Despite the fact that the 2011 Yankee offense once again leads MLB in runs-per-game and wOBA, there’s still been quite a bit of hand-wringing among the Yankee faithful with regards to various aspects of the team’s situational hitting capabilities, be it hitting with men on base, runners in scoring position and the team’s fairly bizarre inability to really lay waste to opposing teams’ bullpens, among what I’m sure are other complaints I’m forgetting about. In this post I thought I’d take a look at the latter, which, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, has been a bit of a head-scratcher, as the Yankees anecdotally have always seemed to thrive by wearing a starting pitcher down before attacking the seedy underbelly of a given team’s relief corps.
The following table shows American League team run scoring by inning (through games of Thursday, June 2). Yellow highlights indicate the team (or teams) that have scored the most runs in a given inning, and pink highlights represent the fewest.
It would appear that there is indeed credence to the idea that the Yankees have not been doing as much damage as we might generally expect from the team in the later innings. Interestingly, the team leads the AL in runs scored in the 1st, 2nd and 5th innings, and is well above league average scoring in these frames. However, they are below league average scoring tallies in the 6th, 7th and 9th innings, and exactly at league average in the 8th inning. Click here to see a line graph of the 2011 Yankees’ run-scoring by inning vs. the AL average.
The Red Sox have done a lot of their damage in the later frames of their games, leading the AL in scoring in the 7th inning (tied with Baltimore of all teams) and the 8th inning. Curiously enough, despite this late-game prowess Boston is actually tied for last in scoring in the 9th inning, though the 9th isn’t a truly fair comparison as not every team is going to play an equal amount of 9th inning frames.
I also wanted to see how the 2011 Yankees stacked up against previous iterations of the team in terms of run-scoring by inning, to see if this year’s team truly was falling short of the conventional wisdom that the Yankees pound teams in the later innings. I decided to go back to 2006, for no real reason other than the fact that the Yankees have boasted the top offense in the American League in each year since 2006 with the exception of 2008.
The 2011 Yankees projected runs scored by inning for the full 2011 season was simply calculated by taking their average runs scored per inning over their first 54 games and extrapolating that figure out over their remaining 108 games. If you’d like the native file, please feel free to to download the spreadsheet I used.
The 2011 Yankees are on pace to score their highest total number of runs in the first inning in the six seasons displayed here, as well as the fifth inning. On the flip side, this year’s team is also on pace for six-year lows in runs scored in the 4th, 6th and 7th innings.
Ultimately what I think we can take away from this graph is that yes, the Yankees are indeed scoring less frequently in the later innings of games than they have in recent seasons — the significant dropoff in run-scoring in the 6th and 7th innings in particular is actually pretty shocking. Anecdotally one might expect the team to be scoring more frequently than normal in those frames, considering the fact that (a) Those innings generally represent the point in a given game where the starting pitcher should be running out of gas, if they haven’t already been removed for middle relief, and (b) Middle relief is usually a lot more hittable than specialized — 8th and 9th inning — relief.
It’s even stranger when you consider that the 2006-2010 teams each scored over 100 runs in both the 6th and 7th innings of their seasons, while the 2011 version is only on pace for 69 runs in the 6th and 75 in the 7th.
One other interesting takeaway from this chart — you already knew this, but the 2009 team was the king of the final inning triad, with the most run scored in each of the 7th, 8th and 9th of all six of these Yankee teams. Perhaps that’s why the lack of scoring in the later innings has been so baffling for Yankee fans this season — we’ve been trained to expect them to come back and pile it on late, although a closer look at the chart shows that the late-inning fade may have actually begun last season, as the 2010 team has the second-fewest runs scored in the 7th and tied for second-fewest in the 8th.
In any event, at the end of the day a lot of this could just be statistical noise, as there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme nor reason as to why a team has a tendency to score a certain amount of runs in a given inning per the random fluctuations in the above line graph, and it seems likely that the run-scoring distribution for the Yankees could very well even out as the season progresses — after all, we’re only one-third of the way through.
That being said, through the first 54 games of the 2011 season, the numbers do in fact show that the Bombers have not been as potent offensively in the later innings as Yankee fans have grown accustomed to, compared with both the American League as well as Yankee teams of recent vintage.
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Look at the Blue Jays. 40 in the 1st, 10 in the 2nd, and then 30 and 42 in the 3rd and 4th. That’s the Jose Bautista effect. He always bats in the 1st inning and almost never does in the 2nd. It is either the 3rd or 4th by the time he comes back up. It’s amazing how good he is and how much the rest of that lineup sucks.
Ultimately, I’m not really concerned about which innings the Yankees are scoring runs in. Runs scored in the 9th inning count the same as runs scored in the 1st inning, so as long as the Yankees are scoring a lot of runs, their below-average production in the later innings is not a huge concern. That said, if there is a matter of approach/focus associated with the dropoff, then that might be cause for concern.
Great analysis though Larry, I love the graphs.
[...] How the 2011 Yankees stack up against the American League in Team Scoring by Inning: From The Yankee Analysts, a look at the pinstripers (and other AL teams) in terms of runs scored in each inning. [...]
My first reaction is to think that there’s something in the lineup positioning that’s making a difference. Bill James once said that more runs are scored in the first innings of baseball games, because that’s how the lineups are organized, but that because of that, the fewest runs are scored in the second inning, after which it’s about the same from the 3rd to the 9th–the Jose Bautista effect, as PaulF put it, isn’t really dependent on Jose Bautista.
But if the Yankees are not scoring in the 7th, 8th, and 9th, that’s a whole turn through the lineup, so placement doesn’t seem to be the issue.
I wonder if there are particular players who are significantly worse this year in the late innings on the Yankees, but I can’t find stats by innings for individual players. I think Jeter is one of guys who doesn’t hit late, because on TV they’re always talking about how high his batting average is leading off games–which must mean it’s very low late in games.
Eric:
I know that how you clump your runs does affect how many games you can win. If team A averages 4.5 runs per game, but never scores more than one run in any inning and team B scores 4.5 runs per game but scores exactly 3 runs in any inning it scores in, and they play each other, team A will win significantly more games. Is it possible that not being able to score runs in the late innings is “clumping” the Yankees runs more than usual and actually affecting the W-Ls? (The clumping may be an effect more than a cause, but the point is the same.)
Do you have any proof? I’m not saying you don’t, but just saying team B will win more doesn’t make it true. Just because you score 3 runs in one game in one inning, and I do the same in 3 doesn’t make you any better.
Yes, Bill James did a study of the numbers. Scoring your runs one at a time is a significant advantage. If I remember, I’ll get the book and post the numbers here.
Of course, that is if both teams score the same number of runs. Teams that score runs in bunches tend to score more runs. But if they don’t, if it’s the same number of runs, the other team has the advantage.
From The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers:
First, runs scored one at a time are obviously somewhat more valuable than runs scored in big innings. How much more valuable? Perhaps as much as 50% more.
Suppose that you take two teams, one of which scores runs only one at a time, and the other of which scores runs only in groups of three. Earl Weaver’s ultimate team: nothing but three-run homers. One team scores in 50% of all innings, one run per inning: that’s 4.50 runs per game. The other team scores in only one-sixth of innings, but scores three runs at a time: that also is 4.50 runs per game.
When these two teams play against one another, who will win? The team which has the big innings will win some games 15-2, but will be shut out in 19% of its games. The team which scores one run at a time can’t score more than nine in a game, but will be shut out only once in 500 games. Because of this, the team which scores runs one at a time will win 55% of games–actually, 55.2816% of the games.
This is a significant advantage. In 162 games, the one-run team would win 90. The big inning team, scoring exactly as many runs, would win 72 games.
[...] the original post here: How the 2011 Yankees stack up against the American League in Team … AKPC_IDS += "19984,"; AKPC_IDS += [...]
[...] in case you missed it earlier today, I broke the Yankees’ run-scoring down by inning and compared it to both the rest of the AL and Yankee teams from the previous five [...]
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[...] is my least favorite chart. I’ve been griping about the team’s seeming inability to score in the late innings, and this just hammers it home. After peaking at a 112 tOPS+ in Innings 7-9 in 209, the team fell [...]
[...] I first did this study on June 3, the season was only one-third over, and I drew the following conclusions: “The 2011 Yankees [...]