The Mets lost tonight. It was pretty awful. Moving along…
On SNY, they mentioned the Phillies’ record when Jimmy Rollins scores a run. It was, of course, very good. They’ve mention this several times in terms of Jose Reyes, too. The idea is that these players are the sparks that ignite the team; when they score, the team wins, and when they don’t, the team struggles.
Part of that is true. When they score, their respective teams do win a lot of the time. The problem with the stat is that it’s not only true of them. In fact, whenever you look at a game where you already know at least 1 player in particular scored at least 1 run, there’s a good chance that their team won the game.
This season, the Mets are 11-6 when Reyes scores a run (this number is so low due to his injury, but it’s similar to his numbers over a larger sample in previous years). That’s good for a .647 winning percentage. Not bad! What about the Mets record when other players score a run, though? These numbers were hand-compiled (so slight errors may be present), and do not reflect tonight’s game:
- David Wright: 24-17 (.585)
- Carlos Beltran: 20-10 (.667)
- Luis Castillo: 20-10 (.667)
- Daniel Murphy: 14-11 (.560)
- Ryan Church: 12-9 (.571)
- Gary Sheffield: 17-11 (.607)
- Alex Cora: 8-6 (.571)
- Fernando Tatis: 9-5 (.643)
- Omir Santos: 12-3 (.800)
- Carlos Delgado: 10-3 (.769)
I bolded those last two because the Mets have by far the gaudiest records when they score runs — much better than any of the players you’d expect to be the “spark plugs” of the team.
What’s really going on here? Nothing, of course. The entire idea of teams doing better when a particular player scores is meritless — the differences you see above between players are mostly statistical noise, since the samples are too small to mean much. But the Mets have a good record when any of them score a run, because while it doesn’t matter if a specific player scores, it matters a great deal whether any players are scoring! Players like Jose Reyes do score more often, so they have more games in their win-loss records (assuming they’re healthy), but the team as a whole doesn’t care who is doing the scoring, as long as someone does. A run by Reyes is worth the same as one by Carlos Delgado or anyone else.
Despite this, you’ll continue to hear this statistic all year long, because most commentators do very little analysis of the data they’re given. Next time you hear this, remember that every player becomes a spark plug when they score a run, whether it’s Jose Reyes or Omir Santos.
