April In Noticing

Live beside the ocean; leave the fire behind.

The eternal challenge to following baseball is that there is too much to attend to, especially once you get past the first layer of team fandom. So there are always a few things that I deliberately follow closely, less to generate content than to make sure I keep paying close attention. Of course, everything ends up content…

So here’s the first month of the year, in categories that will pretty much tell you what I’ve been paying attention to this year.

1. April In Teams Reaching Zero Percent Playoff Odds.

• Rockies on April 15, when they were 5-10, three games out of first. (Started the year at 0.3 percent.)

• A’s on April 17, when they were 3-14, seven and a half games out of first. (Started the year at 1.2 percent.)

• Nationals: April 22, when they were 6-13, seven and a half games out of first. (Started the year at 0.3 percent.)

One thing I’ve learned in a decade of writing about ball is that you can’t just invent a statistic or a new way of presenting information and expect it to catch on. What you really need is the perfect application of it: For the average fan, Mike Trout made WAR. For the Baseball Twitterer, Yu Darvish made pitch overlays. Once upon a time, World Series champion Ned Yost made the Managerial Meddling Index. And while I guess I’d been aware that Baseball-Reference had some sort of colorful bar graphic at the top of its team pages, I didn’t pay attention to them or get what they were for. Then last week somebody sent me one, unlabeled and with no comment, and I immediately knew both what it was and what it was for:

Each bar is a game result; green is a win, red is a loss, and the length of the bar is the margin of victory or defeat. That’s the 2023 A’s. I don’t mean “that’s the graphic for the 2023 A’s.” I mean that it is the A’s. It’s realer and more vivid than the team itself. It has, I fear, taken possession of the team’s soul.

What do you see in this graph? I see one of two things:

1. First I see a post-apocalyptic landscape. The parched earth and the scorched sky have made living on the surface close to impossible, so humans have had to rebuild their cities in a dripping underground. In the centuries since the great undergrounding, most above-ground buildings have collapsed, been toppled by 200-mph sandstorms, or been demolished by a occasional above-ground territorial skirmishes. A very occasional office park or utility station or concrete parking structure remains upright to give the landscape remnants of a modern topography. And a single skyscraper has somehow survived, perpetually off in the distance, an unreachable reminder of the once-comfortable world.

Or I see

2. Deep footprints in an impassable mud. I see a traveler trying to walk through this cumbersome muck, each boot escaping the ground’s clutch only with tremendous strain. Each raised foot releases a loud, flatulent noise, before sinking back into the mud for another step, sometimes sinking inches and sometimes sinking up to the knee. With each step, the traveler tells himself that this is progress. I see not only the toil of the journey so far, but how much of the journey is still to be walked:

Last week I wrote about the 1930 Phillies, whose pitchers had the highest staff ERA in AL/NL history (6.71), and whose 8.20 ERA in September is the worst single month by any team. This year’s A’s challenged, but did not defeat, the latter mark: Their 7.72 ERA in April was merely the fourth-worst team ERA by month in AL/NL history. It’s very early and regression is always the expectation and the A’s play in a pitcher’s park in an average offensive era, but we have to at least consider that the A’s could challenge the full-season record. A lot of damage is already done, and April is traditionally the lowest-scoring month of the year. From this point forward, Oakland needs to have an ERA lower than 6.48 to avoid worsting those 1930 Philies. That should be easy. But, as we’ve seen, it’s not. 

I’ll say this for the A’s: In 2012, a season in which the A’s were barely trying, they hit 0 percent odd at Baseball Prospectus in April. They were still at 0 in July. And they ended up winning 94 games and the American League West that year! I wrote back then about how we never see such things coming. Such a thing is not coming this year, but, then, I would say that.

2. April In Players Getting Weird Just Because The Inning Started With A Runner On Second Base.