This Has My Attention: New Questions

Unfortunately, that article is 23 years old and concludes by saying it has no conclusion. None of the bullpen stuff or one run game stuff makes any sense.

This may get us a little closer (more along the lines of what MochaDog was saying):

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comme ... _blowouts/

Looking at our Ichiro league, you won a big bunch of bigly blowouts (with alliteration! )

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/461821

We both had slightly positive extra inning wins and slightly positive one run game wins. But the big difference was your home run friendly ballpark and the number of times you decimated your opponents.

Which was a lot.

Instead of inspecting games won by five or more, in Strat I would look at the “10+ run innings.” There’s way too many of them.

It's 23 years old because it's been a known exception to pythag for a long time. Which part doesn't make sense?

And I wouldn't say there's no conclusions. The highlights are as follows:

Teams with good bullpens actually won more games–about 1.3 more, on average–than would be expected from their totals of runs and runs allowed, while teams with bad bullpens won about 1.6 fewer games than expected....

When we combine the results of both one- and two-run contests, teams with good bullpens win 0.47 games more than expected, while teams with bad bullpens win about 0.80 games less than expected. Together, this still explains less than half of the disparity between actual records and Pythagorean projections.

So while close games can't fully explain the divergence from pythag, the divergence from pythag - teams with extreme bullpens over- or under-performing - certainly exists.

I would be wary of tossing out blowouts like the reddit post does because a pretty basic premise of pythag is that blowouts reflect true talent moreso than the binary wins and losses that result from them.

From the end of the article itself:

“However, it’s just a theory, and more research may be needed to determine the true source of this dichotomy.

So maybe this isn’t the last word after all.”

Good bullpen vs bad bullpen. Is a Strat bullpen of all cheap relievers good or bad, extreme or not extreme? You can have $3mil worth of relievers with almost no innings pitched who have close to zero influence in the outcome of any game. Also, you can have $20mil worth of relievers that play a huge role in virtually every game. I’ve had both types of teams make the playoffs, but actually only the cheapo bullpen wins rings (for me).

So the part that doesn’t make sense is that real world bullpens and Strat bullpens are apples and oranges.

Also, I’ve been going through some of my pitchers park teams, and quite counterintuitively, I’m shocked to see how many times I actually win 10-1 or 15-2.

Which leads back to the conundrum where good teams that win big blowouts should have overachieving records, yet they still underperform their expected (pythag) records.

IF you win games 20-1; 15-1;18-0;20-1,15-0; 13-2 Then lose 4-3;3-2;5-4;7-6;6-4;6-5 how many games were you expected to win with a +92 Run Differential over the course of a season? The 156 double plays and 38 clutch outs is going to make for a spotty offense. I suggest you run the experiment with positive clutch (you'll have runners on frequently and it's not priced in to the way you are running it) and reduce your hitters GBA

My brain is hurting from a Pythagorean deep dive. I have more questions than answers.

FWIW, I found this interesting.

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news ... -or-lucky/

Most of what I’ve found so far ends with a very unsatisfactory conclusion.

Wins over +/- 3 pythag are entirely due to luck.

Which brings me back to where we started. Why is all my luck bad shaped instead of bell shaped?

Is a Strat bullpen of all cheap relievers good or bad, extreme or not extreme?

You'd want to look at it relative to other bullpens in the league.

So the part that doesn’t make sense is that real world bullpens and Strat bullpens are apples and oranges.

I'm certainly open to the idea that the extreme environments in ATG make pythag less reliable than real life. The theory would go something like: a lot of blowouts in ATG occur because of (a) highly extreme parks, (b) teams highly tuned to the unique environment of their division/league, (c) ludicrously poor bullpens. None of these factors really exist in real life. So maybe where blowouts in MLB are illustrative of a team's true talent, blowouts in ATG are more illustrative of highly idiosyncratic matchups.

My brain is hurting from a Pythagorean deep dive.

Better than fending off those ghosts and goblins though amirite.

FWIW, I found this interesting.

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news ... -or-lucky/

Great stuff^

Without addressing the conspiracy stuff, just want to note that teams with good bullpens will overperform pythag and teams with bad bullpens will underperform pythag. This is true in Strat and real life because of the importance of bullpens in winning close games. I've never analyzed my performance vs pythag but I assume I underperform it because below $200 my bullpens are ass.

Not arguing Max, but I literally NEVER have a good bullpen, so maybe I'm just an outlier, but I rarely spend over $5 mill in my bullpen (at $80 mill)

Without addressing the conspiracy stuff, just want to note that teams with good bullpens will overperform pythag and teams with bad bullpens will underperform pythag. This is true in Strat and real life because of the importance of bullpens in winning close games. I've never analyzed my performance vs pythag but I assume I underperform it because below $200 my bullpens are ass.

Not arguing Max, but I literally NEVER have a good bullpen, so maybe I'm just an outlier, but I rarely spend over $5 mill in my bullpen (at $80 mill)

So your consistent underperformance of pythag would fit perfectly with what I'm saying, yes? Not an outlier at all.