
Baseball Articles \| 2001 Team Reviews

2001 Team Reviews -- Overview

Last updated: February 19, 2002

Each year since 1998, we have posted a series of 30 articles, one for each team, that took a close look at the performance of each team and its key players in that season.

Our purpose is to shed light on what happened in that season so that we might gain a better understanding of what's likely to happen in the future. If a team was down last year, was it because they suffered more than their share of injuries? If they were up, did they get an unusually large number of career years from their players? If so, is it reasonable to expect this to happen again next year? Did the team add or subtract talent in their personnel moves during the year? Or were they just lucky or unlucky?

NOTE: For the 2001 season, we have decided not to do a full set of team and player comments, as we've done in the past. Instead, we've chosen to spend that time getting a head start on some important projects for the Diamond Mind Baseball game.

But rather than do nothing at all, we thought it would be worth posting the projected and actual statistics for each team without the commentary. This will enable you to identify the players whose ups or downs or absences were most responsible for the changing fortunes of their teams last year.

At this time, our plan is to resume writing full team reviews next year.

You can follow these links to see the details for each team:

Anaheim	Arizona	Atlanta
Baltimore	Boston	Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox	Cincinnati	Cleveland
Colorado	Detroit	Florida
Houston	Kansas City	Los Angeles
Milwaukee	Minnesota	Montreal
New York Mets	New York Yankees	Oakland
Philadelphia	Pittsburgh	St. Louis
San Diego	San Francisco	Seattle
Tampa Bay	Texas	Toronto

Setting expectations

We believe this type of analysis is most revealing if the actual results are compared to an objective set of pre-season expectations. The key word here is "objective". Different people have different expectations about what will happen in the coming season. So whose expectations should we use as our baseline?

Certainly not those of general managers and other club officials, because they're renowned for their springtime optimism. How many times have you heard the GM of a last place club talk about being 2-3 players away from contending next year? The reality is that you could add Koufax, Ruth and Bench to some of these teams and they'd still only finish in the middle of the pack. In fairness, we can't blame the GMs for their optimism. After all, part of their job is to create a positive feeling about the team. But that doesn't mean we have to use their public statements as a fair indication of what was most likely to happen.

So, rather than rely on pre-season opinions, we're using the results of the computer simulations that we ran before the season started. Why these?

Because:

- our projections included expected runs scored and allowed by each team, along with their projected totals win-loss record and place in the standings, giving us more material to work with than if we relied on other published predictions

- we projected a full set of statistics for over 1500 players, and many other sources don't include as many players or as many stats

- our projection methodology takes a lot of factors into account, and does so quite rigorously. To summarize briefly, we start with three years of data from both the major and minor league level, then adjust the player stats for park effects (including minor league parks), league (DH vs non-DH), competitive level (MLB vs AAA vs AA), age, and expected 1999 role.

- our simulations used manager profiles for each team that included starting rotations, relief roles, starting lineups against LHP and RHP, platoons, and utility roles, making sure to limit the playing time for guys who were known to be starting the season on the DL.

- defense matters in our simulation software, and because all of our players have ratings for range and error rates (along with ratings for many other skills), clubs that improved their defenses will help their pitchers and won-loss records accordingly

- our projections are a matter of public record. We published our projected team standings and win-loss records in an article before the season started, and we published our player projections in the form of a Projection Disk for our Diamond Mind Baseball computer game, so nobody can claim we're engaging in revisionist history.

We simply want to be able to say that a certain player did better than expected, about as well as expected, or worse than expected, and have that statement mean something. Without a set of projections that are unbiased and reasonably based in fact, such comparisons would be meaningless.

Every baseball season produces its share of team and player performances that nobody could anticipate, and 2001 was no different. Some players raised their game to a new level, and time will tell whether this was a one-time event -- like Brady Anderson's 50 homeruns in 1996 -- or an indication of things to come. Others had their games fall off a cliff, and they may or may not get another chance to prove that they can still play in the big leagues.

For more information on our projection system, the projections for 2001, and how to interpret the information in the team reviews, check out the following pages:

Diamond Mind projection system
Projecting the 2001 Season (March 22, 2001)
Key terms and statistics
Effect of the new strike zone