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BaseRuns & Projections

For more on BaseRuns. What I decided to do was run numbers based on teams baseruns projected record (over 162 games) versus their "real" projected records based on current winning percentage. Since most teams have about 30 games left we probably won't see too big of a swing, but I'm curious if some of these teams regress (or progress) over the next month and some.  In fact when the season is over I plan to review the numbers just to see which pair of numbers worked out.

Here are the numbers we need to worry about:

 

Team RS RA Proj W Real W Difference
ANA 560 552 82 98 -16
MIN 603 607 81 91 -10
HOU 577 656 72 82 -10
TBA 595 528 90 99 -9
MIL 626 572 88 94 -6
PIT 579 742 63 69 -6
CIN 559 673 67 71 -4
FLO 590 602 79 83 -4
SLN 677 637 86 89 -3
PHI 630 590 86 89 -3
KCA 515 630 66 68 -2
SFN 509 587 71 72 -1
CHN 710 551 100 101 -1
TEX 720 738 79 80 -1
NYN 638 566 90 89 1
CHA 670 560 94 93 1
NYA 627 574 88 86 2
CLE 599 594 82 80 2
BAL 656 665 80 77 3
WAS 488 634 62 58 4
COL 638 647 80 76 4
DET 668 657 82 78 4
OAK 505 522 79 74 5
BOS 694 544 99 94 5
TOR 564 514 88 83 5
ARI 581 529 88 83 5
LAN 540 517 84 79 5
SEA 545 654 68 61 7
ATL 599 578 84 71 13
SDN 535 581 75 62 13

Obviously some teams have been bitten by the injury bug -- San Diego has been nearly devoured by the damn thing -- which makes their projected records a bit off if (when) they get healthy. A team like Boston for instance, without Mike Lowell and possibly J.D. Drew are probably less likely to match their production thus far this season than say the Chicago Cubs who aren't missing any key components right now. I'm not quite sure what to expect, but which of the two methods do you think will result in more accuracy?

Update: Thankfully Sky pointed out a mistake I made in the original formula, the numbers above are accurate.

Poll
Which will be more accurate?
BaseRuns
9 votes
Winning%
9 votes

18 votes | Poll has closed

Comment 7 comments  |  0 recs  | 

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i'm confused -- what did you do?

did you compute baseruns for offense and pitching and plug them into a pythag and pro-rate over a 162 game season?

why does it appear nearly every team is underperforming? am i reading the table wrong? is there something in your methodology that would underrate offense compared to defense?

by Sky Kalkman on Aug 28, 2008 6:05 PM EDT reply actions  

Baseruns for hitting/pitching then plugged into pythag.

The chart’s fourth column is Projected wins – real wins, so the teams with negative numbers are those who are overachieving.

by R.J. Anderson on Aug 28, 2008 6:10 PM EDT up reply actions  

That was what I was assuming

Which implies that Anaheim, for instance, is being set up for a first-round playoff loss.

Otoh, since the method appears to be consistently underrating playoff contenders (ANA, TBA, MIL, MIN), there may be a large residual that needs to be captured. (Then again, SDN has been damaged by injury; ATL has been damaged by injury and Jeff Francoeur; CIN has overachieved, since Dusty is trying to destroy more young pitchers’s careers. So the differences may be attributable to management styles.)

by klhoughton on Aug 29, 2008 12:05 AM EDT reply actions  

math issues

any projection system should generate a total of 2430 wins (81*30). The base runs estimate here totals 2302 wins, leading to systematically low win estimates for each team.

by vaclipper on Aug 29, 2008 9:00 AM EDT reply actions  

some ideas

how do you BaseRuns estimates of total runs scored and total runs allowed match with reality? are you not coming up with enough runs scored or are you coming up with too many runs allowed?

are you not including ROE or something dumb like that?

if you can’t figure out what’s making the BaseRuns estimates funky, i’d recommend modifying the B factors (just multiply B by some constant for either RS or RA) so that runs scored = runs allowed when you sum up all the teams. to be exact, you’d probably want a different B scalar for hitting and pitching, so that each of them totals the actual MLB-wide totals. then run pythag.

by Sky Kalkman on Aug 29, 2008 2:58 PM EDT up reply actions  

for those interested

the B multiplier was set to about .95 and 1.07 for batters and pitchers respectively so that baseruns predicted 18000 runs total among all teams. why 18000? it was about half way in between the estimated totals for each group.

the eight playoff teams as predicted by baseruns don’t change, but there would be some GREAT races:

Rays, Yankees, Blue Jays all within two games of each other for wild card.
Cardinals, Dodgers, and Phillies all within four games of Brewers for wild card.
Angels three games ahead of both the A’s and Rangers.
NL East and West still just as close.

by Sky Kalkman on Aug 31, 2008 3:24 PM EDT reply actions  

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