Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Hothouse Flowers?

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Hothouse Flowers?

So, the question for the week, since the rankings started up this week, is, "Are there February teams?" Are there teams that consistently do better in the early part of the season than they do overall? The good news is that this one's fairly easy to answer. For starters, here are a couple of lists -- the top 25 (in ISR, or course) over the last five years, for January and February and for the whole season:

     February                       Overall

  1  Stanford                       Stanford
  2  Long Beach State               Cal State Fullerton
  3  Cal State Fullerton            Texas
  4  Baylor                         Rice
  5  Arizona State                  Arizona State
  6  Texas                          Florida State
  7  Rice                           South Carolina
  8  Southern California            Louisiana State
  9  Florida State                  Long Beach State
 10  Nebraska                       Southern California
 11  South Carolina                 Nebraska
 12  Georgia Tech                   Georgia Tech
 13  Clemson                        Miami, Florida
 14  Alabama                        Baylor
 15  Houston                        Clemson
 16  Southern Mississippi           Houston
 17  Texas A&M                      Florida
 18  Louisiana State                Alabama
 19  Arizona                        Auburn
 20  Miami, Florida                 Texas Tech
 21  Wake Forest                    Washington
 22  North Carolina                 Mississippi State
 23  Oklahoma                       Tulane
 24  Fresno State                   Texas A&M
 25  California                     Georgia

There's nothing deep in that list, although Baylor in particular seems to have done better early on than their quite respectable performance through the rest of the year. Only teams which played at least 25 games in February over the 5 years are listed.

If you look at the whole list, the biggest changes are in the teams who don't meet that 25-game qualification, and that appears to just be a matter of sample-size randomness; when you only play a series a year, your results are a bit skewed. Of the qualifiers, here are the teams that have decreased the most and increased the most from February to the full year:

  -3.9 Utah
  -3.9 Richmond
  -3.1 Long Beach State
  -3.0 Southern Mississippi
  -3.0 Maryland-Eastern Shore
  -2.8 Loyola Marymount
  -2.7 Pacific
  -2.7 Baylor
  -2.5 Texas A&M-Corpus Christi
  -2.1 Kansas

   8.3 St. John's
   8.3 Lamar
   9.1 Virginia Commonwealth
   9.1 Southwest Missouri State
   9.1 Radford
   9.4 Memphis
  10.2 Western Carolina
  10.5 West Virginia
  12.9 Minnesota
  13.7 Wright State

The patterns here appear to be largely weather-based and do, to some extent, support the contention of the Northern teams that scheduling issues hurt them. Minnesota, for example, has been 10-23 and the #126 team in the country in February; they've 159-89 the rest of the year and finished at #59 overall.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

And we're off and running.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Hothouse Flowers?

About the author, Boyd Nation