MLB Team Rankings – Week 10
Posted: May 31, 2011 Filed under: Rankings 1 Comment »Weekly rankings based on a 3rd order winning percentage calculation. Data from Baseball-Reference.
| Rank | Team | 3rd Order W% | Change |
| 1 | Boston Red Sox | 0.633 | 2 |
| 2 | New York Yankees | 0.627 | 2 |
| 3 | Toronto Blue Jays | 0.594 | 4 |
| 4 | Los Angeles Angels | 0.589 | -2 |
| 5 | Cleveland Indians | 0.587 | -4 |
| 6 | Texas Rangers | 0.579 | 5 |
| 7 | St. Louis Cardinals | 0.576 | -1 |
| 8 | Atlanta Braves | 0.571 | -3 |
| 9 | Tampa Bay Rays | 0.569 | -1 |
| 10 | Detroit Tigers | 0.560 | -1 |
| 11 | Philadelphia Phillies | 0.555 | 3 |
| 12 | Oakland Athletics | 0.546 | 4 |
| 13 | Chicago White Sox | 0.534 | -1 |
| 14 | Milwaukee Brewers | 0.534 | 4 |
| 15 | Seattle Mariners | 0.524 | -2 |
| 16 | San Francisco Giants | 0.521 | -1 |
| 17 | Florida Marlins | 0.503 | -7 |
| 18 | Arizona Diamondbacks | 0.503 | 2 |
| 19 | Colorado Rockies | 0.492 | 3 |
| 20 | Cincinnati Reds | 0.488 | -1 |
| 21 | Kansas City Royals | 0.462 | -4 |
| 22 | New York Mets | 0.451 | 2 |
| 23 | Washington Nationals | 0.450 | -2 |
| 24 | Baltimore Orioles | 0.442 | -1 |
| 25 | San Diego Padres | 0.441 | 0 |
| 26 | Chicago Cubs | 0.424 | 0 |
| 27 | Pittsburgh Pirates | 0.415 | 0 |
| 28 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 0.412 | 0 |
| 29 | Houston Astros | 0.395 | 0 |
| 30 | Minnesota Twins | 0.389 | 0 |
How Well Do Monthly Winning Percentage and Overall Winning Percentage Correlate?
Posted: May 30, 2011 Filed under: Research Leave a comment »On twitter (you can follow me there by the way @stealofhome) @yanks08701 asked me “Can you do a report on which month’s winning percentage correlates best with a teams overall winning percentage?” After a little initial confusion, I decided that yes, this is something I could do. Here is a chart that looks at each team’s monthly winning percentage (that month only) plotted against end of year winning percentage:
This is from 1998-2010. August and September have the best correlation, but it is still only at about .45. June has the worst correlation at .31.
Projected MLB Statistical Leaders
Posted: May 30, 2011 Filed under: Research 5 Comments »We’re about a third of the way through the 2011 MLB season. That means it’s time to multiply everything by three and see what happens! I have included the current MLB record along with the projected number for the leader in each category. I did this by taking the total games played for each player’s team and extrapolating their current stats based on that.
Hitters:
| Statistic | Record | Current Pace | Leader |
| AVG | 0.440 | 0.374 | Matt Joyce |
| AB | 716 | 705 | Jose Reyes |
| PA | 778 | 769 | Jose Reyes |
| H | 262 | 229 | Jose Reyes |
| 1B | 225 | 165 | Starlin Castro |
| 2B | 67 | 57 | Alex Gordon |
| 3B | 36 | 19 | Jose Reyes |
| HR | 73 | 62 | Jose Bautista |
| R | 192 | 131 | Jose Bautista |
| RBI | 191 | 140 | Adrian Gonzalez |
| BB | 232 | 140 | Jose Bautista |
| IBB | 120 | 32 | Miguel Cabrera |
| SO | 223 | 201 | Adam Dunn |
| HBP | 51 | 29 | Danny Espinosa |
| GDP | 36 | 49 | Albert Pujols |
| SB | 130 | 60 | Jose Reyes |
| CS | 42 | 24 | Juan Pierre |
Read the rest of this entry »
MLB Team Rankings – Week 9
Posted: May 23, 2011 Filed under: Rankings Leave a comment »Weekly rankings based on a 3rd order winning percentage calculation. Data from Baseball-Reference.
| Rank | Team | WP |
| 1 | CLE | 0.658 |
| 2 | LAA | 0.602 |
| 3 | BOS | 0.596 |
| 4 | NYY | 0.592 |
| 5 | ATL | 0.591 |
| 6 | STL | 0.583 |
| 7 | TOR | 0.574 |
| 8 | TBR | 0.561 |
| 9 | DET | 0.560 |
| 10 | FLA | 0.551 |
| 11 | TEX | 0.550 |
| 12 | CHW | 0.546 |
| 13 | SEA | 0.544 |
| 14 | PHI | 0.542 |
| 15 | SFG | 0.541 |
| 16 | OAK | 0.530 |
| 17 | KCR | 0.510 |
| 18 | MIL | 0.506 |
| 19 | CIN | 0.503 |
| 20 | ARI | 0.474 |
| 21 | WSN | 0.473 |
| 22 | COL | 0.472 |
| 23 | BAL | 0.454 |
| 24 | NYM | 0.448 |
| 25 | SDP | 0.439 |
| 26 | CHC | 0.435 |
| 27 | PIT | 0.409 |
| 28 | LAD | 0.403 |
| 29 | HOU | 0.385 |
| 30 | MIN | 0.350 |
Interesting Perfect Or Near-Perfect Games
Posted: May 22, 2011 Filed under: Research, Retrosheet Leave a comment »I had a little extra time on my hands and decided to use my Retrosheet database to find some interesting near perfect or actually perfect games.
Perfect Games:
August 6th, 1967 – Minnesota Twins – 2, Boston Red Sox – 0
Pitcher: Dean Chance
Dean Chance pitched five perfect innings, but the game was called due to rain. Since it was past five innings, this still counts as an official game.
April 21, 1984 – Montreal Expos – 4, St. Louis Cardinals – 0
Pitcher: David Palmer
David Palmer and the Montreal Expos were in the same situation here. The perfect game was called due to rain after five innings.
Have We Been Seeing Fewer Extra Inning Games?
Posted: May 20, 2011 Filed under: Research, Retrosheet Leave a comment »Yesterday, I found how long extra inning games last. Today, I’m going to look at how often extra inning games are played. Since the data go back to 1950 when less games were played, I simply divided the total number of extra inning games by the total number of games played that year. I also added in a 5-year moving average trend line.
Click the picture to make it readable.
From 1950-1996, extra inning games accounted for an average of 9.69% of all games per year. Since then, the average per year is 8.34%. It’s odd that this all begins in the wild card era, but I don’t see any reason for a correlation between the two.
When Do Extra Inning Games End?
Posted: May 19, 2011 Filed under: Research, Retrosheet 1 Comment »This is something I’ve been interested in, so I decided to look it up. The data come from retrosheet.
Click the picture to make it readable.
When Is a Team “Out of It?”
Posted: May 18, 2011 Filed under: Links to posts Leave a comment »I look at how far back a team can be until they are considered out of the division race at Beyond the Box Score.
When Do the Standings Matter?
Posted: May 16, 2011 Filed under: Research Leave a comment »Vin Scully likes to repeat a quote from a well-known former Major League manager, “Give me 50 games and I’ll know what kind of team I have.” I don’t remember who said it, or what the exact quote is, but that’s the gist of it. Just for reference, 50 games into the MLB season usually lands around the end of May. I wanted to test this out and see how quickly we know how good a team actually is, so I did what any regular baseball fan would do: I went to coolstandings.com and grabbed the record at the end of each month for every team since 1998 (expansion). Then, I looked at the end of month winning percentage and compared it to the end of season win total, using a linear regression. I also split each month up into bins of team winning percentage. Each bin contains about 65 teams.
Teams are all over the place at the end of April. Sure, the 43-119 2003 Tigers looked terrible, but so did the 102-60 2001 Oakland Athletics (end of April WP of .320). There is a definite pattern, but not enough to say who is good or bad with any certainty.
Full On Double Wildcard: What Does This Mean?
Posted: May 16, 2011 Filed under: Research Leave a comment »According to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, another wild card spot in each league will be added to MLB’s playoff system. However, Michael Weiner – head of the Player’s Association – says talks are still in negotiation, though he doesn’t seem opposed to the idea. I’m sure there is a lot of politicking taking place, something I don’t much care for. So instead, I ask the question: what is the difference in adding a second playoff team? I decided to take a look at each season since the wildcard was introduced in 1995 and find out for myself.
I took the record for each playoff team since 1996 and this is what I found:
