Numbers Don't Lie
Sabermetrics Deep Dive
On the morning of June 10, the Rick Astleys were a second-place team. Thirty-nine and twenty-four, two and a half games behind Andrew Harris's Iron Knob Explosions. Then they went 36-6.
Fifty-eight days later, Jeff Burris's club occupies a different room than the rest of the league. Seventy-five and thirty overall. Seven and a half games clear of the Iron Knob–Knockemstiff pack. A run differential of +297 that is nearly twice the next-best figure in the WLB. A 2.5-game deficit on June 10 became a 7.5-game lead by August 7—a ten-game swing in the standings compressed into forty-two games. That is not a hot streak. That is a tectonic event.
Two things have to be true at once for a team to go 36-6, and for the Astleys both of them were.
First, they had the best offense in the league during the stretch. The Astleys scored 319 runs in 42 games, 7.6 per game, the most in the WLB. The next-closest club, Knockemstiff, scored 275. Burris's lineup hit .306/.384/.505 over the window, an .888 OPS that led the league. There is no platoon hole to attack here.
Second, they had the best pitching in the league during the stretch. A 3.07 staff ERA. A 1.10 WHIP, lowest in the WLB. Only 147 runs allowed in 42 games. The Astleys' RCERA over the stretch was 2.83, a quarter-run below their actual ERA. When your best-in-league offense and your best-in-league run prevention show up in the same forty-two games, you get +172, and +172 over 42 games gets you 36-6.
The most revealing number in the whole stretch: in 42 games, the Astleys trailed after seven innings six times. They led after seven in 32 of their 42 stretch games and went 31-1 in them. They were tied in four more and won all four. They trailed in six and lost five. They didn't learn to come from behind. They made the question obsolete. They went 4-0 in one-run games and 2-0 in extra innings.
And they did it on the road. The Astleys went 25-3 away from home during the stretch—an .893 road winning percentage.
Some of this was the schedule. Of the Astleys' 42 stretch games, 15 came against the PanamaCityBeach Hurricanes and the Oak Ridge Nukes—the two computer-managed clubs at the bottom of the league. The Astleys went 15-0 in them. Strip those games out and the 36-6 becomes 21-6.
The team-versus-team grid tells the story: the Astleys played Nicaragua eight times and swept all eight, Fugging nine times winning six, and Iron Knob seven times. They played the Knockemstiff Slap Daddies exactly once. They played Huanca twice. Burris's club spent the stretch feasting on the two collapsing clubs and the two computers, while largely avoiding the only other team playing .680 baseball.
Here is the limit of that argument: even after stripping away the computers, the Astleys were 21-6 against human competition—a .778 clip that is, by a wide margin, the best human-only record in the WLB over the stretch. Knockemstiff went just 16-15 against humans. The Astleys padded too, but they were also the best team in the league at the games that counted. Both things are true.
On June 10, the Explosions led the league. Then they went 29-19 and watched the crown pass to a team that had been chasing them.
What's striking is that Iron Knob's stretch was held up by exactly the kind of luck their profile never used to need. Their stretch ERA was 3.50, but their RCERA was 3.81. The peripherals slipped: a 1.39 WHIP, 175 walks in 447 innings, a .289 in-play average against. The command that defined this staff frayed, and the ERA held only because the sequencing broke their way.
The offense remains the ceiling. Iron Knob scored 248 runs in the stretch, 5.2 per game, second-fewest among the chasers, with a .333 team OBP. When the pitching is merely very good instead of historic, the bats can't cover the difference.
And yet: Iron Knob went 22-16 against humans, the best human-only mark of any chaser, and they were the only team in the league to give the Astleys a real series, splitting seven games 4-3. Everyone else the Astleys played either got swept or lost the majority.
Brett Houlberg's Slap Daddies own second place in the stretch standings at 32-15, and the first instinct is to dismiss it: 16-0 against the computers, 16-15 against humans. That instinct is half right.
But here is what's genuinely new. Knockemstiff's pitching got good. The stretch ERA was 3.56—down from 4.73—and the RCERA was 3.54, meaning there is no luck in it. This is a real improvement, the rotation finally giving the league's most dangerous lineup something to stand on. The offense never left: .302/.489 in the stretch, 60 home runs.
The caution is the one the human column flags: 16-15 against real teams, and a stretch in which they played the Astleys once—and lost. Whether the pitching gains translate against a schedule that stops handing them the Hurricanes is the question September will answer.
The Badgers are the cleanest diagnostic case in the league, because exactly one thing went wrong and it is not subtle.
The offense is fine. Better than fine. Fugging hit .283/.366/.439 in the stretch, a .366 team OBP that trailed only the Astleys. Alvin Davis posted a .971 OPS, Lonnie Smith put up a .990 OPS from left field, Carlton Fisk hit .360 with a 1.031 OPS in 29 games. Garth Graham's lineup scored 5.5 runs a game.
And it didn't matter, because the pitching staff posted a 5.80 ERA. In the stretch, the Badgers allowed 288 runs in 47 games—6.1 a night—on 11.4 hits per nine, the worst rate in the league. The RCERA of 5.62 confirms there's no bad luck to refund; the staff simply got hit. Mike Moore, Bruce Hurst, Kirk McCaskill, and Doug Drabek combined for a rotation that couldn't get to the sixth with a lead, and a .213 quality-start rate that is less a statistic than an indictment.
Whatever stabilized off the field, nothing has stabilized the rotation. Seventeen and twenty-one against humans, on the strength of an offense that deserved a far better staff.
Chris Broyles's Wankers spent the stretch going precisely nowhere: 22-22, exactly .500, 12-18 against humans. For a club that was four games out and 37-25 on June 10, standing still was its own kind of falling.
The offense remained what it has always been—loud and narrow. Huanca hit 62 home runs in the stretch, tied with the Astleys for the most in the league, and slugged .446. But the team OBP was .326, lowest among the human clubs, and the strikeout-to-walk ratio sat at 2.0. When Howard Johnson and Kent Hrbek connect, the scoreboard moves; when they don't, the .326 OBP doesn't generate enough traffic to manufacture anything.
The pitching is where the summer turned ugly. With David Cone lost to the injured list, the staff ERA climbed to 4.40, and the in-play average against reached .335—the worst mark in the WLB. The Wankers are not converting contact into outs, and a 1.50 WHIP is the result. The low point was a 2-3 stretch record against the Oak Ridge Nukes. Losing a series to a nine-win computer team is the kind of thing that tells you everything about a club's margin for error. There isn't any.
Chris Carpenter's Crepe Wrappers were tied for the second-most wins among the chasers on June 10—35-25, five games out and very much alive. Then they went 9-21 against human competition, the worst human-only mark in the WLB, and the only reason the overall record reads 24-22 is a 15-1 run against the two computer clubs.
The collapse was total and it started at the top of the schedule: the Astleys swept Nicaragua 8-0, and Iron Knob took eight of nine. Against the two best teams in the league, Carpenter's club went 1-17. The offense cratered to .289/.341/.423 with just 39 home runs—fewest among the human teams—and 5.1 runs a game.
The cruel part is that the pitching wasn't the problem. Nicaragua's stretch ERA was 4.43, but the RCERA was 4.14—the staff pitched a third of a run better than its results, undermined by a defense that let balls fall. The Clemens-Saberhagen-Key command profile is still the best collection of strike-throwers in the league. It is attached to a lineup that stopped scoring and a defense that stopped catching, and in a stretch where they had to face the Astleys and Explosions fifteen times between them, that combination was fatal.
The Astleys are not going to go 36-6 again. No one does. The road record will regress, the one-run luck will even out, and the 1-25 Trail-7 record is a loaded gun that goes off the moment the offense cools. But a 7.5-game lead is a 7.5-game lead, and it was built by the best offense and the best pitching in the league over a two-month stretch, with the best human-only record to anchor it.
The chase falls to Iron Knob and Knockemstiff—the only two clubs that proved over the summer they can beat human teams more often than they lose to them. The Explosions have to find the command that abandoned them. The Slap Daddies have to prove their pitching gains hold against a schedule with no Hurricanes in it. Fugging needs a rotation. Huanca needs an out. Nicaragua needs a pulse.
The race isn't over. There are too many games left to say that honestly. But the Astleys have turned it from a six-team scramble into a one-team procession with five clubs arguing over second place. The Astleys scored 319 runs and allowed 147 in forty-two games. The other five human teams spent the summer figuring out which of them could beat the computers. That gap—between a team that lapped the field and a field that lapped the Nukes—is the whole season in a sentence.