Base Runs, Playoff Odds, and the Pacific

[Lane]

As Long Beach climbs back into the race for the division, I'm feeling motivated to do a little writing. And do it right away, because surely after another sim or two, the Surfers will fade away.

One of my favorite things to look at from sim to sim is the Base Runs chart on StatsPlus. Once upon a time I tried to calculate this myself, but then we added StatsPlus and and it does it for us! For those that don't know, Base Runs (or BaseRuns) is a Fangraphs formula that tries to estimate how many runs a team should have scored, or should have allowed, thus giving us a way to estimate record on a deeper level than pythagorean record.

It's been interesting following two Pacific teams in particular this season, namely Hawaii and Sacramento. Currently, there's a 9 game spread between the two in base runs expected W-L record. By this measure, Sacramento should be leading the division with a 54-42 record, and Hawaii should be buried at 45-52. Hawaii has overperformed on offense and defense by 39 runs, while Sacramento has underperformed by 29 runs.

Does Sacramento move David Simpson if they're sitting in first place in the division? Does Hawaii start to think about moving Alaric Wullenweber or Gary Allen? We could definitely be looking at very different story lines in the Frick League this season if the actual records were closer to the base runs expected records.

Now, it's obviously not uncommon that we see variance between actual and expected records with base runs just like we do with pythagorean records. But the magnitude of the mismatch for these two teams in the Pacific definitely caught my attention, and the implications seemed significant.

You've also got San Fernando with a minus seven mark at this point in the season. This would put them just one game under .500 and still in the race for the playoffs, instead of 14 under and needing a minor miracle to climb back up.

As for Long Beach, we're running a game behind the expected record, and that definitely makes me feel better about our chances at the division, especially considering Sacramento's sell of Simpson.

Team	W	L	xW	xL
HAW	55	42	45	52
LBC	52	45	53	44
SAC	44	52	54	42
SFB	41	56	48	49

There's a quick look at actual W-L against BaseRun W-L.

What does this mean? Well, it depends. In the standings? Not much. Still gotta win the games on the field. But I like this measure, so to me it means that Hawaii has been lucky, and Sacramento and San Fernando have been unlucky. How much of that is to do with Home/Away or Strength of Schedule or weather or their managers' moods, who knows? But if I were to bet Brewster Bucks on it, I'd say that HAW might fade away, and we might see SAC and SFB climb up in the standings a bit. Well, maybe not the Mad Popes... #veryshoeless


Now, on to the other thing I wanted to write about today. Playoff Odds!

StatsPlus also gives us these handy dandy playoff odds and fun charts. Long Beach's 5-2 sim bumped our odds to win the division above Hawaii, and they now peg us as the favorites for the first time since mid-April. At various points this season, all of the teams mentioned here have been the "favorite" to win the division by StatsPlus projections.

This is what StatsPlus says about their odds:

Based on 5,000 sims of remaining season using log5 with xW%, ties broken randomly.

I'm guessing that by "xW%" they mean BaseRuns expected record, and if you wanna know more about log5, I'll send you a link to my TED Talk.

Anyway I don't have much to say here besides it's neat that there's been four teams in the "lead" at various points throughout the season, and I like seeing Long Beach pass Hawaii.

Actually, I do have one more interesting thing to say here. This is a really cool snapshot point, because it's pegging both HAW and LBC with <50% odds to make the playoffs! Sacramento is in there at about 7%, so that's the big impact on those.

Let's take a quick peek at the Heartland:

Whoa. Haha. Would hate to be in that mess. But there's 5 teams in playoff positions.

As Ron, Ted, and I were discussing briefly on Slack last night, this is probably mostly because there's been a lot of inter-division games lately, and things will look different as we play more intra-division games towards the end of the season. Nevertheless, it's fun to look at, and I'll count my Brewster Bucks now for betting on the Heartland taking all of the Frick League Wild Card spots.

[Jwalk100]

Inter league is killing me. I am 18-26 against the Heartland and 37 -16 in the Pacific.

-48 runs against the Heartland.


+59 runs against the Pacific.


If I can keep beating up on the Pacific I should be ok.

I'm just waiting on something bad to happen.

[Lane]

Inter league is killing me. I am 18-26 against the Heartland and 37 -16 in the Pacific.

-48 runs against the Heartland.


+59 runs against the Pacific.


If I can keep beating up on the Pacific I should be ok.

I'm just waiting on something bad to happen.

Wow! I didn't dig in at all, those are crazy numbers.

[CTBrewCrew]

Im guessing Teds 9-1 run caused TWC to spike on graph.

Nice feature

[usnspecialist]

Does statsplus still only account for 3 WC teams for some ungodly reason?

[Lane]

Does statsplus still only account for 3 WC teams for some ungodly reason?

Shit, it does. I totally forgot about that.

[shoeless.db]

This was difficult for me to read. I could see my offense was over-performing and heavily dependent on Simpson's insane start to the season. My offense and, subsequently, my record began to fall apart when Simpson went cold (along with Kouros). I felt that if I kept Simpson I could continue to challenge for the highly contested fourth wildcard spot. It was a gamble, and I opted for the large fruit basket of mediocre apricots from Ted instead.

Chalk this season up as another learning opportunity for the Mad Sacs. But, knowing me, I'll make a thousand trades in the next couple weeks, as I can't stand losing, which I'll likely do anyway... but...

[shoeless.db]

Oh, and no, I would definitely have not traded Simpson if even half those games went my way...

[allenciox]

Fascinating analysis! And as to statsplus playoff odds accounting for only 3 WC teams in BBA ---at least it is better than UMEBA, where it doesn't account for any wild card teams.