Indians' dominance?

As long as I'm posting to this blog, I might as well share with you an email exchange I just had with my friend Jeff Brown. (I'm pretty sure Jeff won't mind.) I emailed him this morning under the heading "Indians are actually the best team in the AL Central."

Me: Check this out:

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/standings/

According to this page, the Indians have actually played like the best team in the American League Central this year. They've just been deeply unfortunate. According to what the nice folks at Baseball Prospectus call "3rd Order Winning Percentage," no team in the division has had better underlying statistics than our Tribe. Bad luck has shortchanged them out of 11 wins this season (rounding off).

It's apparently some sort of proprietary formula, but this is how BP defines the stat:

3rd Order Winning Percentage: A team's projected winning percentage, based on underlying statistics and adjusted for quality of opponents.

Of course, none of this helps them in the standings. But still, I thought it was interesting.


Jeff:  This is fascinating stuff!

It looks like the Indians get the second-highest adjusted win total (10.6 more wins) in MLB... second only to the Oakland Billy Beane's with 11.7.

Oakland would be 63-52 if third order winning percentage was the law, instead of their actual record of 51-64.

I guess it kind of makes sense for the Tribe, which has gotten numerous stellar pitching performances but lost the game because they couldn't hit the damned ball!

On the other side of the coin, it appears that the Minnesota Twins are actually much worse than their record of 57-56 shows.  Their third order winning percentage would place them at 48-65 with their league-leading 9.4 adjustment downward.

Of course, this is just one way of looking at things and although very interesting, it doesn't meet the eye test because it indicates that the Indians ought to be 64-48 and the Royals ought to be three games back at 61-51, and everyone in the Milky Way Galaxy knows that the Royals are a better team this year than the Tribe.

What do you think?

Me: Oh, come on. There are lots of folks on Rigel 7 who have no idea how good the Royals are.

But seriously, are the Royals truly better? Based on end results, it would appear so, and that's really all that matters. But the fact that it seems obvious that the Royals are better, doesn't make it so. It used to be obvious to everyone that swinging too hard was a bad strategy, that you might hit a few balls out of the park but that would be more than offset by the number of fly balls that would find their way into outfielders' gloves. Then Babe Ruth came along. ... It used to be obvious to everyone that a walk was purely the pitcher's fault, that the hitter basically just got lucky. Then Bill James came along. ... It used to be obvious to everyone that we were all better off if black and white people were kept separate from each other. Then Martin Luther King Jr. came along. ... So what I'm saying is, if you think the Royals are better than the Indians, you're a racist.

Just kidding. The Royals may truly be a better overall team than the Indians, but this chart throws that belief into question, at least for me.

* * *

Jeff hasn't replied to that yet, and I'm assuming that's because he sees my point and agrees with me.

Incidentally, I have since researched the star Rigel, which it turns out is part of the Orion constellation, and there is no evidence it has any planets, much less inhabited ones. But Rigel 7 (or Rigel VII) has often been the setting of much alien-related fiction, as you can discover more information about here.