Has solid start changed your expectations for 2023 Cubs?

[squally1313]

1 hour ago, stitchface said:

but in your coin flip example, you know it's 50-50. In this case, you don't. so, if you thought this was a 78 win team to change and say this is still a 78 win team that's going to win 82, is probably not sound thinking. if the new information says this is an 82 win team, ok. 

 

If you thought this was a 78 win team in a season where teams play 162 games, how many wins do you think that same team would win in a 146 game season?

(as an aside: dumb pedantic Kyle arguments tinged with a cautious amount of Cubs optimism?? NSBB is back bitches)

[Hairyducked Idiot]

1 hour ago, stitchface said:

disagree. 78 wins is based on their opponents and the odds of winning each game - it's not a coin flip in every game. if the first 16 games are all against the 5 worst teams in baseball or the 5 best teams in baseball makes a big difference. being a .500 team does not mean you have a 50/50 chance in every game. the probability of winning is not fixed as it is in a coin flip

In a sport where almost every team is between .425 and .575 true talent, and you play a mixed schedule, the odds of this making a non-negligible difference in the analysis are minuscule.   You can do all that math if you want, but if it changes your result over 16 games more than a small fraction of a win, i would be rechecking the math.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

1 hour ago, stitchface said:

disagree. 78 wins is based on their opponents and the odds of winning each game - it's not a coin flip in every game. if the first 16 games are all against the 5 worst teams in baseball or the 5 best teams in baseball makes a big difference. being a .500 team does not mean you have a 50/50 chance in every game. the probability of winning is not fixed as it is in a coin flip

If you have a team that you are told by God Himself has a true talent level of 78 wins per 162, and they start the season 10-6, but you have no other information, how many games would you project them to win for that season?

[stitchface]

1 hour ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

If you have a team that you are told by God Himself has a true talent level of 78 wins per 162, and they start the season 10-6, but you have no other information, how many games would you project them to win for that season?

God? 78 for sure.

[stitchface]

1 hour ago, squally1313 said:

If you thought this was a 78 win team in a season where teams play 162 games, how many wins do you think that same team would win in a 146 game season?

(as an aside: dumb pedantic Kyle arguments tinged with a cautious amount of Cubs optimism?? NSBB is back bitches)

which sixteen games were removed?

[stitchface]

1 hour ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

In a sport where almost every team is between .425 and .575 true talent, and you play a mixed schedule, the odds of this making a non-negligible difference in the analysis are minuscule.   You can do all that math if you want, but if it changes your result over 16 games more than a small fraction of a win, i would be rechecking the math.

so, if a team goes 10-6 over a stretch in July, you'll bump your projection by four games?

[Hairyducked Idiot]

6 minutes ago, stitchface said:

God? 78 for sure.

OK, that's wrong.  Not in an "I have an opinion, you have an opinion" sort of way. It's objectively wrong in a way that a statistics professor would mark your answer incorrect on an exam sort of way.  We're gonna have to go back into some academic-level statistics to explain why.

A true-talent 78 win team will expect to win 48.1% of their games.  But even if God Himself tells you that the team's true talent level is 78 wins, they won't win exactly 78 games every season. Or even most seasons. That's not how probability works.   In mathematical terms, their observed win percentage will trend toward their true win percentage as the number of games stretches forward toward infinity, but that doesn't mean it will hit that line at exactly 162 game.

This is the same thing as God Himself telling you that a coin is a true 50/50 coin, but you will still frequently get 6 heads and 4 tails in any 10 flips.  The observed rate will trend toward 50/50 as you approach infinite flips, but it will frequently diverge from 50/50 for long stretches.  Those divergences are what we call "variance."  Expected variance approaches the limit of 0 as iterations approaches infinity, but it never touches zero because iterations are never infinite.

If you flip a 50/50 coin 162 times, you expect to get 81 heads and 81 tails, but it's extremely probable that you will observe variance.  If you start out with 10 heads and 6 tails, then in order to get to 71-81, you'd have to 71-75.  If you *expect* that to happen, that means you're expecting the properties of the iniminate coin to somehow have knowledge of how the past flips have gone and adjust physics so that the coin is no longer 50/50.  Coins do not have knowledge and cannot change the laws of physics, so this cannot be true.  

Expecting probability going forward to change in order to revert observed variance is a human cognitive bias known as "gambler's fallacy."  Our brains are sometimes wired to think that way, but it's wrong.

If God Himself tells you that a team has a true-talent level of 78 wins and they start out 10-6, absent any other information, the correct answer to how many games they are now expected to win is (rounded off) 80.  

None of this has anything to do with your original argument, which was about strength of schedule, so I *think* this might be one of those situations where I'm not supposed to be taking your answers literally but generally you're just expressing the vibe that you think I'm wrong and the actual arguments you use aren't supposed to matter.  

 

[Hairyducked Idiot]

15 minutes ago, stitchface said:

so, if a team goes 10-6 over a stretch in July, you'll bump your projection by four games?

Only if they were expected to go 6-10 on average, so that 10-6 results in four wins of variance.

But yes, *every* stretch of games should change your projected final result by the amount they varied from expectations.  If you have a precisely .500 team on paper, every time they win that should add 0.5 wins to your projected total, and every time they lose it should subtract 0.5 wins from it.  (Obviously you could make that model more complicated by adding in strength of schedule, and Fangraphs even has a nice page where they do something similar but also update their estimate of underlying talent level in real time, but strength of schedule just isn't a strong enough factor in baseball games to adjustments like that meaningfully change the answer over small samples).

Edited April 19, 2023 by Hairyducked Idiot

[stitchface]

31 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

Only if they were expected to go 6-10 on average, so that 10-6 results in four wins of variance.

But yes, *every* stretch of games should change your projected final result by the amount they varied from expectations.  If you have a precisely .500 team on paper, every time they win that should add 0.5 wins to your projected total, and every time they lose it should subtract 0.5 wins from it.  (Obviously you could make that model more complicated by adding in strength of schedule, and Fangraphs even has a nice page where they do something similar but also update their estimate of underlying talent level in real time, but strength of schedule just isn't a strong enough factor in baseball games to adjustments like that meaningfully change the answer over small samples).

it's not probability. that's what you seem to not get.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

14 minutes ago, stitchface said:

it's not probability. that's what you seem to not get.

Then what is it?

[stitchface]

1 hour ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

Then what is it?

a projection is not the same as a probability they will win a game - it's an estimation of how many they will over the season.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

27 minutes ago, stitchface said:

a projection is not the same as a probability they will win a game - it's an estimation of how many they will over the season.

That's still a probability, it's just a probability for the season not individual games.

 

You're not wrong, you're just way overestimating how big the difference is.  Converting the total season average into a per-game probability is a convenient simplification that gets you close enough for casual use.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Not exactly the same thing because they do update team strength and account for SOS, but Fangraphs' playoff projections now has the Cubs finishing 81-81 with a 28% chance of making the playoffs 

 

https://www.fangraphs.com/standings/playoff-odds

[Cubfanintheknow]

Came here to revel in the Cub's early season success. Leaving with a headache. Kyle was here.

Should have known better...

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Just now, Cubfanintheknow said:

Came here to revel in the Cub's early season success. Leaving with a headache. Kyle was here.

Should have known better...

Why wouldn't you stop reading and scroll past before the headache?

[Rob]

8 hours ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

If you have a team that you are told by God Himself has a true talent level of 78 wins per 162, and they start the season 10-6, but you have no other information, how many games would you project them to win for that season?

It seems important to ask... which god?

[Ding Dong Johnson]

Just now, Rob said:

It seems important to ask... which god?

[CubinNY]

17 hours ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

OK, that's wrong.  Not in an "I have an opinion, you have an opinion" sort of way. It's objectively wrong in a way that a statistics professor would mark your answer incorrect on an exam sort of way.  We're gonna have to go back into some academic-level statistics to explain why.

A true-talent 78 win team will expect to win 48.1% of their games.  But even if God Himself tells you that the team's true talent level is 78 wins, they won't win exactly 78 games every season. Or even most seasons. That's not how probability works.   In mathematical terms, their observed win percentage will trend toward their true win percentage as the number of games stretches forward toward infinity, but that doesn't mean it will hit that line at exactly 162 game.

This is the same thing as God Himself telling you that a coin is a true 50/50 coin, but you will still frequently get 6 heads and 4 tails in any 10 flips.  The observed rate will trend toward 50/50 as you approach infinite flips, but it will frequently diverge from 50/50 for long stretches.  Those divergences are what we call "variance."  Expected variance approaches the limit of 0 as iterations approaches infinity, but it never touches zero because iterations are never infinite.

If you flip a 50/50 coin 162 times, you expect to get 81 heads and 81 tails, but it's extremely probable that you will observe variance.  If you start out with 10 heads and 6 tails, then in order to get to 71-81, you'd have to 71-75.  If you *expect* that to happen, that means you're expecting the properties of the iniminate coin to somehow have knowledge of how the past flips have gone and adjust physics so that the coin is no longer 50/50.  Coins do not have knowledge and cannot change the laws of physics, so this cannot be true.  

Expecting probability going forward to change in order to revert observed variance is a human cognitive bias known as "gambler's fallacy."  Our brains are sometimes wired to think that way, but it's wrong.

If God Himself tells you that a team has a true-talent level of 78 wins and they start out 10-6, absent any other information, the correct answer to how many games they are now expected to win is (rounded off) 80.  

None of this has anything to do with your original argument, which was about strength of schedule, so I *think* this might be one of those situations where I'm not supposed to be taking your answers literally but generally you're just expressing the vibe that you think I'm wrong and the actual arguments you use aren't supposed to matter.  

 

I like how you use true talent like it's an entity that exists. In life, at the end of the day you are the collection of behaviors you have emitted for that day, your potential to emit other behaviors is irrelevant. What you are talking about is what is expected vs what occurred. The statistical stuff is correct, but the rest is nonsense. There is no such a thing as "true talent". If the model doesn't map on to reality, it's the model that's off, not reality. You can't just chalk it up to variance and wash your hands. 

Baseball is not like flipping a coin. 

As an aside, these supposedly intelligent people should include confidence intervals on their predictions to account for variance instead of pretending they have a level of precision they do not have. 

Edited April 20, 2023 by CubinNY

[Banedon]

Late to this conversation, but...I barely watched the Cubs last year.  A couple of games, here and there maybe?  Paid attention to the result but I just didn't watch much baseball.  This year I decided to get the MLB.tv trial to start the season.  And...they've kept me interested enough that I bought the season and I'm watching almost every game so far.  So, I don't know what my expectations really were, but I'd say they've increased my interest.

[squally1313]

1 hour ago, Banedon said:

Late to this conversation, but...I barely watched the Cubs last year.  A couple of games, here and there maybe?  Paid attention to the result but I just didn't watch much baseball.  This year I decided to get the MLB.tv trial to start the season.  And...they've kept me interested enough that I bought the season and I'm watching almost every game so far.  So, I don't know what my expectations really were, but I'd say they've increased my interest.

The new rules added a lot of enjoyment, but this team was built to produce baseball that's really enjoyable to watch (at least for me), even if I'm still not sold on it being the best strategy to win games. 22nd in offensive K%, after being 10th, 1st, 4th, 11th the last four years. Couple that with being 19th in walk rate (which certainly isn't optimal) and 12th in total HRs (13 of the non-Wisdom variety in 17 games) and you're getting a lot of balls in play. Can we continue BABIPing at a .341 pace? Probably not, but we also don't need to continue playing at a 105 win pace either. 

Pitching has been as advertised too, even if I was skeptical. Starters are pretty average on walk and K rate, but very much outperforming their peripherals because our BABIP against is second best in the league. Reasons for that are pretty obvious if you look across the field. And then the bullpen has been incredible. First in K rate, 14th in walk rate, 10th in HR/9. They've actually been unlucky, 16th in ERA, 3rd in FIP, 2nd in xFIP. 

Eventually we're probably going to have to dong more, and I don't think Wisdom is turning into a 50 HR guy at age 31. But if we can keep hitting the ball hard (1st in LD%, though the rest of the batted ball metrics are, um, significantly worse) and winning the BABIP battle comfortably until it warms up at Wrigley for the Swansons/Happs/Suzukis of the world....we should be fine hanging around. 

[sneakypower]

if preseason our true talent was 78w/162g then the needle on that has surely moved a bit with new information fed into the projections from our 17-games of +39 RD performance indicating 'true talent' improvements

a small example of this is zips ROS for Wisdom is now 116 wRC+, up from preseason zips of 109 wRC+

Edited April 20, 2023 by sneakypower

[jumbo]

On 4/19/2023 at 8:39 PM, Cubfanintheknow said:

Came here to revel in the Cub's early season success. Leaving with a headache. Kyle was here.

Should have known better...

Scrolling right past it felt good to me

[Hairyducked Idiot]

23 hours ago, sneakypower said:

if preseason our true talent was 78w/162g then the needle on that has surely moved a bit with new information fed into the projections from our 17-games of +39 RD performance indicating 'true talent' improvements

a small example of this is zips ROS for Wisdom is now 116 wRC+, up from preseason zips of 109 wRC+

I really like Fangraphs' projected standings page, which makes those sorts of micro adjustments daily and projects the rest of the season then adds it to the current record.  

They have us at 80-82 right now.

https://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=Standings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[David]

So I just put a bet on us to win the division at +500, so you can all blame me when things go to horsefeathers!

[Andy]

I'm not totally ready to go back to my original prediction of boring 2005ish .500 type season, but I'm getting closer.