Things Worth Knowing

The Red Sox haven’t won a season opener since 2000, and found plenty to be happy about with a solid first win. One of our aces (Schilling) beat their ace (Millwood) in a game that started out sharp and opened up with a key 2-out, 2-RBI double by Jason Varitek (who had a pretty lousy spring at the plate). David Ortiz hit a vintage, moonshot, 2-run HR off the right field pole. Coco Crisp (what a set of wheels!) scored twice from first base on doubles by Loretta and Ortiz and had a stellar defensive grab in the 9th. Mike Lowell had a solo HR, and Jonathon Papelbon pitched a perfect eighth. Keith Foulke gave up what felt like 2000 ft. worth of laser shots and fly balls; fortunately, most of them were foul balls or fly ball outs, and perhaps even more fortunately, he either knows what he’s got to work on, or the team knows what they’re going to get from him and plans his replacement.

Roger Clemens was invited to the game by Rangers owner Tom Hicks; the Rocket met with some Sox brass and players before the game and sat in the front row to watch two teams competing for his services go at it. He says he only wants to come back for a contender; he only saw one today.

For baseball fans, the season opener is always about momentum, but not every season opener means a heck of a lot. This one had enough going on that I feel it might, and I score it +1.

At some point last year, a New Englander who now covers baseball in another city — I can’t remember exactly who or where, but I think it may have been a Chicago broadcaster — was on the Sox pre-game radio program and talked about how he scored a team’s season. The way he sees it, across 162 games, there are about 100 games that go as you would expect, and another 60 or so where the win or the loss is significant in some way. Significant wins count +1, significant losses count -1, and the rest count for nothing (0). At the end of the season, the net value tells you something about that team’s chances for the playoffs.

By way of example, a “routine win” would be a win where your ace was going up against the other team’s #5 starter, or vice versa for a “routine loss”. A “significant win” would be a dramatic come-from-behind victory, a key win against a division rival, or a taut 1-0 classic that keeps the fans on the edge of their seats. A “significant loss” could be the opposite of any of those: a come-from-behind victory for the opposing team, a loss to a division rival, or losing a close game.

As someone who’s interested in how well baseball lends itself to detailed statistical analysis, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since last year as a way of tracking baseball in way that relies a bit less on crunching the numbers. (To most sabermatricians, in fact, thinking about rating a team’s playoff chances with this kind of system probably feels like nails on a chalkboard.) For all the value today’s Moneyballers see in Bill James’ way of doing business, many also reflect at the end of the season upon how, despite predictors such as a team’s runs created or allowed, the Win/Loss record wasn’t what they expected… and how something like “luck” played a part in things like their record in one-run games and other crucial moments during the season.

Luck, superstition, momentum… they’re subjective, and we all have a different way of seeing them. For this project, I’ll chart the 2006 Red Sox season and see how they pan out by “Swing Scoring” each game. With any luck, I’ll find a few other people to score their own home teams, and perhaps a few more Red Sox fans out there to compare Swing Scores with.

If you’d like to keep score as well, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post, and I’ll be in touch. Be sure you’re a fan who watches or listens to almost every game your team plays; this is one system where the box score won’t tell the story you need to know to play along.

With other participants charting the other MLB teams, there will be plenty of room for debate as to what the “net value” means as the season goes along, and especially when the regular season ends. Does a team whose swing score is +9 at the All-Star break have a significantly better record than other division rivals with lower swing scores? Does the swing score accurately predict who makes the playoffs at the season’s end? Are the swing scores way off from the team’s record? Does that say more about the person scoring the season, or about the weaknesses of the scoring system?

If there’s enough interest, I’ll publish a separate website with multiple authors, where every person who’s “keeping score” can post his or her own entries, where we’ll publish comparison graphs and running totals for every team’s net swing score to date, and so forth. It could tell us something. Either way, it should be fun.
Play ball!

P.S. If anyone knows the name of the person who came up with this idea originally, please let me know so I can properly attribute credit to him.