After 2007, I was saying the bullpen and the lopsided rotation caused our success relative to pythag and likely meant continued pythag-beating. I was wrong. As I am capable of noticing when I make an analysis mistake, I went into 2009 skeptical of my original point re: the bullpen. I think Sandy is right that bullpen "success" by WPA is mostly situational luck and not something that should be counted on to sustain into future seasons.
No...the reason I'm not worried about the pythag split in 2010 is because it was *NOT* caused by the bullpen...it was caused by a wildly inconsistent pitching staff
And the character of our pitching staff is unlikely to change going forward.
The ace at the top providing consistent success
The fungible core of MOR/BOR fodder constantly being swapped in and out by Z and W
The hard-throwing bullpen with a lot of inconsistent pieces
This type of roster construction (when paired with good tema defense) produces RA results like:
2
4
2
13
5
0
4
0
6
2
3
9
And that has the property of creating pythag ratios that mislead. And no, I don't think that's just luck that will even out. My point is...our pythag ratio this year was misleading for a reason that is persistent.
On top of that, I believe our offense isn't as bad as it currently appears
As i pointed out a couple of weeks back, we're now very YOUNG with the bats...not very old like we were in 2007
A lot more room for upside.