from Amazon
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Game-set-match, or just points?
Rob Neyer points out that you don’t even have to worry about wins and losses when it comes to divisional standings: just look at runs scored and allowed differential over the entire season. Because you get the exact same order for 28 of the teams (within the division anyway), with one little swap for the other 2 teams. Indeed, even for the Wild Card, you get a very strong ordinal ranking match. In the AL, you swap two teams (Cleveland and some other team). In the NL, it’s not so clean, notably because of the Padres (only -29 runs, yet 2nd to last in the league).
I’m sure you can look at other leagues, and get the same result. This is the big thing that is sold to the public: look at each game as if you are starting from scratch. The reality is that you don’t even have to start the game from scratch, because just keeping a running total of runs scored and allowed will give you the same answer.
The same applies for tennis, I am sure (and NHL, NBA, NFL, etc, though NFL has the advantage of having only 16 games). Basically, sell the public that there’s a winner or loser every game, when in reality, what we have are running totals of runs, points, or goals for the entire season.