Luck Factor

Kolten Wong, Kris Bryant, and Gerrit Cole are having the breakout seasons many guessed they would have.  Andrew McCutchen and Brandon Belt are coming on strong and are top 12 ranked over the last month.  Chris Sale is a beast, and most of the rest of my roster has been perfectly complimentary to these guys.  And yet, I am stuck in 10^th place, staring at a dismal .425 winning percentage and a 7-3 deficit this week which would push me down even further.

The fuck?

So I looked at the league totals and put together some “raw” power rankings to see how unlucky I was.  I calculated them by awarding 12 points to the team that has the best total in each category, 11 points to the team that has the second best total, etc.  If there was a tie for first, each team would get 12 points and the team with the third best total would get 10 points.  It’s an imperfect system; not only is the tie thing weird, but it’s not weighted. 

For instance, let’s look at the HR category.  1^st place (Eddie) has 77 HR through week 8, leading the league and earning 12 points for that category. 2^nd place is 14 homers behind – a wide margin – and gets 11 points in the power rankings.  3^rd place, however, is only 3 HR behind 2^nd and would get 10 points.  With this point system, we’re not giving Eddie enough credit for dominating the HR category.  We’re saying the gap from 1-2 and 2-3 is the same.  It’s still an indicator of luck, but not a great one.

I tried to come up with a weighted power ranking system but I couldn’t connect the dots.  Having to find one system that could handle both the counting and ratio categories proved difficult.

My new idea is to compare our numbers to the league average.  It’ll yield a number that won’t mean much at first, but it will at least give us weighted rankings that tell us how our numbers stack up against the league average. 

Let’s go back to the HR category.  When comparing team totals against league averages, we get the following:

1) Eddie +34% vs league average

2) John +10% vs league average

3) Dan +4% vs league average

Now we’re working with something.  First place Eddie’s dominance in the HR category is accurately captured with a 24-percentage point difference over second place John, vs second place John’s 6-percentage point difference over third place Dan. 

If we push this out to the rest of the categories, we get the following results:

Ok, theres a lot to digest in there. All you have to keep in mind is that 1.00 is the league average.  Anything above 1.00 is above league average, anything below 1.00 is below league average.  I also threw in some colors to easily identify areas of notable and extreme variance from the league average.

So after all of those words and boring math talk, here’s what you came here for:

Perka is justified in his first place position.  He’s clearly been the best team this season, by any measure.  Way to go buddy.  Musto, Russell, and John have been the luckiest thus far. Dan, Greg, and Richie (vindication!) have been the unluckiest.  Brad and Scanlon, I have draft picks for your good players because you have not been unlucky and you just plan suck.  Yes, I just managed to open and close trade talks with two teams in one sentence.

Let’s push this thing into overdrive.  Go back to the examples from earlier with the HR category.  Remember how the weighted categories more accurately depicted the gap between our totals?  Let’s keep running with that idea. 

It’s easy to say that Russell has been luckier than Musto because he is 5 spots higher than his predicted spot, while Musto is only 3 spots higher than his predicted spot.  But I think we can quanitify this to see who’s actually the luckiest and unluckiest.

If the 1.00 figure is the league average, that would stand to reason that 1.00 equates to a .500% winning percentage.  So if we take the weighted totals and subtract .500 (I think that’s how it works):

Boom.  Here is your quantified luck so far from luckiest to unluckiest.

The Variance column is how far off of your expected winning percentage you are.  Russell's winning percentage is .109 higher than it should be, while Greg's is .060 lower than it should be.

First of all, nothing makes me happier than seeing that name at the top of the list.  Look at that projected winning percentage.  Gross.  That’s like a whole .009 below an acceptable winning percentage.  You should be embarrassed. 

Second and not surprisingly, we can see that the top four spots in the standings have been the luckiest teams, while the three unluckiest teams are not currently in the playoff picture.  Brad’s in 11^th despite his good fortune - imagine if he was as unlucky as Scanlon or Greg? Dan is in 5^th and has gotten the shit end of the stick - imagine if he was getting Russell luck?

Finally, was it worth writing three pages of garbage just to come to the conclusion that despite being unlucky this year, my stats are still not playoff caliber?  You may have a point.  But I just made up for the 6 weeks of bloglessness with this monster.  I’ll check back in at various points in the season with the updated numbers (maybe leave out the words) so we can either make fun of people for being unlucky or make fun of people for not deserving their success.