With this week's start of the major league baseball season, I have been conducting an experiment:How well can I predict the winners and losers of each day's baseball games?
Using the day's baseball listings from the Los Angeles Times sports pages, I have marked my predictions for the day's winning teams. The Times' listings show the starting pitchers for each team, their win-loss record, Earned Run Average, their team's record when the pitcher started a game, and their win-loss, innings pitched, and ERA against that day's opponent. At this point in the season, the statistics are for last season.
The results so far have been mixed. Sadly, I am not ready to drive to Las Vegas and start betting money at a casino sportsbook.
On Monday, there were 13 games played--almost a full schedule, with Chicago vs. Cleveland getting a head start on Sunday, and the first game between Minnesota and Toronto on Tuesday. I picked an amazing 11 winners, with only 2 wrong guesses.
On Tuesday, flushed with my early success, I went mostly with the same teams I had picked on Monday, with dismal results. There were only 8 games played that day, but I only picked 2 winners.
On Wednesday, with 15 games being played, a full schedule, I came out almost even--8 correct winners, and 7 incorrect.
Generally speaking, one should do slightly better than 50 percent by always picking the home team, as even the worst teams usually win at least half their home games. What distinguishes the better teams is how well they can do on the road.
Monday's starting pitchers were the top starters for each team, and made it easier to divide the stronger teams from the weaker ones. But it's harder to predict when less successful pitchers are matched against each other, and it's also hard for even the best teams to sweep all three games in a series from weaker teams.
Of course, with more information, such as how well a team's batters do against a certain pitcher, which players are injured, etc, it should be possible to make better guesses. But in a long 162-game season, when the best teams win 90-100 games, and the worst teams lost 90-100 games, there is a lot of chance in determining which team will win any random game.
