Paul Articulates – Playoff race by the numbers

On Monday, I wrote about the remaining schedules for the teams in the wild card race.  In that article, I listed both the home games and away games remaining for the top four contenders.

Three wins later, the Mets are still on a hot streak and have come within a half game of the Braves.  So I wondered if this had changed their odds of making the playoffs.  It was time to look deeper than just a subjective glance at who had the most home games and who had the easiest teams to play.  In this world of over-complicated analytics that rule the game, I thought it was only appropriate to come up with an over-complicated formula to pre-determine our team’s fate.

Every game is a new game, and teams that fail miserably one day can play like world beaters the next – that is part of what makes baseball so intriguing.  But statistical averages tend to be more accurate as the sample gets larger, so the day to day variances even out.  With that in mind, I considered a few factors in assessing the mathematical strength of each team. <data as of Wednesday noon>

• First, there is the won/lost percentage that the team has compiled to date.  After almost 140 games this season, it is a pretty good indicator of a team’s overall strength this year.  I would calculate this factor as simply the inverse of 1 minus the team’s won-lost percentage Fw=1/(1-Wpct).

• Second, there is an advantage to playing at home in front of a home crowd in a stadium that the team is very familiar with.  However, all home advantages are not the same, as some parks are more favorable to their team’s makeup than others.  If you read Mack’s Mets regularly, you will see plenty of rationale for why the Mets have less of a home field advantage than some other teams.  If you want to understand more about the factors that govern performance in home parks, I would recommend SwishAnalytics’ page on MLB Park Factors & Stats.  So this factor is calculated as the inverse of 1 minus the team’s home winning percentage.  Their away strength is the inverse of 1 minus the team’s away winning percentage.

• Third, teams get on runs like the Mets are currently in.  They build momentum and feed off their success.  A team’s aggregate state of mind is a very important factor in creating and sustaining streaks.  Streaks are variable in length, but there are easy to locate statistics on every team’s last ten games, so I will use the performance over the last ten games for the third factor, using a similar equation.

So given these three factors that characterize a team’s performance over time, in certain stadiums, and recent trends, one can predict a success rate for upcoming games.  Since this piece is about using analytics to make projections, I had to use every data scientist’s favorite, the Pythagorean theorem, to project relative strength.  For a home game, the team’s Pythagorean strength is the square root of the sum of the squares of the season won/lost factor, the home stadium won/lost factor, and the momentum.  For an away game, the team’s Pythagorean strength is the square root of the sum of the squares of the season won/lost factor, the team’s away won/lost factor, and the momentum. 

After predicting the home and away strengths of all MLB teams, I was then able to use the remaining schedules to pit the strengths of each team against their opponents and project the number of wins.

Unfortunately for Mets fans, the analytical approach shows them falling just short.  The remaining schedule for the Braves, Padres, and Diamondbacks is just favorable enough to maintain their lead over the Mets, and my projection is that they will end up in a three-way tie.  The Mets are hampered by playing seven of their last 23 games against the Phillies, who have the highest momentum score in the NL with 8 wins in their last 10.

An interesting side note is that the San Francisco Giants have a remaining schedule that is almost exclusively against teams contending for playoff spots.  If they get on a roll one way or the other, they can significantly affect the race.  Here is a summary of the results:

• San Diego Padres (currently at 79 wins) will win 6 more at home and 5 more away to end up with 90 wins.

• Arizona Diamondbacks (currently at 78 wins) will win 6 more at home and 6 more away to end up with 90 wins.

• Atlanta Braves (currently at 75 wins) will win 10 more at home and 5 more away to end up with 90 wins.

• New York Mets (currently at 75 wins) will win 5 more at home and 6 more away to end up with 87 wins.

• Chicago Cubs (currently at 71 wins) will win6 more at home and 6 more away to end up with 83 wins.

• St. Louis Cardinals (currently at 70 wins) will win 7 more at home and 5 more away to end up with 82 wins.

• San Francisco Giants (currently at 68 wins) will win 5 more at home and 6 more away to end up with 79 wins.

• Cincinnati Reds (currently at 66 wins) will win 4 more at home and 7 more away to end up with 77 wins.

If you don’t like what the numbers predict, then it is time to root for a miracle, because the Mets will have to out-perform the numbers to make it happen.  Ya gotta believe!!