The 2015 Durham Bulls in Charts

The 2015 Durham Bulls ended the year at 74-70, tied for third place in the International League South Division, four games behind the division winner, the Norfolk Tides. As the first chart shows, the Bulls peaked at 12 games above .500 back on June 15 (game 66) when they began a slide down to 7 games below .500 in mid-August. Then began a fun-to-watch climb that lasted until the end of the season.

[Note: clicking on a chart will get you a larger image]

This was a season with considerable roster turmoil, mostly driven by injuries in the Tampa Bay Rays system that started in spring training  and continued throughout the season. Thirty-one different players came to bat for the Bulls this year and 36 different players pitched (including a couple of position players). That compares to 21 hitters and 26 pitchers in 2014; 19 and 16 in 2013.

What happened to the Bulls in mid-season? In a word, pitching. The starting pitching this year was never very good and, as a team, did not really improve. The relievers had a terrific start and showed some hope at finish, but the middle was awful. Note that these are cumulative numbers. They really should not be showing so much variance except for the above-noted roster turmoil. The end-of-year team ERA was 3.82, 11th in the 14-team International League. They did lead the league in strikeouts (1,117), but also led the league in home runs awarded (116).

Durham Bulls hitting fell off the edge of the cliff at about the same time as the pitching. However, it recovered very nicely and, excepting a hiccup in August, ended well. [Note for stats geeks: Our interest is in team performance here and team wOBA is a pain to keep track of. Plus it follows essentially the same path this year, as far as I can tell.] The Bulls’ team OPS was tied for third place in the International League and at .715, well above the league OPS of .689. Note also that the league as a whole wasn’t hitting all that well this year. The Bulls’ 123 home runs were in second place, as were its 263 doubles. That really helped the OPS, since the team batting average (.250) was 12th in the league. My superficial impression that the Bulls were a running team was off by a good bit. With 160 attempts (119 successful) they were well behind Indianapolis who tried 236 times (168 successful).

At the end of the day, a team has to score more runs than their opponents. In 2015 the Bulls did not. This chart is a running total of the net runs scored minus runs allowed for this year. We get the statistical quirk of ending the year at exactly zero.

The Bulls have done worse, most notably in recent years in 2012. The oddity in this chart is last year, 2014. Last year the Bulls were also barely above .500 (75-69) but that was enough to win the South Division. The South Division of the IL was much more competitive this year, we got to watch four very good teams go at it all year.

Next: Pitchers and Hitters