At least the Reds are balancing out the worst offense in baseball with the worst pitching. The team 6.11 ERA (which sounds like something from 1930) is more than a run worse than the 29th place team. They also have the worst FIP and are walking 5 per 9 innings. Podcast favorite Tommy Pham and waiver wire pickup Brandon Drury have combined for 8 HR; the rest of the team has hit 9. The worst Reds team in history, the 1876 team, went 9-56 in the first year of the National League. The 2022 Reds currently have a worse winning percentage than that team.
Taking the White Sox's offensive woes as an opportunity to carp about Tony LaRussa is a weird choice, especially since you don't give any reason to think that LaRussa might be responsible—what is he doing that might be causing the team to underperform offensively? Did they underperform offensively last season? I'm no huge fan of LaRussa but this just isn't as rigorous as your analysis generally is. It feels like one of your associations with the White Sox is "it's weird that they hired LaRussa" and so any story gets looked at through that lens.
The article is not an in-depth look at the Sox. But just about the only job a manager has is to squeeze every ounce out of the team, especially when injuries come and the chips are down. Teams with those kinds of leaders who really connect with the players find ways to win even they probably shouldn't.
The White Sox have high expectations to be one of the best teams in the league and in the early going they are failing. The manager has to take ownership for a good portion of that...
One thing, no doubt is that it's a long season... So it's a bit premature to think they won't snap out of it. And hopefully if they do La Russia will also get some of the well deserved credit
Larussa was one of the first to use a ton of relief pitchers. Now everyone does so that advantage is gone. I don’t really have a strong feeling about him one way or the other, but he was way way ahead of the curve on this.
4 out 5 are in the Midwest - and then there's Baltimore. Do you think the cold weather has anything to do with it? They're hoping to get into the 50's in Cleveland today. Let's tune back in when the weather and traditionally the bats heat up before making judgments, suggesting firings and saying I told you so. Disappointing.
Living in Michigan about equidistant from Chicago and Detroit the weather has been miserable for most of April, even more so than usual. Maybe the Sox will pick it up when it warms up. I think my Tigers are just gonna suck no matter what.
A note on Bobby Witt Jr. for all you Royals fans, and fans of good rookie stories. He started off colder than April 2022 in Minnesota - it's been COLD here, right up until yesterday. But he started heating up before I was able to start turning down my thermostat.
Last 14 days: .318/.362/.455. Last 7 days: .333/.391./524. To invoke the old Ren & Stimpy commercial for Log: that's better than bad... it's good! He's still got 12 Ks against 3 BBs during the past 14 days but the slash line points to a bright future at least, assuming he's figured out his approach in the majors, and assuming pitchers don't figure out an effective counter to his approach. Keep watching!
I had a Gary Gulman-esque moment with this where I read the title and thought it was off-ENSE not OFF-ense, and assumed it was going to be an examination of various things you’re supposedly not supposed to do according to the infamous “Unwritten Rules”.
Then I halfway expected the Red Sox to be on the list, but I see now that they’re 24th, with 3.54, so nothing to worry about, right?
I believe the World Champion Braves are 28th and just missed this list. But everything's just fine. They'll just pick up 4 random guys after the All Star break who hit 44 HRs & roll into another championship. That's the way it works, right? Note: they kept two of those four guys and they're both off to an atrocious start. Reversion to the mean, I'm afraid. Turns out Eddie Rosario isn't Mickey Mantle and Adam Duval isn't Roger Maris.
The Nats looked to be giving these teams a run for their money, going 2-10 over a 12-game stretch and averaging 2.5 R/G in it, but they've exploded for 10+ runs in 3 of their last 4 games and are out of the offensive basement.
The only true surprise in this list is the White Sox. They're the only one in the 5 who are ostensibly *trying* to win this year, and somehow can't score runs. Sure, some of these guys were not expected to hit too much, or are just getting acclimated to MLB starting jobs, but it's amazing how many players with established track records have completely fallen off a cliff:
Josh Harrison had hit .279/.343/.402 (107 OPS+) across basically a full season's worth of games in 2020-21, but is somehow hitting .170 with 1 walk and no homers in 51 PA this year.
AJ Pollock, ditto. 135 OPS+ (.290/37/103 in 649 PA from 2020-21) but just .184 with 0 homers and one walk in 2022. (Craig Kimbrel has been lights-out for the Dodgers, BTW.)
Jose Abreu won the AL MVP in 2020 and hit .261/30/117 last year, but is hitting .215 with 2 HR in 91 PA this year.
Yasmani Grandal hit just .236 with 31 HR and 89 RBI and 117 walks across 569 PA in 2020-21, but this year has hit .162 with 1 HR. (...and 10 walks, though why anyone feels the need to pitch around him I have no idea.)
Leury Garcia was nothing to write home about before this, but he was consistently useful, with a 91 OPS+ overall and a BA between .267 and .279 every season from 2017 to 2021. This year he's hitting .118 with an OPS+ of EIGHT. As in 92% worse than the league average.
Catcher Reese McGuire was a career backup who had a collective 85 OPS+ in 400 PA in MLB coming into this year, which is obviously not great, but is respectably for a backup catcher. But his OPS+ this year is 9. NINE. O-M-9.
The biggest difference - and I can't say whether it's a cause or an effect - is that the team, with the exceptions of Grandal and Abreu, has basically stopped taking walks. Last year they were 2nd in the AL in BB, this year dead last in MLB. Seven different regulars, players with 40+ plate appearances, have walked only once or twice all season.
Sure, they're missing Moncada (who's close to coming back) and Jimenez (who's not), but this is a team-wide epidemic. Maybe enough to get LaRussa fired, but probably not.
Anyway, I have tickets to see them at Yankee Stadium on Andy Pettitte bobblehead night in a couple of weeks, so I'm hoping they don't sort things out before then, but I suspect they will. Too many of these guys have been good for too long for them to ALL continue their inexplicable inability to hit their way out of a paper bag.
Great analysis. I'm not a ChiSox fan, and this certainly would have been painful to read if I was.
One minor nit, though, on "OPS+ of EIGHT. As in 92% worse than the league average." OPS+ is a weird formula that doesn't equate with percentages. For reasons unknown (to me, at least), it is basically the sum of two percentages (OBP divided by league average OBP plus SLG divided by league average) minus one. For example, if a player was truly 92% worse than league average in both OBP and SLG, his OBS+ would be a *negative* number, -0.92 (0.08+0.08-1). An OPS of EIGHT might only 46% worse than league average for both (more precisely, the OPS and SLG percentages compared to their respective league averages would have to add up to 1.08.)
Forgive the lesson that's coming if you know any of this, but you said you weren't sure, so I figured why not:
OPS+ is adjusted for park factors and such from OPS, On base Plus Slugging, which is just OBP+SLG. So while you're sort of adding apples and oranges, it's a useful one-stop-shop kinda term that can give you an idea of someone's prowess at the plate. Players with a .300 OBP and a .500 SLG or a .400 OBP and a .400 SLG may both arrive at their .800 OPS in very different ways, but they're both pretty good in their own right.
By contrast, OPS+ is a relative term, a ratio of the OPS to the adjusted league OPS, so it's useful to think of someone having a 100 OPS+ as having 100% of the league average, because they do. A 75 OPS+ is therefore 75% of the league average, or 25% worse than average, albeit in a 25%-of-(adjusted)-apples-and-oranges kind of way, which gets to be pretty useless if you look at it in too granular a fashion. Aaron Judge's 201 OPS+ doesn't *really* mean he's twice as good a hitter as the average MLB player this year, but when you're talking about his production to date, it's still *something* like that. As a relative rough measure, it's still reasonably useful to say that, if a little imprecise.
Maybe it's more useful to look at it in percentiles:
Among players with at least 45 PA this season (289 of them) McGuire and Garcia are 9th and 8th worst overall, respectively, which puts them in like the 2nd or 3rd percentile in MLB, i.e. worse than 97% of MLB players so far this season.
Thanks. I know the usefulness of an ad hoc stat like OPS+, but the mathematical side in me would have preferred something like (apples+oranges)/2 instead of (apples+oranges-1). According to stathead, there are 135 players (all pitchers, not surprisingly) with more than 500 PAs who have negative OPS+ numbers. My (apples+oranges)/2 would have kept that from happening and been a little bit more true to the percentage interpretation.
Yeah, it definitely gets kinda wonky at the extremes because of that.
I had always thought of it as a ratio, but it's really not, as I now see.
Anthony Santander, for example, who's as close a player as I can find to the ~.400 OBP/.400 SLG /.800 OPS at the moment, has an OPS of .786, against a league OPS of .676 (for MLB), which would give him a 116 OPS if it were just OPS/lgOPS.
But because they for some reason add the OBP and SLG ratios separately and then subtract 1, his actual OPS+ is 139 (without adjustment) and 136 with adjustments, which doesn't really track. That dude is NOT 36-39% better than the average MLB hitter, even in a world where the league is hitting like .230 overall.
Anyway, I will stop describing it as a percentage.
It's all about the baseball itself. Full stop. Pitchers are throwing ice cubes; batters are hitting like each ball was submerged in water for a week. Some hitters have completely adjusted back to their pre-2017/2018 approach. Others are still swinging for loft and distance and wondering why it's not working. Jeff McNeil had some good comments about it... how he went from contact hitter to a home-run swing and back in the last four years.
Look, I don’t know if LaRussa can still manage or not, but Yoan Moncada hasn’t played yet, Eloy Jiménez is hurt again, Luis Robert, Josh Harrison and AJ Pollack have all missed time with injuries, and José Abreu has never hit well in cold weather. And nobody on the team other than Moncada and Yasmani Grandal has any plate discipline (which was the team’s undoing against the Astros last season). Hard to pin any of that on LaRussa.
I think LaRussa was a really odd choice. But if the team doesn't hit, that's not the manager's fault. It's not even the hitting coaches fault. All teams have video, go over tendencies, work on swings, etc. If teams don't hit, the manager and the hitting coach get fired. But the manager has little control of that. They have much more control of handling the pitching staff, and of course, lineup construction. Managers often get blamed for the wrong stuff.
Abreu has a career OPS of .800 in March/April games. Right now it's .648. Plate discipline may not be a strength for most of these guys, but it's even worse than usual (see my other comment) perhaps born out of desperation.
I did a little research. Right now, there are 11 teams with OBPs less than .300. The MLB average is .306. The last year there were more than 2 was 1972 (4). There were 3 in 1971 and 12 in 1968 - that led to rule changes. Of course, caveats for early-season weather and short spring training and small sample size, but if you're thinking "Hey, no one gets on base anymore," you're right.
The league average for OPS is .676. There are five teams with an OPS of under .620. For a little comparison, in 2019, only the Marlins has an OPS lower than .676 (.673). The league average was .758.
Normally, the implicit threat by the Reds' owners that if the fans don't love them, the team may be sold and moved from Cincinnati would place them in the Pantheon of "Worst Owners Ever." (The WOE Is Me award.) But with Marge Shott as previous owner of the Reds, they're not even the worst owners of the Reds.
As a Reds fan for 60 years, I just want to know why!
At least the Reds are balancing out the worst offense in baseball with the worst pitching. The team 6.11 ERA (which sounds like something from 1930) is more than a run worse than the 29th place team. They also have the worst FIP and are walking 5 per 9 innings. Podcast favorite Tommy Pham and waiver wire pickup Brandon Drury have combined for 8 HR; the rest of the team has hit 9. The worst Reds team in history, the 1876 team, went 9-56 in the first year of the National League. The 2022 Reds currently have a worse winning percentage than that team.
Brutal!
Why do you buy the Reds just to tear them up…buy the Marlins they’re used to it down there!
Taking the White Sox's offensive woes as an opportunity to carp about Tony LaRussa is a weird choice, especially since you don't give any reason to think that LaRussa might be responsible—what is he doing that might be causing the team to underperform offensively? Did they underperform offensively last season? I'm no huge fan of LaRussa but this just isn't as rigorous as your analysis generally is. It feels like one of your associations with the White Sox is "it's weird that they hired LaRussa" and so any story gets looked at through that lens.
The article is not an in-depth look at the Sox. But just about the only job a manager has is to squeeze every ounce out of the team, especially when injuries come and the chips are down. Teams with those kinds of leaders who really connect with the players find ways to win even they probably shouldn't.
The White Sox have high expectations to be one of the best teams in the league and in the early going they are failing. The manager has to take ownership for a good portion of that...
One thing, no doubt is that it's a long season... So it's a bit premature to think they won't snap out of it. And hopefully if they do La Russia will also get some of the well deserved credit
Larussa was one of the first to use a ton of relief pitchers. Now everyone does so that advantage is gone. I don’t really have a strong feeling about him one way or the other, but he was way way ahead of the curve on this.
4 out 5 are in the Midwest - and then there's Baltimore. Do you think the cold weather has anything to do with it? They're hoping to get into the 50's in Cleveland today. Let's tune back in when the weather and traditionally the bats heat up before making judgments, suggesting firings and saying I told you so. Disappointing.
Living in Michigan about equidistant from Chicago and Detroit the weather has been miserable for most of April, even more so than usual. Maybe the Sox will pick it up when it warms up. I think my Tigers are just gonna suck no matter what.
Yep. There is no pop in that lineup at all.
I agree. It's the stupid weather in Kansas City, too.
Nice piece here.
A note on Bobby Witt Jr. for all you Royals fans, and fans of good rookie stories. He started off colder than April 2022 in Minnesota - it's been COLD here, right up until yesterday. But he started heating up before I was able to start turning down my thermostat.
Last 14 days: .318/.362/.455. Last 7 days: .333/.391./524. To invoke the old Ren & Stimpy commercial for Log: that's better than bad... it's good! He's still got 12 Ks against 3 BBs during the past 14 days but the slash line points to a bright future at least, assuming he's figured out his approach in the majors, and assuming pitchers don't figure out an effective counter to his approach. Keep watching!
I had a Gary Gulman-esque moment with this where I read the title and thought it was off-ENSE not OFF-ense, and assumed it was going to be an examination of various things you’re supposedly not supposed to do according to the infamous “Unwritten Rules”.
Then I halfway expected the Red Sox to be on the list, but I see now that they’re 24th, with 3.54, so nothing to worry about, right?
I believe the World Champion Braves are 28th and just missed this list. But everything's just fine. They'll just pick up 4 random guys after the All Star break who hit 44 HRs & roll into another championship. That's the way it works, right? Note: they kept two of those four guys and they're both off to an atrocious start. Reversion to the mean, I'm afraid. Turns out Eddie Rosario isn't Mickey Mantle and Adam Duval isn't Roger Maris.
The Nats looked to be giving these teams a run for their money, going 2-10 over a 12-game stretch and averaging 2.5 R/G in it, but they've exploded for 10+ runs in 3 of their last 4 games and are out of the offensive basement.
The only true surprise in this list is the White Sox. They're the only one in the 5 who are ostensibly *trying* to win this year, and somehow can't score runs. Sure, some of these guys were not expected to hit too much, or are just getting acclimated to MLB starting jobs, but it's amazing how many players with established track records have completely fallen off a cliff:
Josh Harrison had hit .279/.343/.402 (107 OPS+) across basically a full season's worth of games in 2020-21, but is somehow hitting .170 with 1 walk and no homers in 51 PA this year.
AJ Pollock, ditto. 135 OPS+ (.290/37/103 in 649 PA from 2020-21) but just .184 with 0 homers and one walk in 2022. (Craig Kimbrel has been lights-out for the Dodgers, BTW.)
Jose Abreu won the AL MVP in 2020 and hit .261/30/117 last year, but is hitting .215 with 2 HR in 91 PA this year.
Yasmani Grandal hit just .236 with 31 HR and 89 RBI and 117 walks across 569 PA in 2020-21, but this year has hit .162 with 1 HR. (...and 10 walks, though why anyone feels the need to pitch around him I have no idea.)
Leury Garcia was nothing to write home about before this, but he was consistently useful, with a 91 OPS+ overall and a BA between .267 and .279 every season from 2017 to 2021. This year he's hitting .118 with an OPS+ of EIGHT. As in 92% worse than the league average.
Catcher Reese McGuire was a career backup who had a collective 85 OPS+ in 400 PA in MLB coming into this year, which is obviously not great, but is respectably for a backup catcher. But his OPS+ this year is 9. NINE. O-M-9.
The biggest difference - and I can't say whether it's a cause or an effect - is that the team, with the exceptions of Grandal and Abreu, has basically stopped taking walks. Last year they were 2nd in the AL in BB, this year dead last in MLB. Seven different regulars, players with 40+ plate appearances, have walked only once or twice all season.
Sure, they're missing Moncada (who's close to coming back) and Jimenez (who's not), but this is a team-wide epidemic. Maybe enough to get LaRussa fired, but probably not.
Anyway, I have tickets to see them at Yankee Stadium on Andy Pettitte bobblehead night in a couple of weeks, so I'm hoping they don't sort things out before then, but I suspect they will. Too many of these guys have been good for too long for them to ALL continue their inexplicable inability to hit their way out of a paper bag.
Great analysis. I'm not a ChiSox fan, and this certainly would have been painful to read if I was.
One minor nit, though, on "OPS+ of EIGHT. As in 92% worse than the league average." OPS+ is a weird formula that doesn't equate with percentages. For reasons unknown (to me, at least), it is basically the sum of two percentages (OBP divided by league average OBP plus SLG divided by league average) minus one. For example, if a player was truly 92% worse than league average in both OBP and SLG, his OBS+ would be a *negative* number, -0.92 (0.08+0.08-1). An OPS of EIGHT might only 46% worse than league average for both (more precisely, the OPS and SLG percentages compared to their respective league averages would have to add up to 1.08.)
Forgive the lesson that's coming if you know any of this, but you said you weren't sure, so I figured why not:
OPS+ is adjusted for park factors and such from OPS, On base Plus Slugging, which is just OBP+SLG. So while you're sort of adding apples and oranges, it's a useful one-stop-shop kinda term that can give you an idea of someone's prowess at the plate. Players with a .300 OBP and a .500 SLG or a .400 OBP and a .400 SLG may both arrive at their .800 OPS in very different ways, but they're both pretty good in their own right.
By contrast, OPS+ is a relative term, a ratio of the OPS to the adjusted league OPS, so it's useful to think of someone having a 100 OPS+ as having 100% of the league average, because they do. A 75 OPS+ is therefore 75% of the league average, or 25% worse than average, albeit in a 25%-of-(adjusted)-apples-and-oranges kind of way, which gets to be pretty useless if you look at it in too granular a fashion. Aaron Judge's 201 OPS+ doesn't *really* mean he's twice as good a hitter as the average MLB player this year, but when you're talking about his production to date, it's still *something* like that. As a relative rough measure, it's still reasonably useful to say that, if a little imprecise.
Maybe it's more useful to look at it in percentiles:
Among players with at least 45 PA this season (289 of them) McGuire and Garcia are 9th and 8th worst overall, respectively, which puts them in like the 2nd or 3rd percentile in MLB, i.e. worse than 97% of MLB players so far this season.
We should have quit while we were ahead! ;-)
Thanks. I know the usefulness of an ad hoc stat like OPS+, but the mathematical side in me would have preferred something like (apples+oranges)/2 instead of (apples+oranges-1). According to stathead, there are 135 players (all pitchers, not surprisingly) with more than 500 PAs who have negative OPS+ numbers. My (apples+oranges)/2 would have kept that from happening and been a little bit more true to the percentage interpretation.
Yeah, it definitely gets kinda wonky at the extremes because of that.
I had always thought of it as a ratio, but it's really not, as I now see.
Anthony Santander, for example, who's as close a player as I can find to the ~.400 OBP/.400 SLG /.800 OPS at the moment, has an OPS of .786, against a league OPS of .676 (for MLB), which would give him a 116 OPS if it were just OPS/lgOPS.
But because they for some reason add the OBP and SLG ratios separately and then subtract 1, his actual OPS+ is 139 (without adjustment) and 136 with adjustments, which doesn't really track. That dude is NOT 36-39% better than the average MLB hitter, even in a world where the league is hitting like .230 overall.
Anyway, I will stop describing it as a percentage.
It's all about the baseball itself. Full stop. Pitchers are throwing ice cubes; batters are hitting like each ball was submerged in water for a week. Some hitters have completely adjusted back to their pre-2017/2018 approach. Others are still swinging for loft and distance and wondering why it's not working. Jeff McNeil had some good comments about it... how he went from contact hitter to a home-run swing and back in the last four years.
Look, I don’t know if LaRussa can still manage or not, but Yoan Moncada hasn’t played yet, Eloy Jiménez is hurt again, Luis Robert, Josh Harrison and AJ Pollack have all missed time with injuries, and José Abreu has never hit well in cold weather. And nobody on the team other than Moncada and Yasmani Grandal has any plate discipline (which was the team’s undoing against the Astros last season). Hard to pin any of that on LaRussa.
I think LaRussa was a really odd choice. But if the team doesn't hit, that's not the manager's fault. It's not even the hitting coaches fault. All teams have video, go over tendencies, work on swings, etc. If teams don't hit, the manager and the hitting coach get fired. But the manager has little control of that. They have much more control of handling the pitching staff, and of course, lineup construction. Managers often get blamed for the wrong stuff.
Abreu has a career OPS of .800 in March/April games. Right now it's .648. Plate discipline may not be a strength for most of these guys, but it's even worse than usual (see my other comment) perhaps born out of desperation.
I did a little research. Right now, there are 11 teams with OBPs less than .300. The MLB average is .306. The last year there were more than 2 was 1972 (4). There were 3 in 1971 and 12 in 1968 - that led to rule changes. Of course, caveats for early-season weather and short spring training and small sample size, but if you're thinking "Hey, no one gets on base anymore," you're right.
The league average for OPS is .676. There are five teams with an OPS of under .620. For a little comparison, in 2019, only the Marlins has an OPS lower than .676 (.673). The league average was .758.
One hopes warmer weather and more practice will help the hitters catch up.
Also, don’t underestimate Manfred’s willingness to goose the baseballs sometime in late May.
And that's with the universal DH.
Normally, the implicit threat by the Reds' owners that if the fans don't love them, the team may be sold and moved from Cincinnati would place them in the Pantheon of "Worst Owners Ever." (The WOE Is Me award.) But with Marge Shott as previous owner of the Reds, they're not even the worst owners of the Reds.
Marge won a World Series so she's not even close to the worst owner of the Reds.
ChiSox were supposed to pummel the Central. Not so much I guess.
A.J. Hinch should be fired.
Whatya mean they just beat the Pirates slugging their way to a 3-2 win. All 3 unearned and only 3 hits but……yeah
"Fire me? But my guys aren't cheating this time. We're scoring our 3.19 runs per game playing by the rules."
That AL Central has some real offensive powerhouses in it, doesn't it?
Everybody who had the Guardians leading the division in runs per game raise your hand.