Monday, April 20, 2009

No Game Today... But

Let me throw out this little mathematical tidbit. The Dodgers are off to a 10-3 start. Sure, it doesn't gaurantee squat at this point due to small sample size and the fact that the Dodgers have yet to face real, I mean any competition outside of the NL West plus a hundred other reasons. But it is 13 games, so it does mean something as there are only 149 games left in the season.

Let's say you predicted the Dodgers to win somewhere between 87-92 games before the season started this year. You now have to add around three wins to that total. Why? Well, let's use a 88 win projection as our example. 88 wins in a 162 game season is a winning percentage of 0.5432. On a 13 game pace with a 0.5432 winning percentage the Dodgers should have 7.1 wins. But they don't, they have 10. The Dodgers in this scenario have banked 2.9 wins. That's house money. So take your 88 wins and add 2.9 (let's call it three) wins, which means you have to up your win projection for the Dodgers to 91. Likewise, if you projected them as a 90 win team to start off the season, you now have to bump that up to 93. The same for the other NL West teams. If you thought the Dodgers closest competitor, the Arizona Diamondbacks was going to be an 85 win team, well they are off to a 4-8 start and need to be docked around 2 wins. So you are looking at around a 5 win swing between what you need to adjust your Dodger and Diamondbacks projections to. It still doesn't gaurantee anything, but it's always nice to have the advantage.

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