Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> The Value of In-Season Scheduling

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The Value of In-Season Scheduling

Of the major NCAA sports, or at least of baseball and the larger minor sports like football or basketball, there's one neat feature that baseball has that the other don't. The schedule's not completely known at the beginning of the year. I mean, can you see Bobby Bowden getting on the phone in mid-October to, say, Larry Blakeney, and going, "Hey, I see we're both off next week and have a game to make up. Y'all wanna come down?" But every year, through the magic of early-season rainouts and intentional late-season open spots in the mid-week, most baseball teams that don't play in Arizona get to revamp as much as 10% (and sometimes more) of their schedule on the fly. The neat thing about that is that it lets you see what your team actually needs schedule-wise before doing it. If you've got a young team that's struggling and needs some at bats against a little lighter competition to get ready for next year, you can set that up. If you're assured of a tournament spot and the seed you want and you want to rest your starters, just sit it out. And if you think you're right around the bubble, you can do wonders for your RPI with a few well-chosen games against the right teams.

In the interests of concreteness, I want to look at a specific example of that last possibility. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Albany could really do themselves some good if they got on the phone, and I want to explain why (I haven't actually checked to see if they noticed it, too, so this is all theoretical). Albany wasn't expected to be anything special this year; Baseball America picked them for sixth in the America East, which is not the kind of place you want to be if you're thinking about an at large bid. They've played amazingly well, though; they're currently 27-6 and sitting in first in the league. Most significantly, for much of the year, their RPI was in the top 40, which will generally get you a bid. By this week, though, they're down to #78, which won't. Now, what's dropped their RPI is not any fault of their play; it's that the other teams in their conference are killing the opponents' winning percentage component of the RPI. That piece, which makes up half of the base RPI formula, is sitting at .400 right now.

Their schedule looks, basically, like a lower-tier conference team. They've played a tournament that included Coastal Carolina and Missouri and played a single game against St. John's, and went 2-1 against those three. The rest of their schedule falls below #150 in the ISR's for this week. They did play Central Connecticut State this week, which isn't in the RPI's yet; CCSU isn't good, but they look like it to the RPI's, since they're 28-10. The rest of the way, though, most of their opponents are around .500. Figuring in three games against 9-20 Hartford, and the average winning percentage for the rest of the teams they play is .484. That helps some, but not enough.

Besides praying for rainouts against Hartford, though, there's something working in their favor. Albany, like most Northeastern teams, has had a large number of games rained out this year. In their case, it's an unusually high number -- ten games. A couple of those have been made up, but as it stands, they're going to end up eight games under the maximum allowed number of games. It's a little late, but they still have several open dates that they could fill -- if they go to five games a week, they could easily add five games between now and the conference tournament. Now, you don't want to add just anyone; the idea is to pick teams who have a very high winning percentage. As it turns out, there are several teams within driving range of Albany for a midweek game that meet that qualification. I've already mentioned Central Connecticut at 28-10 (I'm using last week's records, but it doesn't change the math much). The NEC leader, Quinnipiac, would also be worth a look at 21-14. LeMoyne, at 20-14, is already on the schedule for one game; adding another might be possible. Army, at 32-11, could be worth a look. Just to get a fifth (although there's no reason not to repeat), we'll throw in a bit of a drive to get to Dartmouth at 22-12.

Adding those five games raises the remaining opponents' winning percentage to .531, an increase of .05. Factoring in the already-played portion of the schedule means an increase in their overall OWP of about .02. If we cherry-pick even more by taking only the best winning percentages above (say, two games against CCSU and three against Army), we can get up to about .04. Since that's half the RPI, that means an increase in RPI of .02. Add in the corresponding increase in Albany's winning percentage (despite picking teams with good records, they're still better than anyone they're adding to the schedule), and it's pretty easy to get to an RPI increase of .03.

Now, there are far too many numbers in the above paragraph -- I'm on a show-your-work kick. Remember this one, though -- .03, the increase we're talking about here by doing some ambitious in-season scheduling, is the difference this week in #63 North Carolina-Greensboro, who won't get an at large bid because of their RPI, and #41 Lamar, who will.

Just to be sure there's no misunderstanding, this is not specific advice for the Albany staff (although I'd love to see them try it). There are all sorts of factors that go into scheduling, and it's really late to try to put something like this together. This is intended more as an example of what's possible, so that coaches who find themselves on the bubble know that there's something they might be able to do to get themselves in.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

Actually, this is an experiment for me to see how predictable the postseason makeup is. I want to see how accurate my picks are (using myself as the test subject as a moderately knowledgeable observer with no input into the results) at various distances from the selection. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

Atlantic 10    Miami                 Oklahoma              Arizona State
America East   Notre Dame            Oklahoma State        Washington
CAA            Oral Roberts          Texas Tech            Arizona
Horizon        Rice                  Minnesota             Southern California
Ivy            Wichita State         Penn State            Oregon State
MAAC           Florida State         Birmingham-Southern   Louisiana State
MAC            North Carolina        Coastal Carolina      Mississippi
MEAC           North Carolina State  UC Irvine             South Carolina
Mountain West  Georgia Tech          Long Beach State      Florida
NEC            Virginia              Cal State Fullerton   Arkansas
OVC            Clemson               Southern Mississippi  Tennessee
Patriot        Florida Atlantic      East Carolina         Auburn
SWAC           Central Florida       Tulane                Vanderbilt
Southern       Texas                 Texas Christian       Georgia
Sun Belt       Texas A&M             Houston               Texas State
WCC            Nebraska              Stanford              Lamar

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> The Value of In-Season Scheduling

About the author, Boyd Nation