Since the break

With tomorrow being September 1st and the call-ups a-comin' the talent pool in the NL will become even more diluted than it already is and the numbers players put up will be meaningless (Tike Redman, Adrian Brown, etc.). That means we should take at least some time now while we're thinking about it to look at the post-All Star stats. Again, we'll use the Baseball Musings Day By Day Database to break things down, hitters here and pitchers here.

First things first, the team is 23-21 since the break. People have said lots of things about their play since then, but the truth is that they've been outscored 216-185 since the break. That would project out to a 19-25 record (using Baseball Reference's pythagorean Win/Loss formula). Over a full-season that only means 69 or 70 wins. That's nothing to be terribly excited about. The numbers bear this out, Jason Bay is the only person with a slugging percentage anywhere near .500 (Nady is next at .466). Bay, Sanchez, and Nady are the only three with OPS's over .800. In fact, 185 runs over 44 games only comes out to 4.2 per game. That's actually less than the 4.4 per the team has averaged during the season, a number that's good for 27th in the league. Clearly this is a huge problem.

The pitching staff hasn't been much better. Out of the three guys (Snell, Maholm, Duke) who have supposedly been pitching well since the break, Maholm's ERA is the lowest a 4.37. Their WHIPs are 1.33, 1.47, and 1.71 respectively (Snell, Maholm, Duke). As previously discussed, Duke and Maholm have cut down on their walks, but they're still both incredibly hittable. Gorzellany was very good, but his sample size is even smaller than everyone else's, making it difficult to judge. Their BABIP (batting average on balls in play, for a good explanation if you don't know what this is, go here) is difficult to calculate from these stats since they don't give exact batters faced numbers and they don't give "sac flies given up", but without the sac flies I have Snell at .236, Maholm at .260, and Duke at .299. That means that none of them have been particularly unlucky when it comes to balls put in play, and actually Snell and Maholm have been kind of fortunate when it comes to things like that (the league average is .290 or so). In terms of total runs given up by the pitching staff, 216 in 44 games is 4.9 per game, only slightly down from the 5.1 we've given up on the season as a whole.

Unfortunately, looking at the numbers doesn't make me think the Pirates have played that much better since the All-Star break. In fact, it just seems that they've been a lot luckier. Since they were a pretty unlucky team in the first half of the season (as evidenced by that record in one run games) we probably had some luck due to head in our way. That doesn't go a long ways towards convincing me that 2007 won't be year #15 of futility.