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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
The ideal Playoff Structure
Patriot has a great post, which I’ll just give you some clips, and I encourage all to read it:
One takeaway from this chart is how silly it is when folks talk about locks to win a playoff series. Even in a situation in which one team has a 65% chance to win each game (which is a big mismatch in the playoffs--a .500 team against a 105 win team or a 90 win team against a 112 win team using Log5), that team only has an 80% shot at winning a seven-game series. Even if you more than double the series length to fifteen games, there’s still an 11.3% chance of an upset.
When sabermetrically-inclined people say that the playoffs are a crapshoot, this is the kind of thing they’re generally talking about. It’s not that you have no way of knowing which team is better or estimating the degree to which they are, it’s just that even in a case where you have clear superiority, the short length of the series makes an upset quite feasible.
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All told, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the probabilities here can be read to suggest that MLB has correctly identified the series lengths that provide the best combination of practicality, uncertainty of outcome, and producing desired outcomes. The extra benefit in terms of desired outcomes from expanding to longer series is relatively small, and is offset by a larger percentage drop in the expected proportion of series with decisive games.
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