Baseball Team

It's been a while since i wrote anything about Clemson baseball. Watching the season unfold, though, I don't think you can complain about anything if you're a Clemson fan. I had the team pegged as being a little better than .500, maybe sneaking into the Tournament if a few things broke the right way. Over half way into the season, and its clear I was totally wrong; they will best the .500 mark and barring a total collapse down the stretch, should find themselves in a decent position to make a run in the Tournament. This is no fluke where the Tigers have won a bunch of close games and been blown out by the better teams, either. Clemson is hovering around the #15 mark in simulated RPI standings and Boyd's world has them at #20 in the iterative strength rankings. Not too shabby. To be clear, I don't think this team can necessarily make it to Omaha, but the season has to restore some faith in Leggett's recruiting and coaching abilities.

So how have they done it? I tried previewing/projecting the offense earlier in the season, and this is what I came up with for some of the important counting stats:

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Here's what the actual numbers look like so far:

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Big differences, but its hard to gauge the actual impact from just looking at the raw numbers (good patience at the plate by Clemson's middle infielders, though). If we convert these into wOBA (a measurement of total offensive worth, scaled to be similar to on-base percentage) and the wRAA (runs created above average), we get a better picture. Here are the numbers I was projecting:

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And here is how the players are actually performing to this point in the season:

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When I talked about Clemson's chances earlier, I mentioned that they would have to see either small improvements across the board or get a couple of players to step up with monster seasons. I didn't plan on both happening. Ben Paulsen is absolutely having a monster season, and Kyle Parker, while not quite as good as last year, is still putting up great numbers. But looking further down, we see great improvement from Jeff Schaus, Mike Freeman, and even Matt Sanders. On top of this, Brad Miller's rookie season at SS has been an improvement over what we could have realistically expected from Stan Widman. The only players not showing a lot of improvement (Addison Johnson, John Nester) are playing premium defensive positions, and its not like they are killing the team, either. The only real exception is probably Boyd, who hasn't really been performing at DH, probably explaining why he's been the odd man out when someone needs a rest in the field.

All in all, the upgrade on offense over last year has been worth somewhere around 100 runs. Using the old adage that 10 runs netted == 1 win in the victory column, that's a swing of about 10 wins. Add these 10 wins to my earlier guess that the team was a little better than .500 and you have a good estimate of where the team will end up, maybe 13-17 games above the .500 mark? Of course, all the usual caveats apply since this ignores defense and pitching contributions. But if guys stick around for another year or so and keep improving, even if not at the same rate as this year relative to last year, next year's offense is looking Omaha-worthy.