Sites for Stat-Heads

With about fifty games left in the baseball season, the pennant races (and more crucially, the wild-card races) are starting to heat up.  Avid fans begin to check the standings more frequently, trying to calculate the chances that their team will make the post-season.

Here are three sites that make this ritual easier.

First, one I’ve shown you before:

Fangraphs gives you live updates of not only all the scores, but also of the odds of any team to win the game:

Exciting game!

With graphs like these constantly updated throughout the day, you can see at a glance how the teams you’re interested in are doing.  You can also get a heads-up on the type of game they’re involved in.  A wildly veering line is a slugfest.  A line that hugs the 50% central line is a pitchers’ duel.

That’s a site I look at all season long, because it tells me at a glance which games I’d like to read about the next day.

The next one I’ll tell you about starts to become interesting right about this time of year.

Coolstandings.com gives you not only your team’s record and games ahead or back in the pennant race, but its odds of winning the division or a wild-card berth.

I can't believe the Red Sox still have a shot.

The odds are calculated by a formula (related to Bill James’ Pythagorean method) which includes the relative strengths of your team’s upcoming opponents, and runs through a million simulations of the balance of the season.

If you click on your team’s name at Coolstandings, you get some more interesting information:

Could be worse.

You can see your team’s trends over the whole season, the opponents they’ll face through the rest of the year (with their individual and aggregate winning percentages) broken down for home and away games, and other cool stuff.

The last site I’m going to show you is not so useful right now, but when it comes down to crunch time it’s my favorite place to visit.

RIOT stands for “Remote Interactive Operations Testbed” for some reason.  Whatever it’s called, it performs an intriguing function.  First, the chart:

(Click to enlarge.)

What RIOT does is to look at all possible combinations of wins and losses by both your team and their opponents.  By going through this process, it can establish the number of wins needed to clinch a division title or wild-card regardless of how well any other team plays.  Conversely, it can calculate the minimal number of wins needed to clinch a title or wild-card assuming a best-case scenario.

In the example above, which was retrieved this morning, you can see that the Yankees have 49 games left, and if they win 44 of those they’ll win no matter what any other team does.  On the other hand, if they can manage to win at least 4 more games, they still have a chance to make the playoffs.

Like I said, this isn’t much help right now* but when there’s a week or two left in the season, you’ll be checking this site.  There are separate links for the American League and the National League.

If you’re thinking, ‘isn’t this the same as the “magic number” that newspapers publish when the season is drawing to a close?’ then check out this explanation of the difference, and how the magic number doesn’t tell you what you really want to know.

———————————————-

*On the other hand, it is interesting that although Tampa is 9 games over .500 at 61-52, they already cannot win the division without help.  Even if they won every game, they would still need their opponents to lose occasionally.

Share on Facebook