Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

Anybody got any theories on why a team might undeperform or overperform in comparison with the pythagorean winning percentage projection? I have a team about to finish out of the playoffs even though its runs scored and runs allowed numbers suggest it should have won nearly 10 more games than it did.

http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/baseball/stratomatic/80s/team/team_other.html?user_id=78765

My own hypothesis is that good relief pitching can get a team more wins than the numbers suggest and bad relief pitching can saddle a team with fewer wins. In the link above, you'll see that Kent Tekulve, a longtime favorite of mine, had a pretty rough season. Anybody else have any hunches on why my team lost more than it maybe should have, or why teams in general might overperform or underperform in comparison to their runs scored and runs allowed number? (Maybe it's just luck?)

I agree that luck and bullpen would be the two biggest reasons a team would differ from its Pythag. Another one would be your offensive style of play. If you use more one-run strategies (steal, bunt, H&R), then you will be involved in fewer blowouts and thus be closer to the Pythag. The tradeoff, of course, is that you're quite likely to also score fewer runs and thus win fewer games to begin with :)

sometimes it's just luck (or in your case lack of it). I had a team (in ATG III) that made it to the Finals with more runs allowed than scored, was outhomered and a slugging pct% lower than my team ERA (this to me is a more accurate indicator of how a team is doing). That team had two ace starters and scrubs on the back end. The aces carried the team and the others got blown out a lot in that situation. In your case, Tekulve lost a lot of games, true, but even with that your team should have a much better record given the run differential. HAL just doesn't like you dude!

I believe that strat is an offense-based games. Twenty-run blowouts aren't all that uncommon, but it real life, that doesn't occur all that much. That would screw up any run differential.

To put it in perspective, I looked up runs scored in the American league in the 80s, and I think the record for runs scored by a team in the American League is 896 by the '87 Tigers, and the mid-700s seems to be the norm. On Strat, most leagues will have at least one team with 900+ runs scored, and a few others with well more than 800+ runs scored.