It’s March now, which means it’s not February anymore. It also means baseball opening day is less than a month away and many fans are doing their annual overreaction to spring training stats. They see their team losing to the Astros, or their favorite player struggling through the Grapefruit League, and they tend to sound the alarm way too soon. Some fans may, GASP!, draft their fantasy baseball team according to some of these performances. So calm down fans, the numbers players and teams put up in spring training do not necessarily indicate that level of performance will transfer to the meaningful games of the regular season.
Eric Hosmer’s regular season performance last year is a perfect example of a player not meeting very high expectations after a very good performance in spring training. After a promising rookie campaign in the 2011 regular season, Hosmer followed that up with blazing through the Cactus League in 2012. Hosmer hit 5 home runs and 29 RBI in 83 at bats. He had a slash line of .398/.453/.675. He looked poised to continue that tear into the regular season.
Not so much.
His 2012 slash line in the regular season was .232/.304/..359. He put up a -0.7 WAR according to Baseball Reference, meaning his performance over the entire season was detrimental to the Royals. His numbers were so bad last year, multiple 2013 projections have Hosmer not even meeting his 2011 rookie performance. ZiPS has him at .273/.339/.435, while Fangraphs is a little more optimistic with .280/.352/.467. For whatever it’s worth, Hosmer is again tearing it up in spring. Through 8 games, he’s at .400/.478/.750.
Basically, don’t put too much stock in spring training performance for players, but what about teams? What are the teams that continually overachieve or underperform in spring training?
Below are the standings in spring training and regular season from 2012. You can see the division winning Nationals actually had a poor spring training as far as win-loss records go. Oakland followed up their strong spring by winning the AL West.
| Spring Training AL | W | L | PCT | Regular Season AL | W | L | PCT | |
| Toronto | 24 | 7 | 0.774 | z-NY Yankees | 95 | 67 | 0.586 | |
| Detroit | 20 | 8 | 0.714 | y-Oakland | 94 | 68 | 0.58 | |
| Oakland | 15 | 7 | 0.682 | w-Baltimore | 93 | 69 | 0.574 | |
| Seattle | 16 | 9 | 0.64 | w-Texas | 93 | 69 | 0.574 | |
| LA Angels | 19 | 12 | 0.613 | Tampa Bay | 90 | 72 | 0.556 | |
| NY Yankees | 18 | 12 | 0.6 | LA Angels | 89 | 73 | 0.549 | |
| Boston | 16 | 11 | 0.593 | y-Detroit | 88 | 74 | 0.543 | |
| Minnesota | 18 | 15 | 0.545 | Chi White Sox | 85 | 77 | 0.525 | |
| Kansas City | 16 | 16 | 0.5 | Seattle | 75 | 87 | 0.463 | |
| Baltimore | 11 | 13 | 0.458 | Toronto | 73 | 89 | 0.451 | |
| Chi White Sox | 14 | 18 | 0.438 | Kansas City | 72 | 90 | 0.444 | |
| Texas | 12 | 17 | 0.414 | Boston | 69 | 93 | 0.426 | |
| Tampa Bay | 10 | 16 | 0.385 | Cleveland | 68 | 94 | 0.42 | |
| Cleveland | 7 | 22 | 0.241 | Minnesota | 66 | 96 | 0.407 | |
| Spring Training NL | W | L | PCT | Regular Season NL | W | L | PCT | |
| St. Louis | 16 | 9 | 0.64 | z-Washington | 98 | 64 | 0.605 | |
| San Diego | 20 | 16 | 0.556 | y-Cincinnati | 97 | 65 | 0.599 | |
| San Francisco | 18 | 15 | 0.545 | w-Atlanta | 94 | 68 | 0.58 | |
| Colorado | 17 | 15 | 0.531 | y-San Francisco | 94 | 68 | 0.58 | |
| Chi Cubs | 17 | 16 | 0.515 | w-St. Louis | 88 | 74 | 0.543 | |
| LA Dodgers | 15 | 15 | 0.5 | LA Dodgers | 86 | 76 | 0.531 | |
| Cincinnati | 15 | 17 | 0.469 | Milwaukee | 83 | 79 | 0.512 | |
| Milwaukee | 15 | 17 | 0.469 | Philadelphia | 81 | 81 | 0.5 | |
| Philadelphia | 14 | 16 | 0.467 | Arizona | 81 | 81 | 0.5 | |
| Arizona | 15 | 18 | 0.455 | Pittsburgh | 79 | 83 | 0.488 | |
| Houston | 14 | 17 | 0.452 | San Diego | 76 | 86 | 0.469 | |
| Miami | 11 | 14 | 0.44 | NY Mets | 74 | 88 | 0.457 | |
| Washington | 12 | 17 | 0.414 | Miami | 69 | 93 | 0.426 | |
| Atlanta | 10 | 18 | 0.357 | Colorado | 64 | 98 | 0.395 | |
| NY Mets | 9 | 20 | 0.31 | Chi Cubs | 61 | 101 | 0.377 | |
| Pittsburgh | 9 | 20 | 0.31 | Houston | 55 | 107 | 0.34 |
The point of this is to not take too much stock in how well or how poorly a team plays in spring training. This is obvious when you take into account the fact that teams plays split squad games regularly and the best players generally only play a few innings each game before letting minor league caliber players take over. Many times players are only trying to compete with one specific goal at the time, such as a pitcher only throwing fastballs to work on command. Results are secondary in these situations.
But over time, are there teams that generally perform better or worse than their normal regular season performance? What teams play well in spring, but don’t live up to that performance when the standings actually matter in the regular season?
Below are the average spring training and regular season winning percentage for all major league teams since 2006. We’ve sorted teams by the difference in winning percentage from spring to regular season.
| Spring Training win % | Regular Season win % | difference | |
| Kansas City | 0.5416 | 0.4241 | -0.1174 |
| Colorado | 0.5553 | 0.4863 | -0.0689 |
| Detroit | 0.5871 | 0.5347 | -0.0524 |
| LA Angels | 0.6107 | 0.5599 | -0.0509 |
| Chi Cubs | 0.5226 | 0.4754 | -0.0471 |
| Minnesota | 0.5490 | 0.5044 | -0.0446 |
| St. Louis | 0.5713 | 0.5314 | -0.0399 |
| Milwaukee | 0.5491 | 0.5150 | -0.0341 |
| Miami | 0.5103 | 0.4774 | -0.0329 |
| Oakland | 0.5276 | 0.5013 | -0.0263 |
| Cleveland | 0.4981 | 0.4736 | -0.0246 |
| San Diego | 0.5103 | 0.4863 | -0.024 |
| Seattle | 0.4737 | 0.4543 | -0.0194 |
| Cincinnati | 0.5197 | 0.5036 | -0.0161 |
| Baltimore | 0.4441 | 0.4403 | -0.0039 |
| Toronto | 0.5043 | 0.5027 | -0.0016 |
| San Francisco | 0.5076 | 0.5109 | 0.0033 |
| Tampa Bay | 0.5121 | 0.5161 | 0.004 |
| Atlanta | 0.5179 | 0.5247 | 0.0069 |
| Houston | 0.4303 | 0.4433 | 0.013 |
| Pittsburgh | 0.3959 | 0.4167 | 0.0209 |
| NY Mets | 0.4850 | 0.5061 | 0.0211 |
| Texas | 0.4909 | 0.5293 | 0.0384 |
| Arizona | 0.4514 | 0.4920 | 0.0406 |
| Washington | 0.4010 | 0.4496 | 0.0486 |
| NY Yankees | 0.5393 | 0.5907 | 0.0514 |
| Boston | 0.4857 | 0.5467 | 0.061 |
| Philadelphia | 0.4916 | 0.5636 | 0.072 |
| LA Dodgers | 0.4469 | 0.5269 | 0.08 |
| Chi White Sox | 0.3844 | 0.5129 | 0.1284 |
The Royals are the winners when it comes to getting their fan’s hopes up in spring training before crashing them down the earth in the regular season. As a matter of fact, they seem to be up to it again with a 9-0 record in spring training so far. Over the past 7 seasons, they have had the 7th highest winning percentage in spring training and the second lowest regular season winning percentage in baseball.
Fellow AL Central rival White Sox are on the opposite end of the spectrum, although they disappoint fans by not being quite good enough to make it to the playoffs. During this timeframe, they increase their winning percentage from spring to regular season by almost 13 percentage points on average.
Other than an organizational approach to spring training or just fluke numbers from a relatively small sample size, one further explanation I can see for the continual discrepancy in wining percentage from spring to regular season could be minor league rankings. For the outliers we’ve mentioned previously, Baseball American has the Royals minor league system regularly near the top on the rankings; topping out in 2011 in what at the time experts were saying was one of the greatest farm system’s ever. During that same time, the White Sox have had a very poor minor league system, according to Baseball America, who ranked them last place in 2012. You can peruse the rankings here for yourself.
Moral of the story, get on your MLB.TV account and listen/watch spring training games to get your fix, but don’t get too excited when Luis Mendoza is leading all of spring training in ERA.
bring on the stats 