Defeating League Excellence by Being a Team Player

This whole week I have been struck by how well EFL teams are doing, especially on offense. It seems like every day teams are scoring a lot of runs. Sometimes I feel a certain way but when I do a little research it isn’t backed up by the data. But this week, in the midst of these feelings, I ran across this MLB stat:

“The whole league is hitting .284/.355/.503 this week.”

That is an excellent slash line for an entire league – all 30 MLB teams combined. I wondered how that stat translated into our EFL world, so I did a tiny bit of math this morning (not sure how people do a lot of math in a morning, or even an entire day of math, but apparently some people do):

If my calculations are correct (which is certainly not a certainty) we are on pace for over 1,800 runs this month in the EFL. To make things even clearer, here is how it is impacting our winning percentage:

If you look at the current season standings page, you’ll see that a .591 winning percentage would put your team in 4th place overall, .001 percentage points behind the third place team, Old Detroit.

That is quite alarming. Offense is good for the game, or so we have been told. It has apparently been taken off the internet, but when I was a kid there was a Nike ad that featured Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, watching Mark McGwire launch balls into the upper deck as Heather Locklear looked on, in awe. Maddux and Glavine were trying to get her attention, but she was unfazed by them. Maddux then turns to Glavine, shrugs his shoulders, and says, “Chicks dig the long balls” (please ignore the obvious misogyny).

But this kind of offensive output is not good for the game, nor for our league. Ron has already warned us what happens when his team does well (is this causation or correlation? We might never know), but I for one, don’t fancy an expansion team coming in stealing my favorite players, which is what will happen if we continue to hit like we are hitting.

So let’s take a little break, shall we? Just as Ron suggested yesterday we should be supple enough to shift our approach. Perhaps you should encourage your batters to bunt a little more often, to strikeout even more than they are, and to ground into a few more double plays. Perhaps, like the Pirates, such an admonition will cause some strife among your team, but even that will help to make things a little less scary (even though the Pirates won yesterday, a day after reports appeared of their dysfunction, they only scored 3 runs, which usually results in a loss).