Tourtellotte: Worst of the best: Holes on World Series teams
From SABR member Shane Tourtellotte at The Hardball Times on September 8, 2015:
The end of the season is rapidly approaching. We’ll soon be down to 10 teams playing baseball, and a few weeks after that it’ll be the final two in the World Series. They will represent the best that baseball has to offer—theoretically.
In practice, they probably won’t be across-the-board powerhouses. Each team will have its weak spots, and perhaps worse. They may have a position on the diamond so weak, you might wonder why it doesn’t drag the entire team down.
Plenty of teams have these holes, and for many it does drag them down, finishing out of the playoffs or at least getting bounced before they can snag the pennant. More interesting, though, are the teams that succeed despite these holes. So today, I’m looking at the worst patches on the teams that have played for all the marbles.
I have done something a little like this before. In a pair of articles last year, I looked both at players with the most sub-sub-replacement seasons, and players who did the worst with various levels of playoff achievers. This is different in that it includes all players who took a specific position that year. One player’s disaster can be redeemed by a fill-in who did well in limited duty or exacerbated by subs who did as badly or worse.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-worst-of-the-best-holes-on-world-series-teams/
Originally published: September 9, 2015. Last Updated: September 9, 2015.