, so when the home runs start coming, things will start to level out.

The second is that I am going to start a new count of Frustration Games.  My criteria for a FG will be a loss, first of all (because no win can be that frustrating), and a SE score for the game of 3.5 or greater.  This means that so far the Cardinals have four such games: Opening Day (5 SE), the opener and rubber game of the Pittsburgh series (4 SE and a whopping 9 SE respectively) and Saturday's game against the Giants (4.5 SE).  I'll add a running total along the sidebar.

Any thoughts on this are welcome.  Like I said, it was pretty intuitive, but I was a little bit surprised that bad teams didn't come out a little better in this, just because of the lower number of opportunities they have.  Leave your remarks in the comments or drop me an e-mail!


2 Comments

2 Comments | Leave a comment

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David | April 11, 2011 3:30 PM | Reply

The St. Louis Bandits are in the 2nd round of the playoffs and need the fans to come out and cheer for them this Thursday, April 14th at 6:30 and Friday, April 15th at 7:05 as they take on the Michigan Warriors!

Kids 12 and under get in free and, as always, the Bandits remain a great option for family fun in St. Louis!

http://stlouisbandits.pointstreaksites.com/view/stlouisbandits

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WilliaminMaine | April 11, 2011 6:22 PM | Reply

Any time you have Albert Pujols batting .143, you're going to have trouble scoring those runs. He'll come around and so will the Cards' run scoring ability.

Nice work though.

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Heroes
Matt Holliday (5)
Matt Carpenter (4)
Rafael Furcal (4)
Carlos Beltran (3)
Jon Jay (3)
Kyle Lohse (3)
Lance Lynn (3)
Yadier Molina (3)
David Freese (2)
Jaime Garcia (2)
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Lance Berkman (1)
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Fernando Salas (1)
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2011 Top Hero: Lance Berkman (24)
2010 Top Heroes: Matt Holliday and Albert Pujols (24)
2009 Top Hero: Albert Pujols (28)
2008 Top Hero: Albert Pujols (25)

Goats
Matt Holliday (4)
Carlos Beltran (3)
David Freese (3)
Jaime Garcia (3)
Marc Rzepczynski (3)
Adam Wainwright (3)
Rafael Furcal (2)
Tyler Greene (2)
Jason Motte (2)
J.C. Romero (2)
Fernando Salas (2)
Mitchell Boggs (1)
Matt Carpenter (1)
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Daniel Descalso (1)
Jon Jay (1)
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Kyle Lohse (1)
Victor Marte (1)
Eduardo Sanchez (1)
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2011 Top Goat: Ryan Theriot (12)
2010 Top Goat: Brendan Ryan (14)
2009 Top Goats: Rick Ankiel and Todd Wellemeyer (13)
2008 Top Goat: Troy Glaus (13)

2012 Happy Flights
Happy Flights: 7
Happy Flight Opportunities: 12
Happy Flight %: 58%

Through 5/20

    Cardinal Nation Approval Ratings (March 2012)
    Adam Wainwright 91.9% (down 2.8%)
    Chris Carpenter 90.1% (up 3.2%)
    Lance Berkman 88.6%
    Tony La Russa 88.2% (up 17.4%)
    Yadier Molina 87.4% (up 3.7%)
    Matt Holliday 87.3% (down 3.8%)
    David Freese 85.5%
    John Mozeliak 85.4% (up 13.3%)
    Mike Shannon 85.3% (up 0.4%)
    Jose Oquendo 84.7%
    Derrick Goold 82.8% (down 5.0%)
    Mark McGwire 82.6% (up 20.1%)
    John Rooney 81.5% (down 2.8%)
    Mike Matheny 81.1%
    Bill DeWitt 79.8% (up 8.8%)
    United Cardinal Bloggers 78.9%
    Skip Schumaker 73.3% (up 9.2%)
    Jim Hayes 71.9% (down 4.2%)
    Jon Jay 71.1%
    B.J. Rains 69.5% (down 0.9%)
    Kyle Lohse 68.9% (up 13.8%)
    Dan McLaughlin 68.0%
    Joe Strauss 67.7% (up 10.2%)
    Ricky Horton 67.5% (down 1.6%)
    Al Hrabosky 66.4% (up 3.2%)
    Albert Pujols 54.9% (down 45.5%)
    Colby Rasmus 46.5% (down 35.3%)

    2011
    Dave Duncan 87.9% (up 0.9%)
    Matthew Leach 85.5%
    Pop Warner 76.7%
    Ryan Franklin 72.8% (up 3.1%)
    John Vuch 68.9%
    Jeff Luhnow 66.4%
    Dan Lozano 58.7%

    2009
    Rick Ankiel 83.9%
    Chris Duncan 69.1%


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