TigerNSX said:
Strange first two games. Lots of errors and lots of runs.
Both teams are strong at their home fields.
Here's another article from yesterday's
New York Times, which I found very interesting. It uses past results to quantify the home field advantage as well as the advantage of a team that wins more games; it's not as big an advantage as you think, and luck plays a big part.
Winning Team and Best Team? It's a Flip of the Coin
By ALAN SCHWARZ
Published: October 24, 2004
Frederick Mosteller is a lifelong Red Sox fan. This is impressive on its face, particularly considering that his life began in 1916, and that he has survived almost nine decades with no memory of his team's last World Series victory. Yet even beyond that, it is remarkable because Mosteller has understood, perhaps longer than anyone else on the planet, the cruel mathematics of October baseball.
Not long after his Red Sox lost to the Cardinals in the 1946 World Series, Mosteller, then a young Harvard lecturer and statistician, was attending a cocktail party when the inevitable question arose.
"Somebody asked about the probability of the winner of the World Series being the better team," recalled Mosteller, now retired and living in Arlington, Va. "It occurred to me that I could write about that."
The result was "The World Series Competition," an article that appeared in September 1952 in The Journal of the American Statistical Association, and remains the first known academic analysis of baseball. When fans watching this year's rematch between Boston and St. Louis repeat the modern mantra "anything can happen in a short series," they are, perhaps less rigorously, reaching the same conclusion Mosteller did more than 50 years ago.
"There should be no confusion here," he wrote, "between the 'winning team' and the 'better team.' "
Sure enough, through 25 pages of binomial probability theory, Mosteller showed how a stronger team - say, one with a 60 percent chance of winning each game - will still lose at least four of seven games 29 percent of the time because of the vagaries of luck. Even Manager Joe Torre, who despite last week's stupefying loss to the Red Sox has a whopping 17-5 record in postseason series with the Yankees, admitted as the 2004 playoffs began: "During 162 games, usually the better teams win. But in short series, luck plays a significant role."
Although comparing the World Series to coin flipping might seem a bit, well, flippant, history demonstrates that it might not be far off. Before 1969, when there was only one annual best-of-seven-game postseason series, the team with the better regular-season record won 34 of 65 series, just a tick more than 50 percent.
From 1969 through 1993, when baseball played one additional preliminary series, a league championship series (first best of five games, later best of seven), the team with the best regular-season record ended up wearing rings 7 of 25 times, or 28 percent. That is very close to the 25 percent of the time a flipped coin will come up heads twice in a row. Since 1995, when the postseason expanded to eight teams and three rounds, the best team in the regular-season has won one of nine World Series, just what a coin's theoretical probability (1 in 8, or 12.5 percent) would prescribe.
Such random-looking results are what caused Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, loser of four straight opening-round series from 2000 to 2003, to liken the baseball playoffs to a crapshoot. John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, whose probability models made him a billionaire commodities trader, put it this way: "Every team might not start with a 12½ percent chance, but no one's lower than 10 or higher than about 15."
But even craps games have calculable odds. Perhaps not surprisingly, another Red Sox fan, Tom Tippett of Lexington, Mass., has developed an interesting method that assesses the math Boston must overcome this year against St. Louis. Tippett is the inventor of a popular computer-simulation game called Diamond Mind Baseball.
Cued by work done by the baseball statistician Bill James in the early 80's, Tippett determined that the chances of one team's beating another could be estimated by the difference in their winning percentages, plus .500. (Correlation tests on almost a century of major league games determined this to be accurate; i.e., .580 teams beat .450 teams roughly 63 percent of the time.)
As Tippett looked at this year's World Series, Boston carried in a winning percentage of .610 (including postseason), St. Louis .647. This suggests that the Cardinals have a 53.7 percent chance of winning the average game between them. And after applying Mosteller's binomial theory, the Cardinals have a 58 percent chance of beating the Red Sox to four victories.
But Tippett builds in several more factors. The Sox could play four games at home, and home games typically add 42 points to a team's winning percentage. Making that adjustment, the Cardinals decline to a 57 percent favorite. Even more significantly, the two teams' rosters have changed, specifically Boston's addition of shortstop Orlando Cabrera. Using only the teams' winning percentages since the July 31 trade deadline, Boston, which has played .700 ball since then, becomes the favorite, at 61 percent.
As heartening as that might be to Red Sox fans, as Mosteller explained a half-century ago, 61 percent still leads to heartbreak a fair share of the time. But at least the Red Sox' historic comeback last week encourages Tippett and Mosteller that maybe, just maybe, their team's chances can be governed more by coin flips than curses.
"Now that they beat the Yankees, I'm not sitting here thinking that they'll find some way to blow it," Tippett said. "But the intellectual person in me knows that they could play well and still lose the World Series. There's a very legitimate chance that will happen. You know, it's not supposed to be easy."
With the Red Sox, it never is.
E-mail: [email protected]
The guy was out of his mind. Honestly, it was a series where it's tough for there to be a loser. Houston has some hard nose ball payers who deserve a world series opportunity. Congrats to the Stro's for a good series. 
. Then, to start the playoffs, Walker received two curtain calls in the same game.
