Making a Hybrid Team

I think it’s safe to say that the Yankees have the best offense around. I also think it’s safe to say that the San Francisco Giants have the best pitching around. The Giants’ defense is also pretty good, ranking third in the majors in UZR/150 with 4.8 and they’re first in the Majors in Defensive Efficiency. So, the Yankees seem to be the best in run production in baseball, the Giants seem to be the best at run prevention.

Why am I writing this? Well, the other day I was reminded at just how bad the Giants are on offense. As of right now, they have scored 556 runs which is 27th in the Majors. They’ve played 140 games, so that’s 3.9714 runs per game. Ouch. The Yankees, on the other hand, have scored 809 runs in 141 games, best in the majors, and good enough for 5.7376 runs per game. So I wondered to myself, what would the Giants be like with the Yankees’ offense or what would the Yankees be like with the Giants’ pitching?

In this post, I’m going to (very feebly) attempt to see what that team would be like, using the Pythagorean method, using the Yankees’ runs scored and the Giants’ runs allowed. Obviously, this is going to be incredibly, incredibly flawed. Why? Well there’s a bunch of reasons: 1) these numbers are not park and league adjusted 2) the schedules the teams play and the teams they face are wildly different, so we can’t assume these numbers would stay the same 3) this is obviously purely fantastical. Regardless of that, let’s have some fun.

So, the Yankees have scored 809 runs and the Giants have allowed 519 runs. With a run differential pushing 300 (290, to be exact), we should expect this team to win a hell of a lot of games.

If we run those numbers through the formula listed above, we get an answer of .7084. That would be this theoretical team’s winning percentage. Multiply that by 162 to get the games they would win and we come up with 114.7663. Since you can’t win .7663 of a game, I’m going to round up. So, we could expect this team to win 115 games, which, despite being downright incredible, is still short of the 2001 Mariners’ record of 116 wins. The ‘01 M’s, for the record, had run differential of exactly 300 (927 RS, 627 RA).

That team, however, played a little bit above its Pythagorean Record (109-53) so maybe this hypothetical team, the New Francisco YankeeGiants, could play above its expectations. Regardless, a team that somehow managed to get that incredible hitting with that incredible pitching would be a force to be reckoned with–though I doubt many would want to reckon with it.