April 11, 2010

W-L Contest - Fun With Pythag

A little while after contest entries started coming in, I realized that everyone was submitting (mostly likely without knowing it) two W-L guesses.

The second guess could be determined by the tiebreaker choices. With the runs scored and run differential, I could get a guess of runs allowed. Then, using good old Pythag, I could determine an expected W-L and compare it to the contestant's actual W-L guess. Fun!

Here is everyone's actual W-L submission, in the same order as posted before the season began, and the expected amount of Red Sox wins according to each person's RS/RunDiff guesses.

I predicted 98 wins, but my other guesses worked out to only 93 wins. Could that be seen as a "truer" measure of how I think the team will do?
          ACTUAL W-L    PYTHAG WINS FROM
PREDICTION TIEBREAKER GUESSES

Rick F 100-62 98.7
Jere S 100-62 98.7

Edward N 99-63 100.8
Justin M 99-63 93.5
Matthew K 99-63 99.1

Steve S 98-64 96.9
9casey 98-64 96.7
Tim B 98-64 97.5
Ofer C 98-64 101.9
Joe G 98-64 97.2
Sean O 98-64 98.3
Allan W 98-64 93.3
Geoffrey W 98-64 97.2

Jonathan A 97-65 95.6
Franco B 97-65 96.4
Rich G 97-65 95.4
James C 97-65 98.0
Andrew B 97-65 98.0
John Q 97-65 91.4

Tim L 96-66 97.0
Richard L 96-66 99.1
Jeff L 96-66 95.1
Matthew B 96-66 100.0
Steve T 96-66 95.9
Dan C 96-66 94.6

Joel F 95-67 91.7
Ignacio C 95-67 112.8

Philip H 94-68 101.9

Matt M 93-69 101.6
Lewis S 93-69 95.4

Jeff R 90-72 95.1

Peter L 89-73 89.4

7 comments:

mattymatty said...

Steve T and I have the smallest differential (0.1) between our predicted records and predicted pythag records. So we're geniuses.

Also I like how Ignacio C thinks the Red Sox are going to under-perform their pythag record by 17 games but they'll still win 95.

allan said...

I'm assuming no one thought to check to see if the W-L, RS and Run Diff all checked out before emailing them in.

Geoff said...

I certainly didn't though I am pleased to see I wasn't far off.

tim said...

Interesting - I was thinking about this when doing the prediction, but never actually got around to doing the pythag calc. Probably would've changed my tiebreaker answers to be bang on.

I was 1 win out, that ignacio one is funny too.

A Conformer said...

I didn't actually calculate pythag when making my prediction, but I knew it would predict a better win percentage. But the Sox always underperform their pythag, so I adjusted down.
This doesn't make my entry any less too-rosy, but I'm cool with that.

Lord Lynch said...

Good to see I'm a misery consistent with scientific formula!

Rick (f/k/a westcoastsox) said...

I can't believe that the most optimistic are Jere and me.