sports+data

a view into the world of sports and analytics

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Matt Booher

Matt Booher

Dad, husband, Web analytics guy, occasional sportswriter, Cleveland sports fanatic, voracious reader. Dad is new, but I've been the others for quite some time now.

A new view for MLB standings

Standings

I stumbled across an interesting article on Hardball Talk the other day titled 'A wonderfully sensible realignment and optimization plan' that focused on how baseball might improve its scheduling and the resulting competitive imbalance problems inherent with its asinine unbalanced schedule and divisional alignments. As a guy focused on helping companies optimize its given resources, I find this proposal compelling and exciting. First, a quick review of the proposal:

1. Move the Colorado Rockies to the American League. They lack a history in the National League and help balance out travel in the American League. 
2. Play a balanced schedule within your league with a few extra games against current divisional rivals. The proposal suggests treating the Rockies as a traditionally AL West team and the Houston Astros as a NL West club.
3. Combine all three divisions into a single league table where the top team earns home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, the next two teams automatically qualify for the post-season, and the next two teams earn the right to play a play-in series to the become the fourth team to round out the playoff bracket.

There are other details that make for an improved overall competitive balance when compared to MLB's current setup. Check out the link above to see more.

In this new setup, the standings would look like this:

A couple of things jump out:

1. The White Sox, despite their slow start, would be very much in the thick of the playoff race.
2. The addition of a fifth playoff team dramatically expands the competitive opportunities for teams further down the standings.
3. The idea of combining the standings into a combined table makes so much more sense than Bud Selig's idiotic proposal of making divisions pliable, whereas a team like the Blue Jays could compete in the AL Central while rebuilding and then switch back to the AL East when competitive.

With 33% of the teams in each league making the playoffs, is this something worth supporting? The risk is the fifth playoff team will be added but none of the scheduling and competitive balance problems of today's baseball schedule and competitive balance. 

MLB: Should Wins Be Considered a Stat?

MLB: Should Wins Be Considered a Stat? - Sabermetricians will tell you that when it comes to pitchers, winning isn't everything. Easy for them to say. http://sports.espn.go.com/insider/news/story?id=6284300

Wins seems to be a stat of attribution which we know becomes flawed since it's dependent on the performance of others. A stat that considers not losing might be compelling. Another could consider the delta between team outcomes and the partial contribution starters make to those outcomes - both positive and negative.

Rethinking the Standings Part 2

Now that baseball season has begun, the daily ritual of checking the baseball standing begins. A couple of months ago, FanGraphs shared some ideas on how to rethink the standings for Major League Baseball. A few compelling suggestions were shared.

I think there three key perspectives must be accommodated when reconstructing the baseball standings:

1. A simple view to see how well each team sits relative to .500.
2. A relative view to see how far back/ahead each team stands from the division leader.
3. A broader view inclusive of all teams to determine position relative to Wild Card race.

The first provides insight into team performance. Additionally, a way to view trends similar to Streak or Last 10 would be very helpful. The second gives us a view into the main function of the standings - who is in first, second, third, etc. Any good visualization will use visual cues to show the non-equal distance between each position. The third view, and perhaps the most challenging, provides perspective as to how well the team is performing relative to everyone else. This is especially important in looking the Wild Card race because many of the teams competing against each other for positioning are not in the same smaller collection of divisional rivals.

I'll stay on the lookout for interesting representations of the baseball standings throughout the summer.

Rethinking the Standings

Now that baseball season has begun, the daily ritual of checking the baseball standing begins. A couple of months ago, FanGraphs shared some ideas on how to rethink the standings for Major League Baseball. A few compelling suggestions were shared.

I think there three key perspectives must be accommodated when reconstructing the baseball standings:

1. A simple view to see how well each team sits relative to .500.
2. A relative view to see how far back/ahead each team stands from the division leader.
3. A broader view inclusive of all teams to determine position relative to Wild Card race.

via FanGraphs Baseball by Joshua Maciel on 2/8/11

Every morning when I was a kid, I would wake up and grab the sports pages to see how my team was doing. Millions of people across the country do the same — they wake up and reach for a paper to sift through something like this:

I always go straight for my division and my team, and see how many games behind they are. I then look longingly at the Wild Card standings to get an idea of how far behind they are. But most of the information gets completely ignored as I eat my breakfast. I’m guessing that millions of people across the country are doing the same.

Chris Spurlock over at Beyond the Box Score made a noble attempt to animate a division race here. But a few things didn’t sit well with me. First of all, it was out of context — you can see how your team is doing in comparison to the division leader, but not in relation to the rest of the league.

My suggestion was this:

But I still have the same problem. It shows how each team is doing in relation to the AL East, but how is the rest of the AL doing? Not to mention that it looks almost exactly like the graphs Studes used to update on The Hardball Times. Though that isn’t a bad thing, it also means that I didn’t add anything at all to the conversation.

So I got thinking even harder about it. What do we really want to see in the standings? We want to know how our team is doing. We want to know how far behind they are in the division. We want to know how they are doing in relation to the other teams in the league when it comes to the Wild Card Standings. Also, we probably want to see what direction they’re headed in. Some newspapers show the record over the last 10 games and/or the current streak (3L, or 4W, etc.). Studes created sparklines to do the same thing.

This is my attempt at making the divisional race better (the file is 6 megabytes, so please give it a little bit of time to load):

Each division is on the same graph, so we can compare across the entire AL in a glance. Whoever is furthest left in their division is in first. Each team also has a “trail” of 5 days to show what direction they are moving in. When a line pops up between two teams, it means that they have changed places in the standings.

Unlike my usual graphs, this was made entirely in Excel, and then was turned into a .gif file, so the image quality isn’t so great. Please be understanding. I also don’t handle ties too well, and don’t show which team is actually first in the Wild Card race.

I want your feedback. Does this graph work for you? Would looking at a chart like this every morning with your coffee be a good replacement for the traditional standings?