Thursday, June 30, 2011

Why I hate the losing on the road

Believe it or not, it's not the losing.  It's the why.  I'm analytical, but also emotional.  To not allow myself to be bothered by the actual losing, I just have to remember that even the best baseball team will lose a lot.  Even Philadelphia, with the best record in baseball, is still going to lose 60 games.  That's still a lot of evenings sitting glumly with your beer (or vodka/Dew).

But what really bothers me is I just can't figure out WHY the Brewers are losing on the road so much and so badly.  You might say it's because they've played against good teams so far on the road.  That doesn't really doesn't work because they won 2 of 3 from Philadelphia and lost 4 in a row against the Nationals.  Besides that, the Brewers swept division-leading St Louis at home and lost 2 of 3 to the Mets.  The quality of the opponent isn't correlated to the home/road records.

What about the park?  Sure, this year, Miller Park is leaning more heavily batter-friendly, but historically, it's pretty close to neutral.  And if the Brewers are a power-hitting team, park effect can explain the poorer showing against San Diego and the Dodgers, but doesn't explain their performance against the Yankees.  (Sure, the Yankees are just overall a good team, but Wednesday night was the Brewers best opportunity to beat up a bit of a struggler in New York's rotation.  That didn't happen).

I'm not even going to look at RISP.  That's just such a stupid stat, that I can't even stand discussing it.  It's just absurd to think that hitters somehow will try harder just because runners on base.  They're trying hard to get on regardless--no hitter wants to strike out or GIDP.

I'd like suggestions if you got them, because we're halfway into the season--park factors can't explain it (the Brewers have visited enough different parks to equalize them), imbalance in road opponents (saying that the Brewers road opponents have been predominately good) doesn't exist and much as Shawn Marcum would like to explain it away with Yostian thinking, it's not all just bad luck.

The home record simply isn't sustainable.  Hell, if it DOES keep going like this, it won't matter what the road record is, but it statistically isn't viable.  The road record doesn't even really need to be good (or even "ok"), it just can't be terrible.  But without understanding what's causing the road issues, I'm not sure how it can be fixed.  And I hate not knowing.

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