Rockies one run loss curse continues, Padres walk off in tenth.

I say aloud “Daley has had a nice little start to his career.”
mkorpal punches me
Daley walked EGon on four pitches
Giles doubles.

Here’s the original post, which got a bit long and buried the goodies at the end.
………..
I was wondering just what Hurdle’s overall record in one-run games has been.

I suspect the manager tends to get blamed/credited for performance in one-run games. The saber shorthand is that W/L records are random, because there is almost no correlation between year-year W/L records in such games. Recent research appears to be somewhere in between, though there is emphasis that there’s a lot of randomness in year-to-year W/L records.

At any rate, I figured it would be worth knowing what Hurdle’s record actually is.

After googling (I am not up on all the latest work…I’d guess this has come up on “the Book” blog), I found this Bill James article on one-run games; he builds on the work of Tom Ruane, who was behind the Diamond Mind baseball sim.

An interesting tidbit from James’s article is that w/l records in one-run games aren’t completely random; he apparently did some shape-fitting and found the pythag works if one uses an exponent of .865.

I applied this pythag to the Hurdle’s yearly records since 2002.

Including the 0-8 record so far this season, here are Hurdle’s overall records:

139.0 – 158.0 Rockies actual record in one-run games
137.3 – 159.7 one-run games pro-rated for overall win pct. (.4622)
145.2 -1 51.8 pythag record, using exponent of .865

So, Hurdle is 6.2 games below what one would expect, given James’s revised pythag, and that includes the 4 games their down in 2009 alone.

BTW, this is meant just to provide info on Hurdle’s record in one-run games. I was curious myself. It’s not meant to be an argument either way about Hurdle’s overall effectiveness, just another data point.

I’ll yell to knock on wood DURING a game, but nobody’s actually pointing at you two and saying “you….dirtbags….”