smart stats

"How do we calculate these statistics? Basically we simulate the rest of the season millions of times, based on every team's performance to date and its remaining schedule. We then look at how many "seasons" a team won its division or won the wild card, and voile - we have our numbers.

The trick, of course, is to determine what chance each team has of beating every other team. Our method is to use simple team statistics (e.g. runs scored and runs against) to predict how each team will fare against all others. For those of you familiar with baseball prediction, we use a variation of the Bill James "Pythagorean Theorem" to predict results. Pretty smart, huh? That's why we call this prediction mode "Smart mode".

Another method is to simply assume that any team has a 50-50 shot of beating any other team. You could flip a coin to decide who would win each game. This method isn't too realistic, but it usually gives Chicago teams a better shot at the division. For lack of a better term, we call this prediction mode "Dumb mode"."

I appreciate the snide remarks for Chicago.. they don't usually go 50-50 when it matters (next year will be 100 years, as the media is fond of 'reminding' Cubs fans). Haven't had much to say on baseball. Not sure why. I've been following with my usual interest, but I suspect its largely because I stick to the boring (but meaty) statistical portions of debate and observation rather than having a zesty passion for any one particular article. The whole HGH/roids cloud also makes it difficult to really get into.

Plus it's probably more fun to tinker around and create a statistical universe of hall of fame/all star players and pit them against one another than watch overpaid 5th starters try to keep it over the plate without the ball being tattooed over the fence. I suppose that tinkering around kept the math portions of my brain out of comatose; what with the normalization and park effects calculations. There's always that.