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The Rockies recently concluded a painful month of May in which they went 12-14 and fell to 7.5 games behind the division-leading Giants, after starting the month just 1.5 games back. This outcome was not really unexpected. Matt Gross over at Purple Row, posted this article predicting Colorado’s awful May, citing five compelling reasons for the expected struggles: injuries piling up, a lot of road games, offense not sustainable, Rox historically bad in May, and Tulo coming down from outer space to stratosphere. Check, check, check, check, and check. Sadly, I have to tip my hat to Mr. Gross, as his prediction was spot on.

It’s natural and very common for us fans to point fingers and place the blame on someone or something in particular. I guess it’s just a defense mechanism to deal with the frustration of watching your team loose. So in that spirit, I’ll try to determine who’s (more) to blame for yet another poor May in Rockies history.

First of all, let’s look at some stats. How did the offense perform and how did it rank among the rest of the teams? How about the pitching staff? The following table shows some Rockies’ batting and pitching numbers for the month of May. In both cases, there’s one stat that is not park-adjusted (wOBA and FIP), and one that is (wRC+ and FIP-). Each stat is presented along with its rank in the majors.

BATTING PITCHING wOBA wRC+ FIP FIP- 0.340 (3rd) 100 (10th) 4.77 (30th) 112 (26th)

Looking at non-adjusted stats, we see that the Rockies had the 3rd best offense in baseball, but ranked dead last in pitching. This points a heavy finger towards the pitching side of things. Then again, Coors Field probably had something to do with this, and that’s why you always have to include park-adjusted stats when analyzing baseball at altitude. Our guys in purple ranked 10th on offense and 26th on pitching this past May when using stats that take into consideration the parks they’ve played in. This is not as extreme as 3rd and 30th, but it definitely tells us that they hit much better than they pitched, especially when compared to the rest of the league.

The easy, most logical conclusion here would be an old, worn out mantra among Rockies fans: the offense is good, we need better pitching. While it would definitely be beneficial for Colorado to actually have better pitching, I believe the pitching staff has been more effective than the stats suggest. I’ll even go a little further and say that the offense has been less effective than the numbers they’ve put up. I know it sounds a bit strange, but bear with me here, I’ll explain.

Adjectives like good, bad, effective or ineffective depend a great deal on what your expectations are. It also depends on the environment in which you’re analyzing a certain performance. For instance, you could say that a second baseman has been good offensively if he hits .280/.340/.420. However, a first baseman with that same slash line wouldn’t be all that good. Also, a 3.50 ERA for a pitcher in 1996 was considered pretty good, but a similar ERA in 1965 would’ve been just average.

If we accept the fact that Rockies teams are naturally offense-heavy, mainly because they play in such a high scoring environment, then we can change our expectations and see things differently. This not an apology for mediocrity, it’s just a way to play the hand you’ve been dealt, so to speak.

With this in mind, I’ll consider the Rockies to have played a good game if they do the following:

Pitching staff allows 4 runs or less. Offense scores 5 runs or more.

It’s a pretty simple formula for winning. It’s also a very reasonable expectation. Rockies teams have never averaged less than 4 runs scored on offense per game, and even though the home/road split is huge, they average almost exactly 4 runs a game on the road throughout their brief history. On the pitching side it gets a little harder to meet these expectations, but just by getting a Quality Start from the starting pitcher (6 innings or more, 3 runs or less), and the bullpen allowing one run, they’re getting the job done.

Sabermetrics are all about throwing away context and circumstantial events. They try to analyze each player based solely on things he can directly control. That’s why FIP is more insightful than ERA, and why RBI or Runs Scored are not what they use to evaluate offensive production.

In real life baseball, however, context and circumstances are very important. A two-out home run, followed by two walks and a groundout is completely different than two walks, followed by a two-out home run and a groundout. The same thing happens with team performances. Scoring 12 runs one game and being shut out the next will probably result in just one win, while scoring 6 runs each game gives the team a better chance at winning both games.

Let’s do a simple exercise in order to see what was more consistent for the Rockies in May between batting and pitching. For each time the offense did its job (score 5 runs or more) they get a point, the same goes for the pitching staff (allow 4 runs or less). I’ll arbitrarily include the last game of the Cleveland series (which was played on June 1st) in this analysis, just because I want to put that painful memory with the rest of May, wishful that June is going to be a better month (so far, this doesn’t seem to be the case).

The final result of the exercise comes back like this:

Offense: 12 points (44.4% of the games)

Pitching: 14 points (51.8% of the games)

This is the first indication that the pitching staff actually performed better than the offense during May. In more than half the games the Rockies played, pitchers were able to allow 4 runs or less. The offense, however, could not get the job done in 15 out of 27 games, which is not very good.

Let’s put a little more context into it, shall we? The exercise we just did doesn’t take into account how the other side of the ball did, i.e., the offense gets a point if they score 5 or more runs, regardless of whether the pitching staff allowed 2 runs or 10. So, what happens if the offense scores only 2 runs, but pitchers pick up the slack and allows just one? Should the pitching staff get the same credit than, say, a 10-4 win? The opposite could also happen; the offense could score 10 runs, only to see their pitchers allow 12 and lose the game. In order to deal with a bit more of these nuances, I designed a simple scoring system to better reflect the performances of each side of the Rockies’ game, on a game-to-game basis.

The principle of the system is that a game won is worth one point, and a game lost is worth a negative point. These points could be split between offense and pitching, depending on the case. There are four possible cases for each game played:

The game is won and each side does its job. In this case, both offense and pitching get half a point (0.5). Example: a 6-3 win. The game is lost and neither side does its job. In this case, both sides are awarded a negative half point (-0.5). Example: a 4-7 loss. The game is won and only one side does its job. In this case, the side that met expectations is awarded one point (1), while the other side gets zero. Example: a 10-6 win. The game is lost and only one side does its job. In this case, the side that fails gets a negative point (-1), while the other side gets zero. Example: a 1-3 loss.

I ran the scoring system for each game played in May (except the suspended game against the Giants, and including the June 1st game at Cleveland), and put the results in the following table.

You can see at the lower right corner of the table, that the offense cost the Rockies 2.5 games, whereas the pitching staff only cost them a half game. The finger has turned and is now pointing towards the Rockies lauded offense.

Of course, if we split games using home/away criteria, the vast majority of the negative points awarded to the offense came from games on the road. In fact, the Rockies’ batting performance cost them 6 games total when playing away from Denver. When playing at home, though, they gave back 3.5 games, thus the -2.5 total.

The pitching staff was no different in this regard. They performed better at home, where they contributed 1.5 games. Meanwhile, they cost the team a total of 2 games on the road, resulting in the -0.5 games shown in the table.

Overall, the team underperformed its run differential in the month of May. In theory, having more runs scored than runs allowed should result in a winning record. As you can see on the table shown above, the Rockies scored 120 runs and allowed 114. Using Pythagorean Expectation (a formula that calculates the expected winning rate of a team, based solely on runs scored and allowed), Colorado should’ve won 14 games instead of 12, and this probably had to do with the offense’s inconsistent play.

Just to get a little perspective, I ran the same system for the Rockies’ first month of play (including Opening Day in Miami, which was played on March 31st), and the offense did a lot better. They contributed 1.5 games, as opposed to the 2.5 they cost the team last month, a difference of 4 games. The pitching staff also performed better in April, chipping in 1.5 games instead of costing the team 0.5 games in May for a net performance difference of 2 games. In case you’re curious, Colorado’s pythagorean record for March/April was 17-12, very close to their actual record of 16-13.

The strongest conclusion that can be drawn from all this, is that the Rockies need to play better on the road. There’s no secret there, we’ve known this for a long time. But if the urge of simplifying the process of assigning blame takes over, we can definitely say that this bad month can be chalked up to the offense. Maybe we can even start a new mantra: the pitching is ok, the offense needs to be more consistent.