I loved the 2016 Brewers season

[monty57]

Good point Reilly. When the bottom half of your order is something like Elmore, Flores, Maldonado, pitcher, that's a whole lot of rally killing. So is running out SPs who are giving up around six runs per nine innings.

 

It should be easier for a sub-.500 team to gain wins from one season to the next than it is for a good team to gain wins simply because the bad team probably has more "replacement level" guys. Simply replacing some of these guys with "league average" guys should make the team much better.

 

When you start replacing them with good players is when you start talking about the playoffs.

[FVBrewerFan]

The Brewers this year have league average OPS and league average team ERA. yet they're 8 games below 81 wins. Why is that? Bad bullpen management? Bad luck? Did they create too many outs on the bases, depriving themselves of runscoring opportunities? It's worth looking at, not to say, "the statistical information is wrong", but to see what caused a minor outlier in the data.

 

It's because 162 games isn't a large enough sample to "even out" these numbers. If the season was 10,000 games the Brewers would have been 5,000-5,000. Probably a tad below that due to below avg defense.

 

But since the season consists of only 162 unique "events" the W/L record can be skewed quite a bit.

 

I did say in my post (in a part that you didn't quote) that by some measures 162 games is a small sample size. I hope you didn't selectively remove that from the quote for impact.

 

Sorry, yes you did make that point. Homer made almost identical comments right after my post, so I think we were just emphasizing the point that the season is a very small sample when it comes to OPS/ERA = Wins.