This Has My Attention: New Questions

I'm not sure anyone is saying it's a big deal, it's just an oddity that might be interesting to solve the origin of, might learn something about the game in the process. At least it's based in math and theoretically solvable, unlike similarly long threads arguing over things that are not provable or testable in the first place.

Yes!

+1

This team has the best R/D & Pythag Record in the entire league but is currently on the outside looking in for the playoffs.

Sometimes it just doesn't work out:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/expanded/463291

This team has the best R/D & Pythag Record in the entire league but is currently on the outside looking in for the playoffs.

Sometimes it just doesn't work out:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/expanded/463291

Missed the playoffs thanks in large part to 30 1-run losses.

Resurrecting an old conversation with some new observations.

Since the last post here, I successfully weaned myself off of caring about the pythag records. Although we didn’t manage to figure out any unique mathematical insights, I believe the general consensus seemed to be that pythag records were largely a function of garbage time scoring.

This irritated me because that meant (to me) that Bullpen V3 was inherently flawed. Pythag records should, within proper parameters, reflect actual records. If they do not, then the game is not a correct mathematical representation of the game of baseball.

Since we left this discussion four or five months ago, I pretty much forgot about it altogether. Imagine my surprise when I looked over my last dozen plus leagues and discovered that much of the Pythagorean weirdness had completely vanished (for the most part). Virtually all of my own teams have returned to +/- 3, and most of the high pythag win teams had actual records reflecting their pythag records.

So my new questions are these:

Do you currently observe most teams now largely within +/- 3 of pythag?

Do you have an intuitive sense that bullpen “weirdness” appears to have subsided?

Do you think Strat possibly tweaked Bullpen V3 to remove some of the fatigue handicaps leading to unrealistic garbage time?

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you get unlucky, that's what I think. Not making it too complicated.

I recently got unlucky in this division, +86 run differential, everyone else negative, but not complaining, only 1 run back from the division winner -- https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/464534

But I can surely search more and find where I got lucky and moreso. I don't think anything bullpen-wise has changed, other than some owners evolve to use it better. Everything evolves.

Matchups. You can have the best run differential in the league, the most wins, blahblahblah. But once the playoffs begin, it's about matchups. For example, managers who play overloaded Lefties in a lefty park (like 100% of the roster), are gonna have problems against a rotation of strong LH starters (or even reverse righties). So, regular season means nothing. Every team ahs streaks. Sometimes you hit a team on whose hot streak starts in the postseason. I had a championship team once where Bill Gullickson simply became unbeatable. Yeah...that Gullickson. 4-0 in the postseason. Don't ask me how. Also had a weird, speed team just blow through everybody as a wild card entry in a 24-team league. They just got hot at the right time.

One factor that might make Pythag less consistently predictive in ATG than in MLB is the hypercharged offenses in ATG. Even in an 80M league, most team offenses are way more potent than in actual major league baseball. And at higher caps, the offenses get even more potent And, the more runs that teams score in a league, the more likely they are to generate 20-2 outcomes that can really throw off pythag predictions.
I have a 175M team in a Godfather league that currently has a +82 run differential and a losing 53-58 record. My Exp.W/L for this team is 62-49, so I'm 9 games behind expectations. I'm 11-15 in 1 run games, so that's part of it.
Perhaps more significantly, my team has won games several games by huge margins, including scores of 17-7, 11-0, 22-4, 16-6, 16-2, 13-1, 12-2, 15-3, etc, etc. Meanwhile, my largest run differential in a loss appears to be 8 runs, and the losing differentials for my team go down rapidly from there.
Obviously, I've had some bad luck in terms of winning the blowouts with garbage runs while I've losing the close ones. More significantly, though, this league's ERA is 5.72--an ERA you would never see in actual baseball.
So, when lots of runs are scored, there are more blowouts. And I would suggest that the more common blowouts are, the more likely it is that pythag will not be consistently predictive.
I'm still hoping this team will turn it around, and there's enough time that they could make up the 5 games they're currently trailing the division leader by. In a couple of weeks, we'll know: https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1729588

The thread is probably too long at this point for everyone to begin on page one.

I was only talking about $80 mil leagues and I understand both matchups and high potency offenses.

In a nutshell:

Before Bullpen V3, actual records largely followed pythag +/- 3.
After Bullpen V3, actual records started to skew way beyond that, and went largely against the high net run teams.
Recently, I’m perceiving a return to actual records falling in line with pythag again.

So, either…

Strat tweaked Bullpen V3 to reduce garbage time scoring, or…
The long stretch of disorderly actual vs pythag records was just an anomaly to begin with.

I was curious what others might be seeing or thinking.

For instance, it appears to me that the 10+ run innings I became quite used to seeing aren’t happening so much anymore. I haven’t done a stats deep dive, I’m only talking about my own perception. Because I’m too lazy to do a bunch of line by lines, I’m simply asking for the drive-by opinions for now.