Spring Has Sprung

It happens every Spring. No, not the old baseball movie starring Ray Miland as a nerdy scientist who invents something that makes a baseball avoid contact with a bat. The Update is talking about the Sox again having a losing record in the Cactus League. Just look at the last two seasons. According to the Tribune, in the World Series Championship season, the Sox finished Spring Training with a 14-18 record. And last year, they were 8-19-2 out in Arizona. Considering their regular season win totals were in the 90s both seasons, Sox fans can take some comfort in the fact that they won't necessarily suck when the games actually count. And according to this week's Sports Illustrated, winning during the Spring doesn't correlate with winning during the regular season: "Since MLB went to three divisions in 1994, in fact, the team with the best exhibition mark in each league has made the playoffs less than half the time." Only 15.4% of the teams that finished with their league's best record during Grapefruit/Cactus League play wound up winning their divisions. And only 23.1% of them won a Wild Card berth. That means a whopping 61.5% of the first-place teams during Spring Training finished the regular season out of the money. There's hope for the Sox yet.

Still, the Update would feel a lot better if the Sox pitchers had performed a little better. Each of the returning starters had a significantly higher ERA than he did last Spring. If the starters give up as many runs as they did in Arizona, the scores in our games are going to resemble those rung up by the Bears (who have their own pitching problems). High scoring games are going to marginalize Ozzie's preferred Small Ball strategy. It's crazy to play for one run when runs are cheap. Actually, it's always crazy to advance a runner from first to second via a sacrifice bunt. Statistics show to a virtually irrefutable degree of confidence that the odds of scoring a run with a runner on first and no one out (the situation when Oz calls for the sacrifice bunt) are better than the chances of scoring a run with a runner on second and one out (the situation if his strategy works).

Fortunately, the Sox have power to spare and the park to take advantage of it. The Update just doesn't get why you would try to tailor your club to avoid exploiting your park's characteristics. And for those of you who say, we won that way in 2005, the fact is we won despite that strategy. The Sox had a huge percentage of their runs score via the home run that year as well. It's just that Small Ball got all the publicity. Anyway, the season is ready to start, so let's break out the battle cry: Go Sox!