Baseball Bytes: Can We Trust the Cleveland Guardians as World Series Contenders?
Plus, the White Sox are horribly historic, and Boston might be a sleeping giant.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a new column I’m experimenting with, in which I point out three byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Favorites or Frauds?
Early in the season, I wrote a story headlined “The Cleveland Guardians Are So Back”… so it’s not like I didn’t see Cleveland’s status as AL Central favorites coming. But even so, I didn’t expect them to have the best record in baseball on August 6, a half-game clear of the Orioles and Yankees. And neither did the numbers — something that is still true today.
Look beyond the W-L records and peruse rankings such as FanGraphs’ BaseRuns predicted standings, which use a team’s underlying statistics to predict the record they “should” have (irrespective of luck), and you would not expect Cleveland to be on top of the league. According to BaseRuns, the Guardians have the stats of a .500 team (literally, with a 56-56 expected record), and they rank as the 16th-best team in MLB. The 11-game positive gap between their actual and expected BaseRuns records is more than double that of any other team in baseball:
What does that mean for Cleveland in the long run? I don’t have BaseRuns going back throughout history, but they should track very similarly with team Wins Above Replacement, and the Guardians are on track to win 11.3 more games than expected via WAR by season’s end. Here are the playoff teams above them on the list since the 1994 strike, along with what happened to them:
2020 Miami Marlins (+16.5 wins/162): Lost to Braves in Division Series
2016 Texas Rangers (+14.2): Lost to Blue Jays in Division Series
2008 Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (+14.0): Lost to Red Sox in Division Series
2007 Arizona Diamondbacks (+12.7): Lost to Rockies in League Championship Series
2004 New York Yankees (+12.1): Lost to Red Sox in League Championship Series
It’s not a huge sample to draw from, but we eventually tend to see teams like this run out of magic before the World Series. That might be why the Guardians have by far the lowest World Series win probability (6.9 percent) among the five teams with at least a 95 percent chance of making the playoffs.
⚾ South-Side Shipwreck
Suffice it to say that things are not currently going well for the Chicago White Sox. Their 5-1 loss to Oakland on Monday was the team’s 21st defeat in a row, which tied the AL record and sits two shy of the 1961 Phillies’ all-time MLB record for consecutive losses. Just how awful are these White Sox? They’re bad on a level we’ve seldom seen since the 19th century. Going back to 1901, here are the lowest single-season “low points” in Elo rating for AL/NL teams:
(If you’re like me, you might also be wondering who the hell the “Rustlers” are… That’s what the Boston Braves called themselves in 1911 — and 1911 only.)
⚾ Hiding in the Sox Drawer
If the Guardians are the luckiest team in baseball so far this season, the Red Sox might be the unluckiest. Going back to that same table of BaseRuns W-L records, Boston has the fourth-best expected winning percentage in MLB, trailing only the bona fide favorite Phillies, Dodgers and Orioles. But again, you wouldn’t know that from their good-not-great 60-51 record, which has them sitting a game and a half outside the AL’s final wild card slot.
Right now, my composite model gives Boston a 43 percent chance to make the playoffs; it thinks they are in for a nasty fight against the Kansas City Royals and Houston Astros to grab the last postseason spot up for grabs.2 The Red Sox are also a complicated team to evaluate (as always), because so many of the players driving that BaseRuns projection — Jarren Duran, Tanner Houck, Wilyer Abreu, Tyler O'Neill, etc. — are having out-of-nowhere seasons. Are they really the fourth-best team team in MLB on paper?
Still, they were a net positive at the trade deadline, which means BaseRuns might be underselling their potential. If they fight through and cash in on that 43 percent playoff probability, this Boston team might end up giving somebody trouble in October.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
This is operating under the forecast that the division favorites are the Yankees, Guardians and Mariners, with the Orioles, Twins and Royals currently looking most likely to claim the wild cards.
Love the new product and very excited to see it evolve.
As to your question, Betteridge's law of headlines states: "any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." So, no - we cannot trust the Cleveland Guardians as World Series contenders. As a former resident of Northeast Ohio, this pains me. Unfortunately, with less than a 5% projection to win the World Series, the algorithms seem to agree with Betteridge.
Best of luck on the Bytes.