Panic In Boston? A Response to Dave Cameron

One of the most commonly asked questions after a week’s worth of baseball games has been “should Boston be worried?” The odds on World Series favourites have started the season 0-6, unable to eek out a win against even the lowly Cleveland Indians. Yesterday, Dave Cameron at Fangraphs issued his own more statistically based suggestion that Boston may indeed be in trouble . While it is scary to think about climbing out of an 0-6 hole, I’m still not ready to assume Boston is any less likely to be the team they were expected to be eight days ago.

Cameron’s argument is as follows: At the beginning of the season, Frangraphs writers (as a mean) predicted that Boston would win 98 games this year. This equals 60.5% of all their games. Knowing that Boston has started the season 0-6, Cameron is concerned that if the Red Sox win 60.5% of their remaining games, it will leave them with only 94.4 wins (rounded up to 95 to account for the fact that all 6 loses have came on the road), one win above the 94 wins the Yankees are projected to have this year. This means the Sox have seriously hurt their chances of winning the AL East

Let’s assume that the projection is true, and the Sox are supposed to win 60.5% of their games this year. After a week of 0-6 baseball, there is still no reason to think the initial projection of 98 (or 60.5%) wins should be subject to any change. When you project a team to win 60.5% of its games, you are projecting a team to win 60.5% of all 162 games over the course of a season. This does not mean that the team must win 60.5% of its games over a shorter period of time (one week in this case) within the season. It should be expected that any team over the course of 162 games should go through periods of (for example) winning 9 in a row, losing 6 in a row and a combination of many other hot and cold streaks in between. Even a team expected to win 98 games. The inverse of this point is that no one is ready to suggest that New York, who has started the season winning 66.7% of their games (4-2) should win 108 games. I would guess (seeing as there was no mention of Yankee improvement in the article) that Cameron doesn’t even seem ready to claim that New York is likely to improve upon the 94 wins that Fangraphs initially projected, despite their hot start. Winning and losing streaks shouldn’t affect an overall expectation about a team’s performance. In the case of Boston, the 60.5% represents the winning percentage at the end of the season, not their performance of a selected sample within it.

No one would think twice if a team went on a 6 game skid in the middle of June, and there is a statistical basis to this. Expecting a team to win 60.5% over the course of a season means just that, winning 60.5% of games over the course of an entire season. Boston is every bit as likely to win the American League East as they were eight days ago.