Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Well, Crap

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Well, Crap

One of the problems with living in public, as I do with this particular part of my life, is that your mistakes are really embarassing. In this particular case, I'm going to call attention to it myself, in the interests of credibility and honesty. You remember that table I ran last week giving the series sweep rate for each conference? It turns out that most of it was wrong. I was going back to modify the code that generated those numbers to look for the answers to a couple of followup questions and discovered a bug that had thrown all the answers off.

Here's the corrected version. It turns out that the numbers are much more clustered around the same rates:

                        4G/2D          4G/3D          3G/2D          3G/3D
Conf                  #   S    %     #   S    %     #   S    %     #   S    %

ACC                    0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0   48  18  37.5  243 109  44.9
America East         125  32  25.6   14   3  21.4   54  19  35.2    2   0   0.0
Atlantic 10            0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  306 118  38.6   28   8  28.6
Atlantic Sun           0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  195  67  34.4   29   9  31.0
Big 12                 0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0   61  20  32.8  310 114  36.8
Big East               0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  226  91  40.3   21   6  28.6
Big South              0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  149  57  38.3   70  35  50.0
Big Ten               38   9  23.7  228  44  19.3   19   3  15.8    5   0   0.0
Big West               0   0   0.0    1   0   0.0    5   3  60.0  254 110  43.3
C-USA                  0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0   46  10  21.7  357 152  42.6
CAA                    0   0   0.0    1   0   0.0   54  26  48.1  178  74  41.6
Horizon                6   2  33.3   56  10  17.9    7   1  14.3    2   0   0.0
Independents           9   3  33.3    7   4  57.1   31  13  41.9   18  10  55.6
Ivy                   75  19  25.3   15   1   6.7    6   0   0.0    2   0   0.0
MAAC                  20   1   5.0    6   1  16.7  209  95  45.5   34  15  44.1
MAC                   93  25  26.9  101  19  18.8   32  10  31.2   83  29  34.9
MCC                   14   3  21.4   37   6  16.2    2   1  50.0    1   1 100.0
MEAC                   9   4  44.4    2   0   0.0  125  67  53.6    3   1  33.3
MVC                   53  13  24.5  170  42  24.7   21   1   4.8   37  16  43.2
Mid-Continent        139  47  33.8    2   1  50.0    8   2  25.0    0   0   0.0
Mountain West          4   4 100.0    4   2  50.0   29  11  37.9  132  49  37.1
NEC                    1   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  158  51  32.3   20   7  35.0
New York               3   1  33.3    0   0   0.0    5   2  40.0    0   0   0.0
OVC                    0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  262  91  34.7    3   0   0.0
Pac 10                 1   0   0.0    5   2  40.0   20   7  35.0  284  91  32.0
Patriot               97  23  23.7   18   5  27.8    1   0   0.0    1   1 100.0
SEC                    0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0   27   9  33.3  435 151  34.7
SWAC                 129  46  35.7    2   2 100.0   44  20  45.5    3   1  33.3
Southern               0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  231  87  37.7  172  66  38.4
Southland              0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  176  52  29.5  162  43  26.5
Sun Belt               0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  108  42  38.9  191  57  29.8
TAAC                   0   0   0.0    0   0   0.0  175  71  40.6    8   3  37.5
WAC                    0   0   0.0    7   3  42.9   30  14  46.7  252 102  40.5
WCC                    4   0   0.0    5   2  40.0  122  45  36.9  169  64  37.9

Again, "G" is the number of games, "D" is the number of days, and "S" is the number of sweeps, so, for example, the ACC had 18 sweeps in the 48 series played where 3 games were played in 2 days.

So they don't get lost in the shuffle, let me point out the other two results I was looking for. First of all, what percentage of sweeps happen at home? The overall home winning percentage in conference play is 55.6% over these 8 years (as an interesting aside, that happens even though home teams only scored 51.2% of the runs, which tells you what even a small advantage in runs can do for you), so you'd expect the sweep rate to be around that, I think, but it's actually 63.2%. In other words, home teams sweep more often than you'd expect just from the home team advantage.

The second question is, "Is a sweep more likely than expected if a team has already won the first two games?" Another way to put this is, "Is there such a thing as series momentum?" There are two ways to think about this if you're not really thinking: In announcer-speak, "Enormous State has the confidence of knowing they can beat this team, and they're more likely to finish it out today," or, "Vine Covered U. has their backs to the wall today, so you know they'll bear down here on Sunday to prevent the sweep."

Now, you wouldn't expect the rate for that third game to just be 50% (or 55%, to take the HFA into account), because there are obviously more cases where the better team overall is up 2-0 than the other way around. Using the crude ISR-based probability formula (each point of ISR is worth around 2% in expected win probability), I get an expected sweep rate of 66.8%. The actual rate is 64.2%, so it is true that it's harder to finish a sweep than to win an ordinary game. Whether this is a psychological factor or due to something like the fact that the team who's up 2-0 may have already burned off more of the bullpen to preserve leads, I can't tell.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. 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.

America East   North Carolina        Liberty              UCLA
Atlantic 10    Wake Forest           Purdue               Washington
Atlantic Sun   Miami, Florida        UC Irvine            Stanford
Horizon        Florida State         Long Beach State     Georgia
Ivy            North Carolina State  Cal State Fullerton  Arkansas
MAAC           Virginia              Cal Poly             Mississippi State
MEAC           Oklahoma              Old Dominion         Alabama
Mountain West  Texas                 Rice                 Louisiana State
NEC            Kansas                Houston              Florida
OVC            Oklahoma State        Tulane               South Carolina
Patriot        Baylor                Kent State           Elon
Southland      Nebraska              Oral Roberts         College of Charleston
Sun Belt       Kansas State          Wichita State        Hawaii
SWAC           Notre Dame            Arizona State        Fresno State
Georgia Tech   Rutgers               Oregon State         San Diego
Clemson        Winthrop              Southern California  Pepperdine

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.

The start listed for Matt Fealey of Yale last week, a complete-game, 53-batter monstrosity against Eastern Illinois, is apparently a phantom. He's listed as the only Yale pitcher in the box score published by EIU, but he doesn't show up at all in the Yale-published box, so I'll assume there's an error on the opponent web site.

(*) Pitch count is estimated. As always, I welcome actual pitch count corrections.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Well, Crap

About the author, Boyd Nation