Climbing out of the hole
Random fact: The Angels were 33-44, with 85 ties, after the first inning. They finished the season with a 97-65 record, which means that they were 64-21 after the first inning. They were not only slow starters during the season, they were slow starters during their games.
The team with the worst first-inning record was the New York Mets: 31-45 with 86 ties. Suffice to say that they didn’t climb out of their early-game holes nearly as well as the Angels did.
Dave Studeman was called a "national treasure" by Rob Neyer. Seriously. Follow his sporadic tweets @dastudes.
Perhaps I’m missing something but 33-44 after the 1st inning doesn’t mean they finished 33-44 in those games. It would seem likely that they won a few games where they trailed after the 1st inning and lost a few where they led. So if their record in those games wasn’t 33-44, you can’t extrapolate their record in the remaining games.
Correct?
I think the point is that if the games were one inning long, the Angels would have been 33-44 with 85 ties.
After the 1st inning, they led 33 times, trailed 44 times, and were tied 85 times.
Assuming that 64-21 “after the first inning” means “if W-L records were recalculated ignoring the first inning”, 64-21 may an understatement. It only considers those games that were tied. Presumably, in some of the 33 games that they were ahead after one inning, they outscored their opponents in innings 2-9 also.
Actually, they might not have been 64-21 in those games that were tied after one inning. That would only be true if their comebacks when down after one equaled their opponents’ comebacks.
Which doesn’t take away from the impressiveness of playing .753 ball over some period, howver defined.
Yes to all of the above.
My first thought was that the top of their order was terrible. It’s true, but only relatively speaking. The ten batters with the most PA all had OPS+ over 100, but of the six guys with significant # of games in the first four spots, they had OPS+ of 108, 107, 103, 116, 126 and 106. Top hitter Morales batted 5th or 6th most often. You could look at “OPS+ differential between top 4 and bottom 5 in lineu”p to see how that correlates with “record differential between 1st inning and end of game”. I guess the only interesting thing would be the amount of the correlation.
A similar stat in the same vein, is that the Yanks were barely a .500 team going into the 7th inning (73-68 to be exact), and finished with a 103-59 record.