Durham Bulls Charts at the 30% (or so) Point

The last time the Durham Bulls hit the road (game 31) and we put together our charts, they were riding fairly high at 9 games above .500 and with a nice spread between themselves and the Gwinnett Braves. Sixteen games later they have slipped to 5 games above .500 and, after a remarkable run, the Gwinnett Braves are a ½ game ahead in the IL South.

All charts can be enlarged by clicking on them.

The runs scored - runs allowed chart is trending slightly upward. That could be an indicator of good things coming, but it's been almost flat for a while.

Pitching

I’ve got three newish ways to look at Bulls pitching. They are comparisons of the game-by-game Earned Run Averages (ERA), Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), and Walks plus Hits per Inning Pitched (WHIP) of the Bulls’s starters and relievers.

For the stats-minded among you let me concede up front that looking at any of these measures for just one game or even 15 games doesn’t tell you much. What needs to be noticed is the trend line, even if it’s just for the sample games, because we are looking at recent history.

And what do they say? Well, they pretty much say that by all three measures the starters have been doing OK, but the relief crew has not been doing well at all. FIP is heavily influenced by home runs and we’ve talked about that a lot. It shows. Still, these are not bad numbers. On the other hand, only winning six of those 15 games implies that they were not good enough.

Hitting

More than that, if you look at the hitting stats as displayed by a game-by-game plot of On-base Percentage plus Slugging (OPS), overall the Bulls trend is upwards even though the Bulls lost 9 of those 15 games. Which implies that the shortfall on the pitching side was even more important. Still, you would like the OPS to be up around .800 for a championship team and the trendline is mostly below that.

All of these data are heavily influenced by the last awful road trip, but the whole point of these charts is to take a look at how the Bulls have been doing lately.  And the answer is: not as well as they would like.