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Road Warriors (September 4, 2003)
Discussion ThreadPosted 7:10 p.m.,
September 4, 2003
(#6) -
Dirk K
If you have the time and data, you may want to attempt to correct for the unbalanced schedule.
Quite a few pairs of opponents play a 9-game season series (at least the AL West does against non-division opponents; it may work out differently for the other divisions that I pay less attention to). That's typically 1 (3-game) home series and 2 road series, or vis versa. If you get the good opponents more on the road and the bad ones at home...
Plus, of course, interleague play is mostly a single series.
With enough data, I would do something like BP does with their postseason odds report. I don't know enough about how they compute Dav W%, but we could at least start with normal Pythagorean %.
Then produce, for each team
Home Strength of Schedule (weighted avg of home opp Pyth%)
Home Pyth (using RS/RA at home only)
Road SOS
Road Pyth
Home Stathead advantage = (Home Pyth - Home SOS) - (Road Pyth - Road SOS)
Home Luck = (Home Record - Home Pyth) - (Road Record - Road Pyth)
Whether you think Home Luck is part of HFA advantage or not is up to you (at least some of it is going to be explained by walk-off/extra inning games, where knowing exactly how many runs you need makes strategy a little easier).
I started writing something more complicated, involving using the teams's own Pyth and SOS via log5 to predict home wins, but then realized that I was confounding my input & output data.
Road Warriors (September 4, 2003)
Posted 8:28 p.m.,
September 5, 2003
(#8) -
Dirk K
#7 -- you're right, of course, about the park factors.
I don't know that I'd worry about the rest of it, though. Home field advantage is what we're trying to measure, not an input.
Trying to account for starting pitchers is probably also confounding -- the different pitchers on a team don't have the same number of home and road games, and they don't face the same opponents.