Should we worry about April statistics?

[morineko]

Every April, baseball fans totally freak out about how their teams are doing, whether it's incredibly bad or incredibly good. Players are being judged by very small sample sizes and are being written off based on 10 or 15 games out of 162.

Outside of fantasy baseball, is this really something to worry about this soon?

Comments

[akatonbo]

Well, (we had this conversation, but not with anyone else who may be reading) look at CC Sabathia last year. After his first 3 or 4 starts I was sure that he was cooked. Done. Stick a fork in him. He wasn't as bad as Wang has been this season, but it was ugly. (I recall I posted something about his ERA and his weight, and how even with his obvious advantage the former was probably not going to get below the latter, especially since at the time it was in double digits.)

The rest of the year, not counting his first four starts, he had a 1.88 ERA (definitely less than his weight) and a... damnit, B-R, why do you never give me WHIP... 1.004 WHIP, and we both saw how absolutely unreal he was.

Bad teams and bad players will probably play poorly in April because they are bad... unless it happens that their random hot streak occurs in April, since it's no less likely to be in April than July. And good teams can have a run of bad luck or 3 or 4 simultaneous slumps or an imploding relief pitcher just as easily in April as September.

Mostly what I want to know here is which fluky WTF April first place or otherwise winning team will actually do well this year. There are so many!

[lunaris1013]

As I was reading my Cubs news this morning, I saw that Sweet Lou answered the question:

"Anybody's entitled to a slow start," Piniella said. "Let's not judge a player, whomever, because of a slow start. A lot of players get off to slow starts and they build (during) the year and end up with excellent years. I think it's too early to make judgments on anybody, truthfully."

That said (quoted?), OMG RANDY JOHNSON YOU'RE RUINING MY PITCHING STATS!

[morineko]

That's kind of odd, considering he booted Marmol out of the closer slot during spring training... ;)

[lunaris1013]

Don't even get me started on Marmol!

Though... I have learned that Lou works in mysterious ways - and he's almost always right.

Except perhaps during the playoffs.