The White Sox defeat the Athletics 6-1 Thursday afternoon to take the opening series three games to one. This morning I was fooling around with an idea, of basing standings not on won-lost records, but on winning and losing season series against opponents. Often I hear announcers talk about the importance of winning individual series. Those are a bit nebulous, but the season series against an opponent is pretty clear cut.
My idea was to award one point if a team won a season series, 1/2 point if they tied, and no points if they lost. I expected this would produce close to the same results as the won-lost records, and in the NL it did. The Cardinals, Cubs, and Pirates were the three best teams (Cubs finished ahead of the Pirates by 1/2 point), with the Mets and Dodgers winning the other two divisions.
The AL came out a bit differently. Houston blew away the field, 13-4-2 in series. Toronto won the east (11-5-3) and KC won the Central (12-7-0). Texas took the first wild card (10-5-4), but the Chicago White Sox, who were not really in the race, take the second wild card at 9-6-4, beating the Yankees by 1/2 point (10-8-1).
What happened is that the White Sox mostly one series with a close won-lost record, but lost series big. The White Sox, in this case, would be analogous to a team with a winning record that is outscored by their opponents.
I don’t think this would work. One thing is that once a series was won, there’s no reason to take a game seriously. On one hand, it might prevent injuries since teams could rest players, but I’m not sure fans would like having games in the middle of the season not really count. I do find it interesting that there is a system in which a team that was torn apart actually would have made the playoffs.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/23gmUX0
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