It’s been a rough start for most of us this season. We have to adapt to a new league stats system, while the new head-to-head format magnifies how badly some of our teams are playing to start the season.
I have created some resources to help us get through these opening transition weeks, and give us a chance to find remedies for our pain and confusion:
- an analysis of our teams’ poor early performances;
- an invitation to use the Data Entry versions of our team spreadsheets to track your team during the week;
- an invitation to schedule a zoom (or in person) training/troubleshooting session so you can catch up with Rob Bohall, who seems to understand the new system just fine, and had better be enjoying the season so far.
The Analysis
If you want to compare our teams this year to previous years, your best tool is the EFL 2022 Weekly Results spreadsheet. Columns H, I and J record our teams’ runs scored and runs against. These are strictly our own teams’ performance, unaffected by the other teams we’re matched up against head-to-head. For the first 18 seasons of the EFL, RS / RA directly produced our W/L record.
If we were playing under last year’s rules, here is how our standings would look as of the end of Week 2:
Old Detroit 9 – 3 .742 —
Salem 9 -3 .741 0.0
DC 8 – 4 .659 1.0
Haviland 7 – 5 .557. 2.2
Canberra 5 – 7 .454 3.5
Bellingham 4 – 8 .361 4.6
Pittsburgh 4 – 8 .352 4.7
Flint Hill 4 – 8 .348 4.7
Portland 4 – 8 .304 5.3
Kaline 3 – 9 .284 5.5
Peshastin 2 – 10 .208 6.4
The mean for our league would be a .453 winning percentage. That’s low — more like 2020 (which was the worst the league has performed in maybe 15 or 16 years) than 2021, which was one of the best seasons for EFL teams ever.
This calls into question the wisdom of our Competitive Balance Expansion Draft. I know the Wolverines suffered from management’s decision to leave JP Crawford exposed instead of Jonathan Loaisiga. I am not proposing changing that rule yet; let’s see how the season unfolds. But if other teams lost someone as valuable as Crawford in the CBED, it would account for our rough start.
There is another possible culprit: over the last two years we’ve dealt with declining salary caps. One would expect declining resources to limit our ability to stockpile talent.
A third possible explanation: Covid disruptions, compounded with short spring trainings lately, have left our players underprepared, and extra vulnerable to injury.
But the new system we are using for our league is, as far as I can see, blameless for this dip in our teams’ general quality.
However, the new system probably is responsible for how much worse our teams are doing than our own rs/ra stats would predict. Dealing with variations in our head-to-head opponents’ quality, and the random variations from week to week in their performance, has so far magnified the variance in our teams’ performance (so we range from 10 – 2 to 1 – 11 instead of 9 – 3 to 2 – 10). And, so far, we’ve found ourselves facing somewhat better than average MLB performances, especially in the second week when our MLB foes scored 292 runs while allowing only 251.
Both of these secondary effects (greater range of results, and generally better-than-average MLB opposition) should diminish as we get bigger samples and more teams. And we still have the 17th team to pick for the last 11 weeks, to adjust a little for any imbalances we still show at the All-Star break. But in the meantime, this has made our results a little more discouraging (for most of us — maybe not the Rosebuds, Dragons or Balk).
It’s likely the head-to-head effects will mostly even out by the time we’re done. But we should keep an eye on this and make sure the trends are heading the right direction, week to week.
USING THE DATA ENTRY VERSION OF OUR SPREADSHEETS
If shared with each of you access to the Data Entry version of your team’s spreadsheets. This will generally be the most up-to-date version of each current week’s results. I’ve also shared the Archive versions of your team spreadsheets.
If you can’t see my folders, I recommend you make a Google Folder in which you put these spreadsheets:
Data Entry EFL 2022 (your team name) v2 (or v2w3)
Archive EFL 2022 (your team name) v2w1
Archive EFL 2022 (your team name) v2w2
(and the other archive versions that will be coming out each week).
For all of these you have Comment access. At the top there is a little dialog balloon with lines in it. If you click on that something opens where you can put in a comment — a question about the sheet, or the results, or how to find something, etc. I will try to remember to check these every time I update league results.
Every week I wlll make a copy of the Data Entry sheet, rename it, and share it with you so you can use it to experiment with allocations. I advise you to throw away previous copies, or else your google drive will get hopelessly cluttered. I will be going through periodically to clean things up. When I throw them away from my drive, I think you get a grace period to save your own copies before they disappear from your drive. If I make something you wanted to keep disappear from your Google drive you, let me know and I will replace it.
TRAINING/TROUBLESHOOTING SESSIONS
I am happy to work with any of you who want to improve your ability to navigate among, and make good use of, your team spreadsheet and other resources. Let’s meet in person if you’re local, or via Zoom. Once the semester is over (and my grading is done, which are not going to be simultaneous) I will have plenty of time for Zoom chats with any of you. I already have some time — tomorrow (Saturday) for instance.
I would enjoy trying to answer your questions, and helping you get on top of the new system. I think some things might even work better than Dave’s amazing database, while others will (alas) inevitably be clunkier.
So if you’re frustrated, peeved, or even mildly inconvenienced by anything, please let me know and we’ll set up a time to fix (or at least ameliorate) whatever is wrong, puzzling, or irritating.
OK, it’s after 10 and the Friday night games have all gone final. Let’s see if I can get a quick standings update done to kick off Week 3.