Fire Gardy

Just saw that Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs has decided to run down the Twins Team Win Values, as he’s been doing for a few other teams. Apparently he didn’t notice that we already did that here.

For every other team he’s looked at, their team win value indicated that they were actually far better than their record indicates, because they were unlucky and didn’t hit well with men on base. The Red Sox should have won 106 games and everyone should have forfeited to them in the playoffs because they were the best! Boo hoo!

Well, Cameron’s decided it’s time to shit on someone, and who better than those confusing Twins, who seem to perpetually win games despite having players with dumb names I’ve never heard like “Blackburn” and “Span” rather than awesome names like “Rodriguez” and “Youkilis?” If they’re not famous, they’re not good. This is a widely believed fact, and if you don’t know it you’re just a homer.

Anyhow, Cameron points out that the Twins were an 80.5 win team last year based on win values. He arrives at this number for two reasons: 1) His calculator was broken, it’s actually 80.6; 2) He made his calculation before the bug in pitcher team win values was fixed, because it was actually 82.1 and no, I’m not going to let it go. 

When a single wasn’t going to be worth much, the Twins didn’t do much, hitting like a band of Triple-A infielders. When they had a chance to drive men in, though, they turned into a pretty nifty bunch of run producers. Because their offensive distribution was so heavily skewed towards hitting in situations that would produce runs, the team ended up finishing 3rd in the AL in runs scored despite an offense that simply wasn’t that good.

Yup, the stupid Twins were “run producers” who value RBIs rather than doing their best work with nobody on base, which makes you good. And what’s that about no-name players? AAA infielders you say?

While watching your team capitalize on a huge portion of their run scoring opportunities is exciting, it’s not a great recipe for success. If the Twins want to keep winning in 2009, they’re going to have to just hit better, rather than rely on turning up the offensive jets only in certain situations.

Why yes, it was exciting. Thank you very much, isn’t that the point of sports? It is “entertainment,” after all. And no, the Twins didn’t succeed. They lost their play-in game. Thanks for rubbing it in.

Alright then. While he ignored the fact that actual wins from year to year are more closely correlated with pythag wins than win value wins, he came to the same ultimate conclusion I did. That the Twins need to improve their offense.

What he didn’t point out is that Mike Lamb and Craig Monroe and Adam Everett being gone are improvements. And that Delmon Young and Carlos Gomez can reasonably be expected to improve. And Michael Cuddyer is coming back from injury. And Jason Kubel is set to be a regular DH. These are all things that should improve the offense.

I’m not worried. But other people evidently are, since they’re already warming up their “The Twins aren’t really any good” arguments that they’ll be using all season.

No comments