Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
October 20, 2005
Lucky Teams

The Chicago White Sox won almost seven more games than predicted by Bill James Pythagorean formula, runs^2/(runs^2 + ra^2). This makes them the 6th luckiest team to reach the World Series:

TeamWinsPred. WinsDifferenceWon Series?
1970 Reds10291.410.6No
1961 Reds9383.49.6No
1931 Athletics10799.27.8No
1930 Athleitcs10294.87.2Yes
1959 White Sox9486.97.1No
2005 White Sox9992.26.8??
1960 Yankees9790.26.8No

Not very good news for the White Sox as only one of these lucky teams managed to win the World Series. It seems lucks runs out late in the season.


Posted by David Pinto at 03:34 PM | World Series | TrackBack (0)
Comments

BP has the Sox at 91.1. The question is what were the opponents expected wins of those teams? Even at 91.1, the Sox expected wins is greater than the Astros 90.

Posted by: Scott Janssens at October 20, 2005 04:25 PM

The two teams look pretty evenly matched on any system that uses run diff. That's not surprising because the teams' differentials were close neighbors: +96 for the Sox, +84 for the Astros.

If the Padres had somehow snuck into the Series, you'd see somewhat different evaluations based on run diff (wink).

BP puts run diff through seven million contortions, but comes out pretty close to the simple James formula, whether you use the 2.00 exponent or 1.85 (as some have suggested).

Posted by: Casey Abell at October 20, 2005 07:43 PM
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