Rich Harden’s hot start fills not one but two teams’ farm news. Daryl Clark may have just earned the only mention of his career alongside Barry Bonds. And Craig Biggio’s showing little with the bat and hurting his team in the field, surprising no one but his employer.
I’ll start today with thank you. It’s been a year since I started publishing UTK, first as a stand-alone and now as a part of BP. I’m nothing without my readers and–love me or hate me–people are reading.
In one year, I’ve covered an average of 12 injured players per day, written an average of 1900 words per day, had my first radio appearance, started my own show, gone from three subscribers–who really didn’t ask for it in the first place–to over 3000, gone from an email I hoped I could get 100 people to read to a spot on the Baseball Prospectus’ staff. I’ve gone into clubhouses, met players, GMs, doctors, trainers, and even some of the hangers-on that populate the world of baseball. I’ve made mistakes, said things that were stupid and things that bordered on prophetic, and everything in between; but the one thing I’m proudest of is that I’m starting to hear people talk about injuries. They discuss them as something similar to on-base percentage–that if we teach the players the right things, the game can be improved.
Kevin Millwood celebrates his no-no, Todd Helton lobbies for Mark Prior Boulevard, A.J. Burnett becomes Brad Arnberg’s latest injury victim, and Juan Pierre laments pro wrestler Buff Bagwell…er…Fernando Vina’s 20th inning single.
Sometimes, the game loves you back.
I spent last week on the road, first on a trip with my wife, Sophia, then off to see an old friend from the East Coast who was out on this one. I didn’t see much baseball from the 19th through the 26th, even missing the highlight shows most of the time. It was a good break; I remarked to Sophia on Tuesday, as a game aired on a television in the back of a restaurant, that I was really starting to miss the game. While I was enjoying our trip, I was also looking forward to getting back to “normal” life a little, immersing myself in the game and writing again.
With my travel complete, yesterday was the first time in a while I’d had a chance to follow a day of baseball the way I usually do, watching games on television and following the untelevised ones online. I picked a pretty good day to return, because almost as if the game missed me and wanted to show me just how much, baseball provided a ridiculously entertaining day of highs and lows.
Welcome to Part 2 of our look at the importance of hot starts. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 first. We’ll wait for you to get back.
Last time, I looked at how teams fared at season’s end after starting the season with a particular record, varying the data by looking at starts of varying lengths. While I pointed out general trends in the data (as well as the exceptions that proved the rule), I did not sum up the data concisely into a single, coherent formula to predict a team’s final record. That’s what today’s article is about. In Part 3–yes, there will be a Part 3–I want to examine how the interaction between a team’s record at the start of the season, and its record the previous season, affects its final winning percentage.