The Better Offense - Rockies or Dodgers

So there is this Buster Olney guy who gets paid money to write about baseball.  Recently, he put up an article where he ranked the best offenses in baseball.  More than a few Dodgers fans were up in arms when Buster ranked the Rockies offense a few spots ahead of the Dodgers offense.  I was asked by a couple followers on twitter to run the numbers through my simulator where I can take into effect things like the enormously friendly park that the Rockies hit in.

This is a pretty easy exercise for me to run in my simulator.  What I did is get park neutral offensive stats for both the Rockies and Dodgers lineups.  I took the 8 starting hitters for each teams, as listed at MLBdepthCharts website and gave each team what the simulator thought was its most efficient lineup.  I then gave each team the exact same starting pitcher, bullpen, bench and made all park factors league average.  I then ran five million individual game simulations, pitting the two teams together.  I let each team be the away/home team and repeated the above process for both a right handed and left handed starting pitcher.

So the only difference is the two hitting lineups, everything else is held constant.  The metric to determine the better offense can now be measured in how many of the five million games each team won.  Here are the results...


The top two lines in the table are with both teams using the exact same RHP and the bottom two lines are with both teams using the exact same LHP.

Away	Home	Winner	RS	RA	Win%	Total Runs		Wins/162	Losses/162
COL	LAN	LAN	4.0406	4.3248	54.8790	8.3654		88.9040	73.0960
LAN	COL	COL	4.1684	4.2027	52.8284	8.3711		85.5820	76.4180
Away	Home	Winner	RS	RA	Win%	Total Runs		Wins/162	Losses/162
COL	LAN	LAN	4.1137	4.3618	54.3382	8.4754		88.0279	73.9721
LAN	COL	COL	4.1803	4.3052	53.8402	8.4854		87.2211	74.7789

First, let's take a look at the vs RHP results.  Both teams come out ahead when they are the home team.  But the Dodgers do quite a bit better averaging 88.9040 wins per 162 games while the Rockies come in at 85.5820 for a difference of 3.322 wins.

Now we move on to the vs LHP results.  Once again, both home teams come out ahead.  But this time the margin of victory for the Dodgers is much slimmer.  The Dodgers win 88.0279 games per 162 and the Rockies slip in at 87.2211 for a slight difference of 0.8068 wins.

In conclusion, the results from this exercise show the Dodgers with the stronger offense than the Rockies.  There is only a slim margin against a left handed pitcher but the gap widens between the two offenses against a right handed pitcher.