October 8, 2009

The Angels host the Red Sox in the final American League Division Series starting Thursday. The following table shows American League ranks for the teams in various offensive and pitching categories:

Could these two offenses be more evenly matched? In one of his old Abstracts, Bill James wrote that if you have two players with the same OBP, take the one with the higher batting average. The reason is that hits do more damage than walks, and we that here. The two teams differ by just two points in OBP, but the Angels batting average is 15 points higher, and they outscored the Red Sox. Note, however, that Boston is more likely to get a long hit. Their isolated power (Slug-BA) comes in at .184 compared to .156 for LAnaheim. The Red Sox scored 331 runs on homers, second in the AL behind the Yankees. Note however, that due to their high OBP, both teams hit a high percentage of their home runs with men on base. Each team is scoring lots of runs quickly due to their combination of on-base and power, but Boston should be just a bit better at it.

Boston’s pitching and defense is better than their ERA indicates. They rank third in runs allowed per game, as they give up a low number of unearned runs. The Red Sox pitchers strike out a ton of batters, which prevents any advancement of runners who might have reached by an error, and they allow few home runs, which does the same thing. Combine that with a high fielding percentage, and the Red Sox just don’t give away extra runs. With the two staffs even in walks, the advantage in pitching clearly comes down on the side of the Red Sox.

That’s even more true late in the game, where the Red Sox bullpen’s ERA is 0.69 runs better than the Angels pen. With two pitchers capable of going deep in games (Lester and Beckett), Boston does not need to worry about overworking the pen in games started by Buchholz and Matsuzaka. They are more than capable of shortening those outings to six innings.

That said, the starting four the Angels will use in the playoffs is pretty good. Lackey posted an ERA under 4.00 despite taking a while to fully recover from his injury. Jered Weaver made a nice ERA improvement this year and proved he can go 200 innings. The Angels picked up Scott Kazmir just as he figured out his control, and he may be the ace of the staff right now. Joe Saunders and Daisuke Matsuzaka can go either way, great game or slugfest.

Still the pitching should give Boston the edge in this series. However, these are not your older sibling’s Angels. It’s a much more selective team than in the past, and a much better offense. They took the season series 5-4 from the Red Sox, holding them to about 4.5 runs per game while scoring about five runs per game. I’m favoring Boston, giving them a 55% chance of winning, but I suspect it will be a close series.

Posted by David Pinto at 9:17 am | League Division Series | Permalink | 1 Comment