HELLO NERDS!

So I’m in major baseball withdrawal and there’s not really an easy way to fix it, but let’s pretend we can by doing that little baseball analysis thingy that I’ve done for the 2016, 2017, and 2018 seasons, but now let’s do it for 2019!

A reminder of what this analysis is, since it’s been more than a year (I think):

At the end of the regular baseball season, you can see how many wins each team got out of the total number of games they played, and then rank the teams by their performance (who had the most wins, the second most wins, etc.).

What I want to do is see how this “real” data correlates with how many wins each team would get if they scored their average number of runs per game in every single game they played. For example, if the Phillies score an average of 4.78 runs per game, how many of their games would they have won by scoring 4.78 runs in each of those games?

(Yes, I know you can’t score a fraction of runs in a single game, but just pretend you can, huh?)

The process:

1. Record each team’s average runs per game (I’ll call this “RPG”) (from here).
2. Sort teams from highest to lowest RPG.
3. Now, if a team A has a higher RPG than team B, that would mean that A would win every game they play against B. So the next step was to figure this out for each pairing of Team A versus Team B.
4. I used this logic for all pairings, then summed across the rows to get the “predicted” number of wins based on RPG alone. I ranked the teams according to how many predicted number of wins they’d get (“1” meaning the most, “30” meaning the least). Then I compared looked at how each team’s “predicted” ranking compared with their “actual” ranking.

How do they compare for the 2019 season?

The Yankees (highest RPG, “Predicted” rank of 1) would have won every game they played; Miami and Detroit both would have lost every game they played (lowest RPGs, “Predicted” ranks tied at 29). Poor Colorado did a lot worse in real life than they would have scoring their average number of runs per game. Coors Field effect, maybe?

The “Diff” column is calculated by taking the predicted rank minus the actual rank. Positive “Diff” numbers suggest teams did better than they would have had they scored their average number of runs in every single game. Negative “Diff” numbers suggest teams did worse than they would have had they scored their average number of runs in every single game.

Correlation of team rankings based on RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.811

FUN!

So the Mets officially got eliminated from playoff contention today.

SAD TIMES.

But we can still live for the chance that Alonso beats Judge’s rookie home run record. He’s so close!

The number of baseball-related posts has been increasing over the past few years, huh? If you’ve known me from high school or college, you know I’m not really into sportsball. Take the Vandal football games, for example. I really didn’t pay attention to the football at all because I didn’t care; I was just there for the marching band experience.

But baseball is different, and I figured I’d take a few minutes to explain why (in case you’re wondering why the hell there are so many baseball posts when I’d really never talked about sports before).

Let’s do it!

My mom used to watch the Braves a lot when I was a young kid (she liked their announcers). I don’t remember too much from my first few elementary school years (apart from coos and other miscellaneous nonsense that doesn’t matter), but it seems like my mom had baseball on every night during the season. I was too young to really understand it (or at least I didn’t seem to care enough to try to understand it past the basic premise), but the sound of a baseball game (and that freaking tomahawk chop chant the Braves fans do) triggers serious nostalgia for me.

Apart from my grandparents being obsessed with Mark McGwire during his steroid home run era and that one year that the Mariners were good, I never really watched much baseball after that. I didn’t know the teams, I didn’t follow who won the world series, I didn’t really even think about it much.

Fast forward a whole bunch to 2015. Nate and I started living together in June of that year. He’d expressed that he liked baseball and I told him I liked it too (even though I was definitely not up on current baseball news/players/etc. and I definitely didn’t have the knowledge of the game that he had). So at some point he decided to get a subscription to MLB TV so that we could watch the Mets (his favorite team).

But it wasn’t really until the 2016 season where I really got into it. I started to know the game better (thanks mostly to Nate, haha). I started to know the players and become invested in them. I got more familiar with the teams, leagues, and the general competition.

Now I love it. I love all the stats. I love all the weird little things that can happen in a baseball game. I love how long the season is and how that means that there are so many opportunities for teams to hit winning or losing streaks. I’ve got, of course, my favorite players.

Plus, it’s something I enjoy watching and discussing with Nate. I can also watch and enjoy it while still having my music blasting on my headphones, so that’s always a plus.

I don’t know. I just really like it. It’s exciting to me.

(Apologies, though, to anyone who reads my blog who doesn’t like baseball, haha.)