{"id":422,"date":"2008-05-14T22:02:52","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T21:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=422"},"modified":"2009-09-26T11:42:35","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T10:42:35","slug":"sleepless-in-st-albans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=422","title":{"rendered":"Sleepless in St Albans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether you live in Seattle or St Albans, this is not a good time to be a Mariners fan. The team\u00c2\u00a0has a woeful record (15-26 as I write this), at least relative to some bold predictions of postseason baseball. But after reading Matt’s two-part piece on Ichiro’s bad luck (part one<\/a> and part two<\/a> are here), I was left wondering if other elements of\u00c2\u00a0unluckiness are at work.<\/p>\n

One\u00c2\u00a0thing\u00c2\u00a0to notice is the team’s 1-9 record in 1-run games. While there is undoubtedly some room for teams to be “good” or “bad” in close games (through the astuteness of the manager or the small-ball\u00c2\u00a0skills of the hitting line-up), a record this lopsided must be at least in part a result of some serious bad luck. Right?<\/p>\n

Bill James developed a method, known as Pythagorean expectation,\u00c2\u00a0for estimating\u00c2\u00a0how many games a baseball team should have won,\u00c2\u00a0on average,\u00c2\u00a0based on the number of runs they have scored and\u00c2\u00a0conceded. The original and simplest formula (winning percentage equals runs\u00c2\u00a0for squared divided by the sum of runs\u00c2\u00a0for squared\u00c2\u00a0and runs\u00c2\u00a0against squared)\u00c2\u00a0suggests that\u00c2\u00a0the Mariners should have a 17-24 record at this moment based on their runs scored and allowed.\u00c2\u00a0In other words,\u00c2\u00a0bad luck has “robbed” the Mariners of just two wins. Maybe I could\u00c2\u00a0add an extra win to account for\u00c2\u00a0Ichiro’s bad luck. But even then, I’m still a fair way short of\u00c2\u00a0getting my team\u00c2\u00a0above .500.<\/p>\n

As I write this, the Mariners are tied with the Texas Rangers 3-3 in the bottom of the\u00c2\u00a0ninth inning, and the Rangers have just shown poor small-ball skills in bunting into a 3-6-4 double-play, which was an attempt to get a lead-off walk into scoring position. Time to find out if they will be made to pay…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whether you live in Seattle or St Albans, this is not a good time to be a Mariners fan. The team\u00c2\u00a0has a woeful record (15-26 as I write this), at least relative to some bold predictions of postseason baseball. But after reading Matt’s two-part piece on Ichiro’s bad luck (part one and part two are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4546,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions\/4546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}