The Search for Significance

Ryan informed me a couple of days ago that he knew we had reached the point where our early season sample had reached a level or predictive significance because Mike Trout had taken over the major league lead in fWAR.

I just checked.  He’s still ahead.

Another way to measure our arrival at statistical significance is to see if all the wild extremes have settled down.  Let’s see:

Someone will have to tell me sometime how to get this chart off Excel and into my posts with the sharp graphic quality intact. Bit if you squint you might notice a grey line running along the bottom herding all the rest of us upward. That’s the Pears.  And the burnt orange line at the top herding us lower is the Kangaroos.

There are some lessons we can draw from this chart:

1. The Pears are better sheep dogs than the Kangaroos.  No one has slipped past Peshastin into last place since April 3. Haviland (the green line) has approached a few times, including today, but so far has fled back upward every time the Pears showed their fierce teeth. Meanwhile Old Detroit (April 7), Kaline (April 18 – 21) and Cottage (Apr 23) have all taken a turn in the top spot.  However, to its credit, Canberra has successfully corralled these pretenders and sent them scurrying back into the herd without lasting harm.
2. Also, the Pears have brought everyone (including themselves) above the .400 line.  The Kangaroos have brought everyone below .600 — except themselves!  They are currently wandering at .631, up almost .030 points over the last two days.
3. “Hey, Kangaroos!  What are you doing all the way up there?…. No, there are no more missing sheep.  You do NOT have to leave the 9 to go search for anything… C’mon, ‘Roos, it is NOT foggy where you are.  You are not lost. We can see you. You’re right there, trying to sneak off to higher ground… TRUST YOU? You can’t be up to any good that far away from the herd.”
4. There seems to be an overall upward trend in the league. As of today we are about 11 games over .500 as a league, the highest average I have recorded this year: 1 per team. If we kept our current pace we’d end up about 8 games over at the end of the year, or 89 wins, on average. That puts us on the verge of our new rule mandating an expansion draft the next winter if we average over 90 wins in a particular season.  If we don’t actually expand, that means we’d all protect 15 players and then we’d all vote on which unprotected player would be lost from each team. This, I suppose, is our way of handicapping all the real GMs out there in MLB who can’t keep up with us.