I wish there was a cool graph I could come up with to illustrate this, but it's an elusive image right now. There is one interesting data point that didn't make the actual data - the 2011 Red Sox. Back when the team was falling apart from within and completing one of the most monumental collapses in history, Adrian Gonzalez was saying that the team had too many night games on getaway days - days in which the team travels to another city - and that it was a lot to endure. (You can read more about it here.) This was coming from a player who was 29 at the time, enjoying a .338 batting average and 117 RBI. So I looked into it, and in 2011, the Red Sox were 21-12, good for a .636 win percentage, much higher than their .556 overall win percentage. I won't say that Gonzalez was making empty excuses, but it might have been a good idea to consult the stats before he made his remarks.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Rise and shine, there's baseball today
Well, now that I'm essentially out of things to blog about pertaining to Stonehill, I have to find something else to talk about. Good thing I still love messing around with baseball-reference.com! I wanted to see if there was any relationship between the average age of an MLB team, and their win percentage in day games played following a night game. The theory here being that older teams rest some of their older stars for said games (this can be said for banged-up players and catchers, too), and because the best players aren't out there, the games aren't being won. Unfortunately, I was horribly off. In 2013, the ten oldest teams (we're talking about exclusively hitters here - if a pitcher is scheduled to pitch a certain day, he's pitching that day) won 55.4% of their day games after a night game. On the other end of the spectrum, the ten youngest teams won 45.8% of their games, effectively reversing my hypothesis. The correlation between a team's average age and their difference in win percentages (that is, overall win % minus day-game-after-night-game win %) is 0.245, suggesting that if anything, the older your team is, the more likely you are to win these games. (Not by a significant amount, but it's still a positive correlation.)
I wish there was a cool graph I could come up with to illustrate this, but it's an elusive image right now. There is one interesting data point that didn't make the actual data - the 2011 Red Sox. Back when the team was falling apart from within and completing one of the most monumental collapses in history, Adrian Gonzalez was saying that the team had too many night games on getaway days - days in which the team travels to another city - and that it was a lot to endure. (You can read more about it here.) This was coming from a player who was 29 at the time, enjoying a .338 batting average and 117 RBI. So I looked into it, and in 2011, the Red Sox were 21-12, good for a .636 win percentage, much higher than their .556 overall win percentage. I won't say that Gonzalez was making empty excuses, but it might have been a good idea to consult the stats before he made his remarks.
I wish there was a cool graph I could come up with to illustrate this, but it's an elusive image right now. There is one interesting data point that didn't make the actual data - the 2011 Red Sox. Back when the team was falling apart from within and completing one of the most monumental collapses in history, Adrian Gonzalez was saying that the team had too many night games on getaway days - days in which the team travels to another city - and that it was a lot to endure. (You can read more about it here.) This was coming from a player who was 29 at the time, enjoying a .338 batting average and 117 RBI. So I looked into it, and in 2011, the Red Sox were 21-12, good for a .636 win percentage, much higher than their .556 overall win percentage. I won't say that Gonzalez was making empty excuses, but it might have been a good idea to consult the stats before he made his remarks.
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