Phillies vs. Mets

Baseball Prospectus, a great web site that caters to NJ ( Nerdy Justin ) had a great piece yesterday on the current three game series between the New York Mets and the Phillies.  You’ll need a memberhip to Baseball Prospectus ( $5 / month ) to read the whole article, but the gist was that the two teams are relatively evenly matched in a number of statistical categories especially pitching depth throughout the team.  The piece has a very technical analysis of how well the Phillies have performed so far compared to how they were expected to at this point based on information such as the total number of runs the team has scored and how many they “should have”.

This short paper on “Regression to the Mean” is helpful in understanding the point made in the article about how Raul Ibanez is likely to perform at a slightly lower level during the remainder of the season than he has so far.

Since the Phillies were unlucky last night, let’s hope they can salvage a 2-1 record for this series and be energized for their return to Philly later this week!

Visualization of 2008 World Series Probabilities

Using data derived from mathematical simulations run by Baseball Prospectus, I made this chart in Excel that shows their predictions, by day, of who might win this year’s World Series.

Notice how the Chicago Cubs ( the teal blue line that starts above 30 percent on October 1 ) were quickly eliminated, and now have a (sigh) 0 percent chance of winning this year’s World Series.  The probability for my Phillies, 19.13 percent, isn’t all that bad; it’s the best we’ve had in a LONG time and I’m very excited for this year’s ALCS and NLCS to start up.