Gleeman & The Geek, Episode 208: Free Fallin'

I don't understand why Aaron is hammering away at the "worst AL team in the past 2 1/2 months" point when their -10 record came almost entirely in the past two weeks. It's a bad argument that intentionally obscures what has happened to this team since the All-Star Break.

On June 1st, they were 30-19.

On July 17th (ASB), they were 50-40.

Today, they are 55-56.

It's not hard to see where everything went to pieces and it wasn't June 1st.

But as John said, they went into the break on a high note. From June 1 to July 12, they essentially played .500 ball. That's six weeks of .500 baseball after their ridiculous month of May.

They fell to pieces after the break and lost their entire +10 record in that three week span.

Well, my point is that the June 1 date turns out to be misleading as it immediately precedes a stretch in which they went 2-9. If you go two weeks out or one week out from it either way, it's a different story. If you go one month from it either way, it's a different story too.  

Note that I'm not saying that Aaron used it to be misleading - the 1st is a normal number to use - it just ends up being that way. But if you choose other random numbers by which to do a month-long comparison, things look differently. For instance, if you choose the 15th (another normal number to use), the months look like this since may 15th: 15-12, 15-12, and 6-16. Or say we use the 9th, since that was yesterday and we count back a month at time. Then the months look like this: 16-11, 13-15, 9-16.

I'm sure, alternately, that we could find a date that even looks worse than the first. Probably the 3rd, since that's when that June swoon started. 

I guess I'd say that right now, this is a .500 team, and as such, they've had some ups and downs, specifically one big up (May), one medium up (1st half of July), one big down (post All-Star break) and one medium down (beginning of June).

As Aaron points out, the last 2.5 months, there have been more downs than ups. But the implication is that we might want to write off May as the only complete aberration, and I think that is a mistake. Either they're all aberrations or they're all not. Teams get hot/cold. Things go right/wrong.

(It's just hard to be objective when things are going very, very wrong.)

It is also hard to be objective when things are like May......there was an awful lot of chest puffing in late May, early June on this site.....

And an awful lot of hand-wringing lately. That should be par for the course, right? We come here because we are fans, right?.