Have you heard to the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball? It’s pretty simple. Basically, it says that your Expected Win-Loss should be equal to the proportion of the runs you score out of all of the runs scored in games you play. (Your Runs) / (Your Runs + Your Runs Allowed) in other words. Normally a team’s record falls within +/- 3 games. There are of course exceptions like last year’s Diamondbacks who “should” have been 79-83 but actually led the NL at 90-72. But it’s a good guideline.
The variation usually comes from games at either end of the spectrum, blowouts and close games. So when the Twins get trounced by the Tigers 19-3 on Saturday it makes the Twins appear worse and the Tigers appear better than they “are.” Additionally when the Twins win one-run games which they’ve done 12 times against 8 loses, they appear better than they “are” and the Royals appear worse.
The cool thing for me as a Twins fan is this. At the beginning of the Twins-Royals series, the Twins record (25-25) was better than their X W-L at (23-27). In both of the Royals games, the Royals led going into the top of the 9th including a blown save by Joe Nathan on Tuesday because of a missed sliding catch by Delmon Young which resulted in an indoor-four for Mark Teahan to tie the game. Each of those nights, the Twins squeaked out extra inning one-run wins alternately by playing small ball on Tuesday and by hitting the long ball last night. There’s no “this game is over” once we reach the late innings with this team. In the end it's the games you do or don't win that count not the ones which you should or shouldn't have.
As a result this morning the Twins record (27-25) is 4 games better than their X W-L (25-27). This makes sense since, as I said before, the Twins have won four more one-run games than they’ve lost.
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