Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Alex Ovechkin vs. the former Southeast Division

Alex Ovechkin scored a very impressive four goals against the Tampa Bay Lightning last night. They've been one of his favourite opponents over the years; he's scored 70 points against them in 52 career games, his second-highest total against an opposing franchise.

Now, there's no doubt that Ovechkin is a special player, and one of the best of his generation. But has he had an easier time of it because of the fact that he's spent most of his career to date in the brutally awful Southeast Division, which existed up until 2012-13?

Let's consider Ovechkin's numbers against those teams:


Opponent
GP
G
A
Pts
Pts/gp
Tampa Bay
52
35
35
70
1.35
Florida
47
30
31
61
1.30
Atlanta/Winnipeg
54
40
41
81
1.50
Carolina
54
25
42
67
1.24
TOTALS
207
130
149
279
1.35

To put it mildly, that's a massive beating. If you imagine Ovechkin played only SE division opponents, his average 82-game season would be 51 goals and 59 assists, for 110 points.

 Now, consider this:

Opponent
GP
G
A
Pts
Pts/gp
Eastern Conference
516
324
315
639
1.24
Non-SE Eastern Teams
309
196
166
362
1.17
Western Conference
114
73
58
131
1.15

Ovechkin's performance against the rest of the league drops off significantly. Against the Eastern Conference as a whole, his numbers still look amazing, but if you cut out the SE division, it drops quite a bit. Against the rest of the East, he's a 96-point player; against the West, he's a 94 point player.

That's not to say that playing in the Southeast division has been worth 14 or 16 extra points a season for Ovi; obviously, he doesn't actually have the luxury of playing all 82 games in-division. In the six-division era, teams played about a third of their games against divisional opponents; that's about 27 games. They'd play about 20 games against each of the other two divisions in their conference.

So, in actual fact, Ovi was only playing about 7 extra games against SE opponents than other Eastern teams. If playing the SE division only is worth 15 extra points over 82 games, that means 7 extra games in-division has been worth about 1.3 extra points per season for Ovi versus, say, Sidney Crosby. Versus a Western Conference player, it's more significant - as much as 4 points.

While we like to say that players in the Southeast had a big lift from regular access to punching bags like the Florida Panthers, it's easy to forget that they all had to play plenty of non-divisional games, and that everyone else gets to play the SE division too.

The big difference, really, has been between the two conferences; for most of the six-division era, teams only played each team in the opposite conference once a year, so Western teams got barely any chance to feast on the weak SE divison. So don't pile on Ovechkin for getting easy pickings down South; in fact, it's been the entire Eastern Conference that enjoyed that advantage.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

JP Arencibia: Blue Jays, foolishly, cut a face of the franchise

It's been a quiet off-season for the Blue Jays thus far. The biggest news to this point is yesterday's announcement that Dioner Navarro will be coming in to replace JP Arencibia as the Jays' starting catcher.

The move is perhaps not a surprise. Arencibia's batting regressed last year, striking out 148 times in 497 at-bats, putting up an ugly .194/.227/.365 line. He was only able to pull himself up to a replacement-level 0.1 WAR thanks to good defensive numbers. He's about to turn 28, and we can no longer assume that he'll sort it out and get better. In fact, the league may have sorted him out. He's now likely to land somewhere as a backup catcher and occasional pinch-hitter.

Navarro, his replacement, isn't really an improvement, however. Navarro had a nice 2013, hitting .300 with 13 homers over 240 at-bats, but that's a serious outlier compared to his career line (.251/.313/.371). His defensive numbers don't help him. For the most part, he's the same slightly-better-than-replacement catcher that Arencibia is. He's 29, so, like Arencibia, we know who he is by now. There's not likely any more upside here.

So what's the point? If you're going to re-arrange deck chairs, why not stick with the devil you know?

I make this point because while JP is an underwhelming asset on the field, he rates very well as a clubhouse guy, and most importantly, as a fan favourite. In particular, he's a huge hit with female fans, because he's undeniably one of the prettiest faces in MLB:


Dioner Navarro isn't a bad-looking guy, but he's not going to draw a crowd in the same way. The Blue Jays saw a big upswing in attendance last year, and a lot of that was driven by young fans up in the 500 level - and of those, a large portion were female.

Female fans are smart, and they know baseball. They want the team to win, and they know that JP's strikeouts hurt the team. But they also like to be entertained, and JP does that. When he does add offensive value, it's through home runs - and all fans love those. Dioner Navarro will put together a few more singles and some walks, but he's not going to create excitement. I daresay he's not going to sell a lot of jerseys, either.

JP puts butts in the seats. He was part of the youthful energy that made the Jays a big draw in 2013, and he became a face of the franchise. For female fans who bought "ARENCIBIA 9" t-shirts, he was a key part of forming that bond between fan and team that keeps people coming back. Any way you slice it, he may not have added much on the field but he did earn a profit for the franchise. The money that you earn on Arencibia can then be spent elsewhere on the roster, upgrading the starting rotation or the second base position. If the best you can do is a sideways step to a similarly mediocre catcher, why not stick with the guy that fans love?