San Francisc-who?

“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

You know, I’m not so worried about the Giants. I’m worried about the Dodgers.

Baseball experts say that you cannot quantify defense. However, that is simply not true. What is true is that it is incredibly hard to quantify defense and that you cannot do it with the same precision that you can quantify hitting.

It is well chronicled that the best way to set up a team is to look at how many runs your offense should score and how many runs your pitching and defense should give up. Then when you’ve determined the run differential, you can reasonably predict your win-loss record.

The mathematics is complex, probably calculus even, but it is highly accurate. Paul DePodesta, the Dodgers GM, was trained under The Master, Billy Beane. It is a certainty that Paul knows, understands, and has even advanced the math to more accurately build a team that will repeat as NL West champions.

The Padres had a good chance to get off to a fast start. With their first two games on the road at the mile-high equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, a sweep couldn’t be expected, you just hope the bounces even out and you escape with your dignity (the Padres did that and opened 1-1 against Colorado). Then with four games at home against the lowly Pirates, the Padres had an opportunity to get the season going.

The Padres needed to win the series. Bill Werndl of The Mighty 1090 said all last week that San Diego needed to sweep. Now if Bill were a little less dramatic and a little better at analyzing baseball, he would realize that expecting even a poor team to go 0-6 is a huge statistical improbability. Never the less, Bill said that after the Pirates opened 0-2 the Padres should be able to sweep the Bucs.

While I disagree with Bill on the importance of going 4-0 on the weekend instead of going 3-1, 2-2 was not an acceptable outcome.

A while back I read that teams who are 4 or more games up (in first place) by the end of April, in their division, win their division something like 90% of the time. Likewise, if a team is more than 4 games out of first by the end of April they are highly unlikely to win their division. Let’s not kid ourselves; losing just one game more than they should have against the Pirates was not an insignificant event.

Thankfully the Dodgers lost to the Diamondbacks today as well. So now we’re just one game out behind the evil blue team from up the 5. Oh yeah, the Giants are 4-2 as well.