This Has My Attention: New Questions

Case study:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1705177

Here’s a $5.02 bullpen in a $140m league. Obviously extremely cheap. Minimally involved in 76 innings of use (just over 5% of total innings).

Bullpen had nothing to do with being eight games under pythag. I did score 15 runs or more ten times (incl three in the 20s) with the big TTO lineup.

But both things can’t be true at the same time: blowouts are a sign of a good team and it’s factored into pythag OR blowouts are a sign of a skewed pythag that’s artificially high. Further, the results across the board should reflect a common sense level of consistency for all managers. My old Strat teams did demonstrate a bell shaped graph of results. Why don’t they now?

Additional insights:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/457185

Here’s a league egvrich and I were in together. He had a highly effective $10m bullpen and received a -5 pythag. I had a cheapo bullpen and came in at even. Both of us had pitcher park teams, so no outlandish blowouts as far as I can tell from a glance.

I concede that looking at individual results is kinda sorta pointless, but we need some form of evidence. It would be nice if a Strat engineer could get on here and say he polled 10,000 leagues and the exponents in pythag would better be reflected by x+ due to xyz.

Unfortunately, answering our questions would end up being a full time career and not likely a very rewarding one at that.

Having said that, Strat365 integrity may be at a tipping point for many managers, so maybe there should be some communication here…

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.

Apparently, contextual reading is not one of my strong suits ...........

Having said that, Strat365 integrity may be at a tipping point for many managers, so maybe there should be some communication here…

I know it is for me (and many others who are either on their way out or already long gone).

I find that when the expected wins are off a bit, it usually boils down to the record in one-run and extra-inning games. I'm not seeing an integrity issue, based on what's been presented so far.

The results in one run games for the three leagues you posted
19-28
18-21
24-23

In your latest league you have lost 15of the 23 with 6 to go one run games on the road. You are a +30 Run differential on the road and a +149 at home. You have never lost by more than 9 runs on the road and only lost 6 times by more than 5 runs on the road, on the flip side you won one game against a very week apponenet by 12 and another by 15, these accounted for the entirety of your run differential on the road.

At home the POW on pitchers versus your hitters comes into play and you absolutely destroy bad teams with this. I think this is known as the Dallas Cowboy effect.

BC15NY & gkhd11a:

One run games are luck (according to the wizards of smart at the SABR sites). You can not build for luck, nor can you directly influence one run games.

Therefore, if one run games are luck, then managers should see an equal (or somewhat equal) distribution of luck. I have not been seeing it for quite some time now. Other managers have not been seeing it for quite some time now. I think a lot of this coincides with the new bullpen rules, but that still does not explain the overall results I’ve been getting.

I can’t even find the last time I had a +4 pythag. So for me, too bad so sad, I get it. But me and egvrich aren’t the only ones experiencing this, as I have a lot of interleague discussions about the topic with other managers. So there is a larger frustration with things, bigger than my own personal results.

I concede that looking at individual results is kinda sorta pointless, but we need some form of evidence. It would be nice if a Strat engineer could get on here and say he polled 10,000 leagues and the exponents in pythag would better be reflected by x+ due to xyz.

Unfortunately, answering our questions would end up being a full time career and not likely a very rewarding one at that.

Strat engineer?
Suggesting those exist could be the biggest conspiracy theory in the game.

Great discussion. My unscientific take:

Weird stuff happens all the time. I have heard that you need to sim 10,000 seasons to get all the numbers to settle. And I think I remember from my college Stat course (which was quite a long time ago) that a sample size of under 30 has zero information value. So anyone looking back at their last 15, 25 even 100 seasons probably does not have enough data to form actionable conclusions.

And how can anyone assume that a company that for 20 years hasn't removed the word "BETA" from it's visually-gross game replay screen would commit time and resources to surreptitiously game its system to punish better players? That said, back in 2017, when I tried the site for the first time, my "free" team's first simulated game was a one-run win, coming on a bottom of the 8th inning, two-out, two-run jack by Dustin Pedroia.