Game Twenty-Five
You may never see an easier-to-manage 1-0 victory than today’s game. The only bullpen decisions to be made were obvious ones (Choate versus the lefties, Wheeler versus the righty, Soriano in the ninth) and there was no pinch hitting or running. Pretty efficient game overall.
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The Rays are now 18-7, which is a 72% win rate. That’s four wins in the bank no matter what you have them projected at. They will not continue to win 72% of their games, but that doesn’t mean you should expect them to start losing games to even out to a 56% win rate either. Anyone claiming a split of the Royals series is ‘regression’ doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is falling into the gambler’s fallacy.
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About a month in, and there’s nothing to complain about. This team is doing better than expected without its best reliever, without its starting right fielder, and without its best catcher. That’s impressive.
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As an aside: I don’t get the feeling I would enjoy writing about Trey Hillman.
I would say that, with Soriano now in the ‘pen, Howell is either tied for the best relief pitcher, or just barely the second best. But I’m guessing you said that for a reason.
Also, our best catcher IS back. Didn’t you hear that Navi came back from suspension? /sarcasm
Not that this point is really worth arguing, but isn’t a split with the Royals still technically regression? It’s a data point that brings the current win% closer to the expected talent level than previous samples (which are most likely outliers). The gambler’s fallacy is expecting the mean to be reached exactly within a finite set, which it probably won’t, and as noted the new expectation considering what’s already happened this season is 94 wins instead of 90 over the finite 162 game set, but you still expect your future samples to bring you back towards the mean, which the Royals series did.
I’m not sure Joyce was going to be the starting Right Fielder.
Our two losses in the Royals series were great efforts, the bats just cooled down a bit.
If we can get out of this west coast trip slightly over .500 I’ld call it a win.