Having fun with Pythagoras, or, who got lucky during 2009
by doctorK on Nov 7, 2009 10:22 PM PST
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PrintToonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
Toonces made me do it.
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You've inverted the causality in this part:
One of my pet beliefs (meaning not necessarily quantifiable) is that good teams have a tendency to make their own luck (conversely, bad teams like the A’s play just good enough to lose). Of our 16 winning teams, 12 exceeded their Pythag records. So, does winning percentage correlate at all with Pythag diff?
Winning teams aren’t making their luck— luck is making winning teams. (The best example of this is, of course, Seattle…)
Linda's in the cold ground, won't see her anymore
Somewhere out on the highway tonight, the drunken engines roar
It's just one of those things, one of those things
-- Al Stewart, "Accident on 3rd St."
In memory of Nick Adenhart and all victims of drunk driving
It does seem more or less true for Scioscia's Angels, right?
Over the last couple years they’ve been good at scoring those one or two runs they really need in tight ballgames. Hence they tend to consistently look “lucky” when compares to their Pythagorean.
I think it's both...
Luck makes winning teams make their own luck…
or
Winning teams make their own luck which attracts even more luck…
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yes!
"Flea Markets aren't just for blind dates anymore!"- The Reverend Billy Lard
by Gaijin_Suketto on Nov 9, 2009 3:07 PM PST up reply actions
Ah, the old correlation/causality conundrum
"Loyal? I'm the most loyal player money can buy." - Don Sutton
by vignette17 on Nov 8, 2009 4:02 AM PST up reply actions 1 recs
Three statisticians went duck hunting
Upon spying a duck, the first one shot, but missed a yard high.
The second one then shot, but missed a yard low.
Exclaimed the third; “we got him!”
LOL!!!
My religion is A'slamic.
by WhoNeedsReligionWhenYaGotBaseball on Nov 8, 2009 6:40 PM PST up reply actions
total agreement from me
Winning close games is pretty much the definition of beating your pythagorean record. And since the pythag winning percentages range from 0.4 to 0.6 or so (because even the best baseball teams lose 35-40% of the time), beating your pythagorean record by a few games is a very good way to finish over 500.
I dig the histograms doctorK! (scatter plots too)
You are probably right
One thing that would be interesting to do would be to see if there are any teams who consistently out-perform Pythagoras over several seasons. The easiest example are the Angels, who have been +5, +12, +4, and +5 their last four seasons, but before that they were not exceptionally lucky either way. Also, the typical standard deviation is about 4-5 games each year (I only took the time to do the last three seasons), so being +4 or +5 is not particularly notable. Clearly, this year’s Mariners at +10, last year’s Angels at +12, and 2007’s D-Backs at +11 were, in fact, quite notable.
I’m also not surprised you made the first comment on this post.
Hey Al, just go away, baby.
it would be pretty easy to clear up this bias
with some Monte Carlo. And pythagorean wins are a simple enough statistic that it could probably be handled analytically.
I’ve been wanting to do a fANpost for a while on the mathematics of the pythagorean wins formula, but the thesis is taking precedence right now.
Been there - done that
The last three months of 1990 and first four months of 1991 are only a blur today – in fact, they were a blur then.
Hey Al, just go away, baby.
Simple solution: Quit school and write a fanpost for AN
I taked that aproach years’ ago and I’m still prety educatified.
I like Cindi. A. She never pretends to know more than she does. B. She has unbridled enthusiasm for her "Hotties," and isn't afraid to show it. -IM4Oakgal
It's "edumacated" Nico
"Flea Markets aren't just for blind dates anymore!"- The Reverend Billy Lard
by Gaijin_Suketto on Nov 9, 2009 3:09 PM PST up reply actions
Same principle as "saxomophone"
It pays to study etymology.
"Go ahead and overachieve, you scrappy Brett-Favre-colored walk-takers." —Rev Halofan
Ha ha ha
You mean “etology.”
I like Cindi. A. She never pretends to know more than she does. B. She has unbridled enthusiasm for her "Hotties," and isn't afraid to show it. -IM4Oakgal
that word is so totally chromulent.
"Flea Markets aren't just for blind dates anymore!"- The Reverend Billy Lard
by Gaijin_Suketto on Nov 9, 2009 11:21 PM PST up reply actions
The extra H embiggens the word.
"Go ahead and overachieve, you scrappy Brett-Favre-colored walk-takers." —Rev Halofan
This would be a more interesting question:
Does Pythagorean differential positively correlate with third-order record? (You can find third-order record at baseballprospectus. Basically, for those who aren’t familiar with the stat, it’s a linear-weights estimate of how many runs a team should have scored and allowed, adjusted for strength of schedule, and then converted into an expected win/loss record.)
Third-order record is (mostly) luck-independent.
Linda's in the cold ground, won't see her anymore
Somewhere out on the highway tonight, the drunken engines roar
It's just one of those things, one of those things
-- Al Stewart, "Accident on 3rd St."
In memory of Nick Adenhart and all victims of drunk driving
For some reason
I couldn’t find 3rd order wins on that site anymore. How did the A’s do? And what about the Angels?
"If Bowden was a general contractor, he'd build houses with nine bedrooms, six garages, no bathrooms, and half a roof."
by DyeLongJustice on Nov 8, 2009 3:12 PM PST up reply actions
so theoretically
we are still the worst team in the dvision? Well, at least we are close enough to luck into the playoffs.
"If Bowden was a general contractor, he'd build houses with nine bedrooms, six garages, no bathrooms, and half a roof."
by DyeLongJustice on Nov 8, 2009 4:23 PM PST up reply actions
Yeah, ironically it doesn't change anything about the order of finish
just tightens the gaps.
Weirdly, Seattle was both “lucky” in the Pythagorean sense and also hugely “unclutch” in terms of runs scored relative to linear weights, so the two virtually cancel each other out.
Linda's in the cold ground, won't see her anymore
Somewhere out on the highway tonight, the drunken engines roar
It's just one of those things, one of those things
-- Al Stewart, "Accident on 3rd St."
In memory of Nick Adenhart and all victims of drunk driving
I believe TB was that way in 2008
"Loyal? I'm the most loyal player money can buy." - Don Sutton
Pretty graphs
What program did you use? Excel? I always am trying to make my graphics prettier.
Hopefully I’ll be able to bust out some new ones in my newest FP in my series (ETA next week). I’ve been working on adding some new toys and haven’t had much time to write. Very interesting fanpost btw.
"Loyal? I'm the most loyal player money can buy." - Don Sutton
Graphics were generated from RS/1
RS/1 is an old BBN software package that we still have on our network at my place of employment. Make really nice graphs as well as has great software for experimental design and analysis.
Hey Al, just go away, baby.
Although RS/1 specifically is no longer supported
it’s one of many variations of the more generic R, which is freely available. You can download it at this site, which also has a bit of explanation of exactly what R is. In brief, it is a programming language designed for statistical work.
R is a standard tool in the statistics world. If you have any aspiration of getting involved in the business, or even if you’re just an enthusiastic amateur who isn’t afraid of some simple coding, it’s well worth your while to learn it. R is a large and powerful system so it would be quite a project to really know all its abilities well, but to learn enough to create some basic charts isn’t so hard.
"Go ahead and overachieve, you scrappy Brett-Favre-colored walk-takers." —Rev Halofan
R is pretty cool
pet project of Cal profs…
Being a non numbers guy
I will just copy off PT’s paper.
But the cool graphs look like rollercoasters, and that makes me happy.
If any of this helps the A’s win, then thanks for posting!
"Tonto think Billy Beane need to make team full of squirrels and bears."
Bell curves are like dinosaurs:
They’re small on one end, then much, much bigger in the middle, and then small again at the far end. This is my theory that it is, and it’s mine.
-Anne Elk.
I like Cindi. A. She never pretends to know more than she does. B. She has unbridled enthusiasm for her "Hotties," and isn't afraid to show it. -IM4Oakgal
Carl Everett doesn't believe in bell curves.
Somebody actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a bell curve.
"Go ahead and overachieve, you scrappy Brett-Favre-colored walk-takers." —Rev Halofan
It was the snake.
What a standard deviant that snake was.
I like Cindi. A. She never pretends to know more than she does. B. She has unbridled enthusiasm for her "Hotties," and isn't afraid to show it. -IM4Oakgal
1-run games
I’ve always wondered if it’s proper to treat all 1-run games as the same. Do teams tend to do as well in 1-0 games as they do in 5-4 or 8-7 games? It seems to me that teams with better offenses might be a bit better at winning the high-scoring one-run games because they have a better ability to push across a few extra runs than does a team with a poor offense, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone break down games in quite that way.
I did the graphs too, very nice!
There is no gravity - the earth just sucks.
Actually, to build on that
As far as I know, the Pythagorean calculation doesn’t take into account the distrubution of the scoring; in other words, how consistently teams give up large totals, and how consistently they score big themselves. If I score, say, 4,4,4,4, or 7,7,1,1, then the total runs scored over the four games (obviously, this makes no analytical sense over four games, but you see where I’m going).
Do teams that are the most consistent in run scoring / prevention do best? Or is it the ones that put up big scores in some games, and then blow it in others? is there a ‘minimum level’ (4.5 runs, say) at which consistency is a good thing (and conversly, below which it’s a bad thing?)
I think I’m wondering whether a low standard deviation from the median number of runs scored per game is a good thing, or a bad thing, and how much that relates to what the median value of runs per game actually is.
These thoughts are a little blurred, and I’m not sure how much it makes sense, but it’s been something that’s been ticking over in my head since the AS break last year, when the Giants were overperforming their Pythagorean level, with a rather unusual team.
Maybe I’ll see if I can find some data on this, unless someone knows that the answers to this are already out there.
distributions
Pythagorean wins assumes that teams don’t control their scoring distribution. Your offense has some skill level and, assuming that the team is out trying to score as many runs as possible in every game, then the runs scored distributions should converge so some common shape with a large enough sample.
I’m not really sure how well that particular hypothesis has been tested, but I think it’s pretty essential for the Pythag wins formula.
to put it another way
there is a built in assumption that only one number (i.e. run scored per game) is sufficient to characterize a team’s ability to score runs (and the same for run prevention)
Oh yeah - I don't believe it's possible to be able to control the consistency of runs scored
But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a statistic that reveals something. What, I don’t know.
And yeah – like you said, I’ve not seen any testing of the hypothesis you state above; it’d be interesting to do so.
I was thinking more about this last night – to do so, I’d need access to evey game score over a number of seasons – is there a downloadable spreadsheet of this sort of thing?
Try the team schedule pages at baseball-reference.com
Example: A’s 2009
If you click the ‘CSV’ tab, then the table will be converted to comma-delimited, which is then easy to parse out in Excel.
Hey Al, just go away, baby.
There is a perfectly reliable and achievable way
that any team could use to beat its Pythagorean record. It would simply have to play most games like normal but then any time it falls far behind, intentionally give away 30 or 40 runs in a game they’re going to lose anyway.
Do this and your W-L record will be well in excess of your Pythag record.
My point in making this absurd observation is to illustrate that beating one’s Pythagorean record is neither an accomplishment nor a worthwhile goal.
"Go ahead and overachieve, you scrappy Brett-Favre-colored walk-takers." —Rev Halofan
In other words, sign Chris Bootcheck for the back of your bullpen?
I like Cindi. A. She never pretends to know more than she does. B. She has unbridled enthusiasm for her "Hotties," and isn't afraid to show it. -IM4Oakgal
Aha, now we know the Angels' pythag-breaking secret!
"Go ahead and overachieve, you scrappy Brett-Favre-colored walk-takers." —Rev Halofan
Fantastic, doctorK.
Don’t have much to add other than what’s already been said, but nice work.
No, there's no light,
in the darkest of your furthest reaches.
Thanks for letting us know who got lucky during 2009
I was already pretty sure it wasn’t me.
I like Cindi. A. She never pretends to know more than she does. B. She has unbridled enthusiasm for her "Hotties," and isn't afraid to show it. -IM4Oakgal
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