Not So... Great Expectations

While Diamondbacks brass cheerfully and predictably spins this season's abject failure as "a 26 game improvement over last year", Bill James' Expected W/L findings shed illuminating sabermetric light on the true extent of the Dhacks utter futility.

Expected  W/L, listed on the far right column of this expanded standings chart, uses the runs a team scores(RS) and yields to opponents(RA) over the season, to sabermetrically arrive at an "Expected" W/L record.  For example, thirteen of the NL's sixteen teams had an Expected W/L within 5 games of their Actual W/L, suggesting what a powerful correlative tool this is. Imagine - you dont know any team players,context, circumstances or stats - other than RS and RA - and one can approximate most team's actual W/L with startling accuracy.

The Diamondbacks have by far the largest gap(+13) of any MLB team between their Actual(77) and Expected(64) win totals. And their Expected W/L(64/98) is dead last in the league, a full five games worse than the Colorado Rockies, who own the NL's worst Actual record.

No one knows exactly why the Hacks won so many more games than RS/RA expected. Were they better coached than opponents? Did intangibles enable them to squeeze extra wins from an abysmal RS/RA starting point? Did a great bullpen win all the close games? Or were they just 'off the chart' lucky? 

I suspect the discrepancy is largely because of - not despite - the woeful pen. Lyon(April-Early May) and Valverde(Late Aug-Sept) were effective closers and the team did win alot of those close games. The rest of the year, with Bruney et al closing, they lost more games but the pen was so spectacularly flammable that the losses were not close - they were blowouts. How else to reconcile the league's highest bullpen E.R.A. with an NL-best record(28-18) in one-run games? Yes, the same team accomplished both!

But no single facet can completely explain a +13 Actual/Expected gap in a 162 game season - it's just a huge number.  Can any regular observer of the 2005 Diamondbacks seriously credit this statistical chasm to great coaching or intangibles? No - this team with the NL's worst run differential was likely also 'off the chart' lucky.

Moreover, they benefitted greatly from one of the easiest schedules in modern history due to an unbalanced schedule within the weakest MLB divison since the advent of divisions in 1969 - and still - under these historically favorable conditions, compiled the league's worst RS/RA ratio!   

Given their significant off-season acquisitions coupled with a neutral injury profile and several career-best individual performances, the 2005 Diamondbacks team result, shrouded under the false veil of respectible mediocrity, was in fact, an unmitigated disaster, easily trumping the well chronicled failure of the fraudulent 2004 Diamondbacks, the National League's worst team in 40 years.