Devils

As a Yankee fan, I am obliged to hate the Angels almost as much as I do the Red Sox; hence the title. They are, nevertheless, a fascinating team for so thoroughly bucking recent trends in baseball analysis.

In one sense, the answer to how the Angels are so good is easy: they score a lot of runs, and don't get scored on very much (it is misleading to say that they are 12'th in baseball in ERA, since that includes National League teams without the DH; more relevant is the fact that they are 5'th in the AL in RA per game.) Their divergence from their expected record, while real, is too small to warrant coming up with a special explanation.

Thus, the relevant question is how they manage to score so many and allow so few runs. The few runs allowed part is easy: they have some
excellent defensive players, two ace pitchers, and a solid bullpen, including a great closer (Ok, I'll stop with the links.)

Their offense, however, is more interesting. They score a lot of runs, despite displaying little power or patience at the plate. However, as Jack mentioned the Angels are still a respectable 5'th in OBP, in large part because of their very high .286 team batting average. The Angels have an extremely aggressive approach at the plate, putting the ball in play more often than other teams; as such, their overall performance is more tightly tied to their overall batting average than most. Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus (they're going to come up a lot) had a useful insight into this approach: since batting average displays more year-to-year variance than secondary batting skills, one would expect the performance of the Angels offense to display such variance. The Angels take a high risk, high reward approach to hitting; some years, the
schtick works, other times it doesn't (Sorry, I lied about the links.) In other words, the Angels have just had a lot of their batted balls fall in for hits this year; next year, they may not.

I still haven't touched on the Angel's baserunning, which is the part of their game about which crusty old men who wish it were still the 60's most like to wax lyrical. How much of an effect does their running game have? As Jack points out, they only steal bases at a 73% success rate; given that the break-even stolen base rate in the current offensive environment is about 72%, it is unlikely they are adding many runs this way.

There is more to baserunning than stealing bases; more important are features that were sadly not recorded until recently, namely, advancing on outs and taking the extra base on hits. And the Angels are spectacularly good at that sort of baserunning, far better than any other team in baseball. In a series of articles last year on Baseball Prospectus, Dan Fox carried out an exhaustive study of baserunning. Fox estimated that the Angels added about 20 runs last year in non-stolen base baserunning (though they gave up about 8 runs by getting thrown out so often stealing); no other team was above 8. 20 runs is a lot, worth about 2 wins in the standings. Thus, assuming their baserunning this year is comparable to last year (which is a big assumption), we would expect them to have scored about 20 runs more than expected. This assumption is roughly borne out: using Bill James's simplest runs created formula (AB*OBP*SLG) the Angles should have scored 732 runs this year when in fact they have scored 761. I know, 29 is not the same as 20, but given the coarse nature of baseball statistics this seems pretty good to me.

Of course, having just said all that, the Angels were just shut out by the Orioles with Jon Leicester on the mound, so maybe they just suck.

By the way, I nominate this for dumbest thing ever. Unless the guy is a Sox fan.