The Futility Infielder

After a week's hiatus so that I could complete my recent articles for the New York Sun and Salon, I'm back with a new Prospectus Hit List. The Cardinals sit at #1 for the ninth week in a row (zzzz), but the White Sox, who spent eight weeks at #2, have fallen to sixth on the heels of a 1-5 week. The Red Sox have taken over the #2 slot, followed by the A's, the Indians, and the Angels. The Yankees are currently eighth, while the Dodgers are 24th.

Five months into doing the Hit List, I've found that many readers still don't understand what the rankings are about, thinking they reflect my biases or those of Baseball Prospectus. The most frequent piece of mail I get regarding the Hit List is something along the lines of "How can the Sludgebeasts rise in the rankings this week if they lost most of their games? Your bias towards sabermetrically-inclined teams is showing, bitch."

The answer I should offer, but usually don't, is "Kiss my Pythagoras."

The single most important tenet of sabermetrics, for my money, is that there's a predictable relationship between a team's winning percentage and the number of runs it scores and allows. Bill James first codified this in his original Pythagorean formula: win% = (RS^2)/(RS^2 + RA^2), where RS and RA are runs scored and runs allowed, and G is games. Studies by BP's Clay Davenport have shown that not only is the Pythagorean a good predictor of a team's winning percentage after the fact (how many should team X have won), it's a better predictor of future winning percentage than the team's actual winning percentage.

The Hit List builds on this in creating our version of the power rankings. There's no subjectivity involved; the rankings are computed by equally weighting actual, first-, second- and third-order winning percentages for the season to date as calculated in BP's Adjusted Standings (a Davenport invention). Actual winning percentage is obvious enough, the percentage of games a team wins. The other three are calculated using the Pythagenpat method, a close relative of Bill James' original Pythagorean formula where win% = (RS^X)/(RS^X+ RA^X), where X = (RS+RA)/G)^.285. First-order winning percentage is computed using actual runs scored and allowed. Second-order winning percentage uses equivalent runs scored and allowed, based on run elements (hits, walks, total bases, etc.) and the scoring environment (park and league adjustments). Third-order winning percentage adjusts for the quality of the opponent's hitting and pitching.

By using the four different percentages, we're correcting for teams that over- or underperform relative to how many runs they've scored and allowed, how many runs they should have scored/allowed given the number and type of hits, walks and other events, their ballpark environment, and the quality of competition. There's nothing written in stone about this formula, but neither is there any hidden agenda. It's simply a way of looking at the question, "How good is each team?" and using a few related but slightly different objective measures to answer that question.

Now, with regards to this week's rankings, I caught some flack from a few readers regarding the A's coming in at #3, rising a notch despite a 1-5 record. But the A's weren't the only high-ranked team to have a bad week. The White Sox had a much worse week, and those of the Angels and Braves, the two teams directly below the A's last week, were nothing to write home about. Here are the run totals of the four teams:

           W-L   RS   RA
A's        1-5   17   24
Angels     3-4   30   27
Braves     2-4   33   36
White Sox  1-5   14   28

The A's, despite losing, at least did a relatively good job of preventing runs, which tends to have a positive effect on those Pythagorean calculations. The Angels actually allowed fewer runs per game, and they've got a better raw run differential this year than the A's, but once all of the adjustments are thrown in, the A's still come out ahead this week.

But not by much. In fact the A's, Indians, and Angels are separated by .0027, with Hit List Factors (the unpublished average of those four winning percentages) of .5660, .5656, and .5633, respectively. That's about 1/3 of a win this far into the season; another run here or there would have likely jumbled those rankings.

Anyway, enough about the nuts and bolts of the equation. This morning just before the Hit List went up, I tacked on a happy birthday wish to the Braves' Julio Franco, who turns 47 today. He's hitting a robust .299/.359/.503 with nine homers - his most since 1996, when he was an old man at 38 -- and outproducing players who were still in diapers when he broke into the big leagues. If that doesn't make you feel like a lazy slob of an underachiever, you're one up on me.