The first semester of the 2016 regular season has come to an end, and report cards are heading home to each of baseball's 30 teams. Some managers and front office executives will try to get into work early to intercept the mail, while others will simply lean back and wait for a pat on the back from ownership.
While it's far too early to make declarative statements about the ultimate fate of most teams after only a month of action, it's enough of a sample size for us to look at areas that are strengths for each club and, conversely, areas that are in need of improvement.
A team's record certainly plays a part in our evaluation, but we'll look specifically at four areas: hitting, defense, starting pitching and relief pitching. Spoiler alert: We're notoriously tough graders.
Before we get into things, here's a brief explanation of a few advanced statistics that you'll see either directly or indirectly referenced on the pages that follow. Click on the link for a more detailed explanation, courtesy of FanGraphs:
- Defensive Runs Saved (DRS): Tells us how many runs, better or worse, a player has been compared to the average player at his position.
- Ultimate Zone Rating/150 (UZR/150): Calculated differently than DRS but similar in that it tells us how many runs, better or worse, a player has been compared to the average player at his position over 150 games.
- Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+): Aims to present a more accurate representation of offensive value than batting average and OPS.
Traditionalists need not worry, however, as there will be plenty of references to batting average, errors and all the old-school statistics that have been a part of the game for more than a century.
With that out of the way, let's take a look at which teams made the grade and which clubs need to stay after class for a bit of extra help.
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