Monday, March 12, 2012

Pythagorean Expectation Part 1.5: 2011 San Francisco Giants

Wanted to get out another example about Pythagorean Expectation. The San Francisco Giants' 2011 Season. Unless you are also a Giants fan, I cannot even begin to tell you how damn stressful it is to watch these games sometimes. They are torture. I don't know how many hours of sleep I've lost. Leading 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th. Brian Wilson on the mound. Walk. Out. Out. Walk. Walk. Pitch count 3-2. Foul. Foul. Foul. Strike Three. Whew. That's Giants baseball. One run squeakers. We can do this all season. Not. They were just setting themselves up for an epic fail. Let's take a look at the season ending numbers.

No surprise to anyone who follows baseball. The Giants were one of the bottom-feeders in offense. Third to last in my ratings. However, they maneuvered themselves into 86-76 record.... scoring ONLY 3.52 runs per game. That's 570 runs scored all season. And how many runs do they allow? 578. Now what does that tell us?

How do the Giants have a positive winning record? They allowed more runs than they scored. What happens when you allow more runs? You lose. With 570 runs scored and 578 runs allowed, the Giants end with a PW% of 0.494. This translates to a Pwin of 79.97 games, giving us a Pdiff of -6.03. From what I remember, they already had a Pdiff of about -5.0 (estimate) at the All-Star Break. The Arizona Diamondbacks however, had a positive Pdiff. The SF Giants were not going to repeat as Division Champions (although it got close at the end as the Dbacks tried to screw themselves over as well).

If you updated the stats daily, you can see the Pdiff for the Giants progressively grow bigger and bigger in the negative with all of their one-two run wins. When they lose a game, they would not lose by one. They lose by three, seven, thirteen. What happens as we allow more runs in the equation? The denominator gets bigger, giving us a lower win percentage. And then we lose. We lose. We lose. Alright, I'm done ranting. Peace.

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