Are the Indians "Built for October"?

When trying to gauge the relative strengths of teams in October, people tend to use run differential. The Red Sox were +210, the Indians +107, thus the Red Sox must be significantly better.

The runs scored portion of this makes sense to me. Boston averaged 5.35 R/G, Cleveland 5.01. Those numbers are probably pretty representative of the strength of their offenses.

In terms of pitching, however, run differential doesn't strike as a very effective way to judge teams in October. First of all, a lot of these guys aren't even on the playoff rosters. Does it really matter that Jeremy Sowers allowed 49 runs in 67.1 innings? Should we really care that Roberto Hernandez had a 6.23 ERA in 26 innings? As incredible as Clay Buchholz was in limited work (22.7IP, 4ER, 22K), that really isn't going to help the Red Sox against the Indians.

I think we also need to take into account the extra off days. During the regular season, C.C. Sabathia made 34 starts, which is 21% of the Indians' games. Regardless of the length of this series, his share of October starts will be higher. If the series is a sweep, he will have pitched in 25% of the games. If it's not, he will pitch game five, which means he'll pitch in at least 28.5% (2/7) of Cleveland's games.

I have always thought that the Indians are "built for October", with the strength at the top of their rotation, and their three excellent relievers (plus Borowski). So I decided to try to figure otu if there was any truth to that.

Here's what I did. For the bullpens, I took the FIPs of each pitcher. I then tried to figure out about what percentage of their team's relief innings each pitcher will throw. Here are the results of that little exercise:

These %s are obviously quite unscientific, but I think they're pretty decent approximations. Using these, we can reach a weighted ERA for each bullpen. Cleveland's comes to 3.11, Boston's to 3.27. This doesn't take fielding into account at all (thus the "Fielding Independent" portion of FIP), so I added each teams unearned runs per nine innings; 0.24 for Boston, 0.28 for CLE. So, the expected bullpen RA is 3.35 for Cleveland, and 3.55 for the Red Sox.

For the starters, I just used their individual RAs. I also took into account each guy's average innings per start. For example, Sabathia has an RA fo 3.51, and averages 7.1 IP/GS. That leaves 1.9 innings to the bullpen. So I combined Sabathia's 3.51 RA, and the Indians' bullpen RA of 3.35 (obviously weighting Sabathia's much more heavily), to come to 3.46 as the Indians' expected RA in a game Sabathia starts. Here are the numbers for each of the eight starters:

Okay, now we just have to account for the number of starts each pitcher will get. For this, I turned to the Vegas lines (of course I did). BetUS.com thinks there's a 15% chance of a sweep, 25% chance it ends in 5, 30% in 6, and 30% it goes 7.

Accordingly, the G1 starters will make an average of 1.85 starts, G2 starters 1.60, G3 starters 1.30, and G4 starters 1.oo (obviously). With this information, we can weight each SP's "TM RA" appropriately, and take into account that Sabathia and Beckett will inevitably be bigger factors in this series than Byrd and Wakefield.

Finally, we have how many runs we should expect each team to allow per game. Combining this with their R/G, here are the results:

These results are very different from what we get when we simply use RS & RA from the entire season. Doing that, we get an EXP W% of .623 for BOS, and .562 for CLE.

The Red Sox are still the better team, and they have home-field, but it's probably closer than most people think. Here are the W%s for each team in each game, taking the location of the game into account.

The Red Sox are favored in G1 (-155 at Bodog), and that makes sense. It will be interesting to see what the line is for G2; I would guess Boston will be slightly favored, and that may be legit if you want to talke Schilling's postseason dominance into account.

I think Boston will probably be favored in G3, as Matsuzaka inspires more confidence than Westbrook. I'm not so sure about G4 though- this analysis doesn't know that Wakefield is struggling through injuries.

Finally, if the Indians are going to advance, it looks like they're going to have to do it in G6, as things aren't looking too good for them if this thing goes the distance.

Photo: Cleveland.com.