Baseball Bytes: Scott Servais, Jerry Dipoto and the Foibles of 54 Percent
Baseball Bytes: Scott Servais, Jerry Dipoto and the Foibles of 54 Percent
Plus, Greg Maddux's fielding dominance and the D-Backs' recent hot streak.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a new-ish 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!
⚾ Should the Mariners Have Aimed Higher?
The first managerial firing of 2024 was sad, though not necessarily surprising — it came when the dreadful White Sox let go of Pedro Grifol shortly after losing 21 straight games. But the second firing raised a few more eyebrows, because it involved Scott Servais and a Mariners team that went into 2024 with aspirations to contend after barely missing the playoffs with 88 wins last season.2 Despite a 92 percent playoff probability (per FanGraphs) in mid-June, Seattle’s odds have fallen sharply ever since, and the team is now very likely to fall short of the postseason again for the 22nd time in 23 years.
Although they boast a very strong rotation — each of their five most-used starters (Logan Gilbert, Luis Castillo, George Kirby, Bryce Miller, Bryan Woo) went into Sunday on pace for at least 3 WAR3 — and a lineup of recognizable hitters like Julio Rodriguez, the Mariners are probably only on track to finish with 81 or 82 wins, a clear disappointment based on their talent and expectations. However, Seattle’s struggles did make me think back to general manager Jerry Dipoto’s comments after the team missed the playoffs last year:
“If you go back and you look, in a decade those teams that win 54 percent of the time always wind up in the postseason. And they more often than not wind up in the World Series. So, there’s your bigger-picture process…”
“Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’ Because sometimes 54 percent is — one year, you’re going to win 60 percent, another year you’re going to win 50 percent. It’s whatever it is. But over time, that type of mindset gets you there.”
Dipoto caught a lot of flak for saying that, because 54 percent of 162 is 87.5 wins — a somewhat mediocre total when we consider that 35 of the 36 division winners during the double-wild-card era4 had more than 87 wins. It sounded like he was basically conceding not being one of the league’s best teams, even though a stat-wonk like me understood exactly what he meant: That in the long run, you aim for 54 percent and hope to take special advantage of the seasons when variance and luck help you rise higher than that.
But this season is showing the real pitfalls of the aim-for-54-percent mindset. If we look at the distribution of residuals around preseason predictions (whether via Elo ratings, statistical forecasts like PECOTA, or Vegas odds), the errors are approximately normal with a standard error of 9.4 wins. Here’s what that looks like for a team like Jerry Dipoto’s mythical 54 percent squad:
Sometimes, the projected .540 team is quite good: 42 percent of the time it wins 90 or more games, getting to 95+ wins 23 percent of the time and 100+ wins with 10 percent frequency. However, aiming for .540 also leaves a lot of exposure to the risk of missing the playoffs or not even finishing .500. In the distribution above, there is a 42 percent chance of finishing with fewer than 86 wins, which is the average number necessary to make the playoffs since the postseason expanded in 2022.5 There’s also a 26 percent chance of finishing 81-81 or worse, a category this year’s Mariners might fall into.
By aiming for 54 percent, then, Dipoto probably created too much downside risk for himself when the Mariners undershot their mean projection. In order to have a 70 percent chance at winning at least 86 games — thereby feeling safer for the postseason — you’d need to build a team with 90.4 wins of projected talent (i.e., a .558 winning percentage club). To have a 90 percent chance of winning at least 86 games, you need to have 97.6 wins of talent (a .602 projected winning percentage).
Maybe that’s overkill, and you’re comfortable with a bit more risk than that. But the main point is that 54 percent is too low a target to reliably avoid the type of season that has already cost Servais his job — and might have even more of those consequences when all is said and done.
⚾ Greg “The Glove” Maddux
Greg Maddux might be my favorite pitcher ever, so I was excited to see MLB Network’s documentary about him, “One of a Kind”, debut on Sunday night. The film was filled with the types of awesome Maddux Stories you might expect — moving the narrative through his early years, his departure from the Cubs, his relationship with the rest of the Braves’ aces, his chess matches with Barry Bonds, his many nasty pranks, and more.
The through-line was Maddux’s incredible genius as a pitcher, and the sheer brilliance of his craft. But I thought they didn’t really give anywhere near enough attention to Maddux’s ability as a fielder, which was a key component of his pitching success because it made his infield defense on ground balls that much more airtight.
How great was Maddux with the glove? Well, for one thing, he won 18 Gold Gloves on the mound, including 13 straight at one point, giving him literally the most Gold Gloves of any player at any position in baseball history — 5 clear of Ivan Rodriguez at catcher. (Jim Kaat is the only other pitcher with double-digit Gold Glove wins.) But Maddux’s defensive statistics were also an incredible outlier relative to other pitchers. If we add his career putouts + assists (i.e., the components of range factor) to get the number of successful plays he made, Maddux had 38 percent more of those than any other pitcher in the post-integration era:
The difference between Maddux’s plays made as a fielder and those of No. 2 Tommy John (475 plays) was the same as the difference between John and No. 36 Mark Buehrle.
And while some of that was a result of Maddux also playing 23 years in the big leagues, he is also the post-integration career leader in Range Factor at pitcher with a minimum of 2,000 innings. Maddux’s average of 3.13 plays per 9 innings leads Bob Lemon (3.04); those two are the only qualified pitchers who made more than 2.76 plays per 9. Let’s just say it helps as a pitcher when you’re getting an entire inning’s worth of outs just with your own glove.
⚾ Slithering to Success
When I wrote an ode to the underrated Ketel Marte in early July, I lamented that his Arizona Diamondbacks weren’t really holding up their end of the bargain in their bid to make a World Series return.
That was then, and this is now. As August approaches its end, the D-Backs are currently the hottest team in baseball — and nearly the hottest in franchise history. After beating Boston on Sunday, Arizona has won 24 of its past 30 games, which is tied for the second-best 30-game stretch in franchise history, trailing only the 25-5 record compiled by the 2002 version during their own August heater.
The funny thing is that the ‘02 Snakes were also coming off an appearance in the Fall Classic — avert your eyes, Yankee fans — but that team was still stacked with big names like Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and Luis Gonzalez, and thus were favorites throughout the season (including before the playoffs, until they promptly lost to the Cardinals in an NLDS sweep). This year’s D-Backs were viewed more cautiously for most of the season, up to and including about two months ago.
But now they have strong playoff odds — and therefore a chance to do what the ‘02 squad couldn’t, shocking the baseball world again on the road to another World Series.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
It also raised eyebrows because Servais reportedly found out he’d gotten the ax via Twitter.
If we round Castillo up from 2.95 WAR/162.
Excluding the Covid-shortened 2020 season.
That’s across all of MLB; the average in the AL specifically has been slightly higher, at 86.5. (The odds of fewer than 87 wins is 46 percent.)
I just can't get there. For me, 54% is an utterly bankrupt belief that alone largely explains why Seattle has so consistently failed. Let's start with the obvious. No marital vows that I have witnessed said "and I vow to shoot for 54% with you over the long haul till death do us part." Nothing in your life that really matters would merit or tolerate 54%. We can only hope to achieve that for which we at least strive.
The Mariners are no different.
No effective or cogent business strategy relies on "variance and luck" - ever. No effective leader of an organization expecting excellence worships at the altar of some bell curve hoping that the future will occasionally bring them good fortune from a black swan or tail effect. To the contrary, that is the absence of leadership.
Great strategies are about seeing the future and its risks and planning for them - knowing where the puck is going and building steps to get there more efficiently and faster than the competition. A large part of that is planning for contingencies i.e. expecting the unexpected and building that into your plans to achieve your outcomes.
Take the Dodgers. No team has been stricken with more catastrophic injuries than LA. Yet, they sit on top of the NL West- again - at around .600. Does anyone think they got there by believing that 54% reflects their goals, aspirations, or culture? That organization is 100% committed - at every level - to continually achieving excellence. They planned for injuries - and have addressed them without a whimper as the season has moved along.
See, there is "long run" in LA...no bell curve to keep them complacent. They expect to be in the World Series every single season - no excuses. Not getting there is unalloyed failure. They'll be the first to tell you that. Does that feel like Seattle? Does 54% philosophically capture the consistent success you see with LA, Atlanta, Houston and elsewhere?
Words matter, and 54% - whatever the intended meaning - is a poor leadership moment. Great leaders craft a compelling vision of a future for their organizations that their associates want to occupy and motivates them to work towards. Who is motivated to achieve great things by 54%? Has anything you consider great ever been fueled by "hey folks, remember, we're just shooting for 54% here?"
So why did a smart person like Jerry Dipoto say something so objectively wrong and counterproductive. As the losses mount, I suspect his sole concern now is self-preservation. When you are not succeeding as a leader, your first move is often to lower expectations because lower expectations help to push out the day of reckoning.
54% tells us more about Dipoto than the Mariners. Firing Scott Servais is a meaningless public sacrifice to hopefully keep the pitchforks and torches on the walls a little while longer. Here's the thing. When I read your work Neil, I never get the feeling that you are satisfied with 54% or that your horizon for excellence in your work involves some amorphous long run of hits and misses around a bell curve. Why should Seattle ask for less?
Thanks again as always.