Seraphim Dance on the Tip of a Pin — and We have a Decision to make

Please read all the way through!  We have a decision to make at the end.

The race for first seed position in the EFL pennant race came down to the last paste into the DC Balk update sheet.  After a brilliant burst of play, the Balk were in first place in the EFL by 0.1 games.  But after that last paste of data from the update sheet, the Balk slipped back behind the Seraphim by 0.07 games.

Only angelic beings can dance on such a small surface. It’s not like their MLB opponents — the Giants — tanked for them.  In fact, the Giants finished the week with two wins over the Brewers, 9 – 5 on  Saturday and 2 – 1 Sunday, leaving their weekly rs/ra at a whopping 41 – 21, good for a .702 raw winning percentage. That cut Salem’s raw .597 winning percentage down to .280 for the week.  

Meanwhile, the Balk were dashing toward first place.    Dylan Cease started twice, compiling 12.7 scoreless innings to limit DC’s team ERA for the week to 2.49.  They scored 40.5 runs on the week, led by Ryan McMahon’s .368, .520, .579 and Matt Chapman’s .333, .391, .714.  After I entered the last two days of pitching (including Cease’s second shutout outing) and the last two days of hitting down to Nico Hoerner, the Balk had actually taken a 0.1 game lead over the Seraphim.  

Then I added the last two days of hitting for Balk’s batters, Jansen through Straw.  This included a 1.000 OPS from McMahon, and 1.200 OPS from Bryson Stott (in 5 AB). But everyone else in that group went 7 for 27 with one double and two walks — a slash line of .259, .311, .296.  The Seraphim are too good to catch them with that kind of hitting, even when the Giants are giving them fits.  So the Balk ended up .07 games short of the first seed. 

Here’s the consolation:  they still are set up to play the Seraphim in an epic 6-game home-and-home series in the final week of the season.  That could be the most exciting week in EFL baseball in either DC or Salem history. 

 

Meanwhile, the Mock family will have its own epic final week series, as the 3rd place Wolverines take on the fourth place Kangaroos.  Actually, most pundits expect the red-hot Kangaroos of overtaking the Wolverines long before then. In fact, Old Detroit will be lucky to be within 6 games of the ‘Roos by the end of the season. But if they can manage to cling to relevance somehow, the Mock boys may be glued to the MLB Gameday feed in the final week, weighing every AB and IP…

… as will some of the Johnson boys.  The 5th place Dragons will fly into the maws of the 6th place Tornados in our season’s final week, bragging rights around the Thanksgiving table at stake. 

Unfortunately, the Bellingham Cascades messed up my plans for a final week Puget Sound Showdown.  That has a ring to it: the Puget Sound Showdown. But to get a final week showdown with the Kaline Drive and the Wizard of Whidbey, the Cascades needed to overtake the Rosebuds.  Alas, they did not pull that off.  So Portland will face off with Kaline in October for … I dunno, some sort of bragging rights. 

Bellingham will instead face southeast to take on the Peshastin Pears in their own private King of the Cascade Mountain contest.  

The Alleghenys don’t yet know who they will face in our final week. That will be determined when we decide how we will pick which MLB team we face in our one week off from EFL v. EFL head-to-head between Week 17 (next week) and Week 28. 

 

Our next step is to decide the identity of our 17th MLB opponent(s) we will each face (where the number 17 appears in the above schedule).  We can either all face the same team, or each face a different team.

If we all face the same team, we have to pick that team.  At the beginning of the season I leaned toward picking a team that had the best chance of making our MLB head-to-head teams average a .500 record.  

I just discovered something: the 16 MLB teams we faced played better against us than they did in the five weeks each wasn’t playing against us.  Overall, these teams went (on average) 45.75 – 46.56 over their entire first 16 weeks.  But in their 11 weeks playing us, they generated rs/ra that point to an expected record of 46.6 – 45.7.   

How dastardly can MLB get!  Treating us that way. Saving up their best stuff to try to humiliate us. We should probably throw one behind their lead-off hitter next time.

We never officially decided how to choose the 17th team, but the leading idea was to pick a team whose projections come closest to making our MLB opposition’s record exactly .500.  If we go by how the first 16 teams played against us, we’ve faced 16 teams who, on average, went 0.9 games over .500 against us, for a total of 14.4 games over .500 among them all. That means we would need a team we haven’t played against who, by itself, is projected to go 14.4 games below .500 the rest of the way. 

The closest team projected to fall 14.4 games further below .500 over the rest of the season is the Detroit Tigers (-13.7, per Baseball Reference). But we’ve already played them. We’ve already played several other teams closest to that dismal projection:  Kansas City (-12.0), Oakland (-11.8), Washington (-16.6), and Colorado (-10.6).  The only team in this vicinity, sort of, we haven’t played is the Pittsburgh Pirates (-17.2). So we could all play the Pirates — which does have the nice twist that it would put the Pirates up against their cross-town-rival Alleghenys in the last week of the season.  

If we think intra-EFL equity is more important than symmetry or EFL/MLB equity, then perhaps we should consider having each EFL team face the MLB team whose rest-of-season projection most closely undoes whatever advantage or disadvantage we have gotten from how our MLB matchups played in the week they faced us. Here is the current tabulation of net boost (or injury) each of us has enjoyed (or suffered) so far due to the vagaries in our MLB competition:

TEAM	Adj Win % Advantage	Extra Wins
KD	0.096	9.2
PP	0.030	2.9
FH	0.027	2.6
CK	0.012	1.2
BC	-0.001	-0.1
DC	-0.013	-1.2
PR	-0.037	-3.6
HD	-0.038	-3.6
OD	-0.047	-4.5
SS	-0.057	-5.4
PA	-0.093	-8.9

You can see the problem:  in a 6 game series, it’s impossible to “correct” two of these disparities in luck, and practically impossible to eliminate couple more.  So we can’t perfectly eliminate the luck element. 

This doesn’t trouble me. In MLB they don’t even try to eliminate the vagaries of luck, getting to face the Yankees in their one losing week, or having to face the White Sox the one week they compile two double-digit wipeout wins. You just eat it. 

I am content, then, to take the Wolverines’ relatively bad luck and all play the Pirates. But if others aren’t so content, here’s a way to make a (mostly-but-not-entirely-symbolic) correction to the luck of the draw:

MLB	W		L	Proj %	.500 – (X)		EFL	ADV (Y)	Extra Ws/	X+Y
									96 games
STL	39.0	–	29.0	0.574	-0.074	v.	KD	0.096	9.216	0.022
PHI	39.6	–	30.4	0.566	-0.066	v.
HOU	39.5	–	31.5	0.556	-0.056	v.
ATL	37.6	–	31.4	0.545	-0.045	v.
TBR	37.5	–	32.5	0.536	-0.036	v.
TOR	36.4	–	32.8	0.526	-0.026	v.	PP	0.030	2.88	0.004
TOR	36.4	–	32.8	0.526	-0.026	v.	FH	0.027	2.592	0.001
MIN	34.7	–	33.3	0.510	-0.010	v.	CK	0.012	1.152	0.002
LAA	35.2	–	34.8	0.503	-0.003	v.
CLE	36.1	–	35.9	0.501	-0.001	v.	BC	-0.001	-0.096	-0.002
BAL	34.0	–	36.0	0.486	0.014	v.	DC	-0.013	-1.248	0.001
MIA	33.7	–	37.3	0.475	0.025	v.
CIN	32.4	–	38.6	0.456	0.044	v.	PR	-0.037	-3.552	0.007
CIN	32.4	–	38.6	0.456	0.044	v.	HD	-0.038	-3.648	0.006
ARI	31.9	–	38.1	0.456	0.044	v.	OD	-0.047	-4.512	-0.003
ARI	31.9	–	38.1	0.456	0.044	v.	SS	-0.057	-5.472	-0.013
PIT	25.9	–	43.1	0.375	0.125	v.	PA	-0.093	-8.928	0.032

We still get PIT v. PIT in the final week, October baseball at its finest.  We also get the Seraphim playing the D-backs before (hopefully) Arizona completes the dismantling of their team for tanking purposes, which feels good to me (and maybe 90% of the rest of the league). 

 

SO — PLEASE WEIGH IN.  If we don’t get any clarity, I believe the default should be for us all to play the Pirates. That’s not a bad default.  They have some interesting players (Oneil Cruz, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Brian Reynolds, etc.)– at least, so far they do.