Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Hobgoblins and Little Minds

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Baseball is an inconsistent game -- an upset, in almost any given game, is just not that surprising. One of the side effects of that is that almost every teams' fans are convinced that their team is just horribly inconsistent, and that if they could just work that out, things would be great. Obviously, if you're doing the same thing as everyone else (getting upset occasionally), you don't really have a problem to be fixed, and, in a good portion of the quality spectrum, you're actually better off being inconsistent sometimes -- I'll talk more about that later.

That said, I want to try to actually quantify inconsistency this week, so we can see who's really driving their fans nuts. I've played with a number of measures, and the one that seems to work the best by most of the measures I'm using is the percentage of a team's games that are upsets using the ISR's adjusted for home field advantage as the determining factor for what is an upset. In other words, if a team has played 40 games and beaten 6 teams better than them and lost to 4 worse than them, they'll have an inconsistency index (II) of (6 + 4) / 40 = .250. That 25% number turns out to be right around the average value, by the way.

Here are the twenty most inconsistent teams for the 2003 season to date by this measure:

Campbell                  0.512
Penn State                0.459
Fairleigh Dickinson       0.448
Illinois                  0.447
Middle Tennessee State    0.444
Eastern Illinois          0.432
Columbia                  0.432
Wisconsin-Milwaukee       0.424
Marist                    0.421
Vanderbilt                0.415
Northwestern              0.412
Bradley                   0.410
San Jose State            0.409
UC Irvine                 0.409
UCLA                      0.409
Jacksonville State        0.409
Northern Illinois         0.405
Long Island               0.400
Gonzaga                   0.395
Dartmouth                 0.393

Campbell has been just about the prototypical inconsistent team this year. They're right in the middle of the pack at ISR #144 this week, but they have wins over Miami and FAU along with a sweep of Stetson among their twelve upset wins. They also have nine upset losses, so over half of their forty-one games have been upsets. That's not that unusual historically; almost every year, it looks like there one team that breaks the 50% mark.

Here's the flip side, the twenty most consistent teams:

Morris Brown              0.033
Alabama-Birmingham        0.071
Southern                  0.093
LeMoyne                   0.094
Canisius                  0.097
New York Tech             0.103
Prairie View A&M          0.106
St. Peter's               0.107
Pace                      0.108
Chicago State             0.111
Western Carolina          0.116
Georgia Tech              0.119
Savannah State            0.121
Hawaii-Hilo               0.122
Notre Dame                0.122
Coppin State              0.125
Iona                      0.138
Virginia                  0.140
Hartford                  0.143
Kansas State              0.146

Most of these teams are pretty bad, which makes sense -- Morris Brown, for example, hasn't played anyone they should have beaten, and they've only won one game, so they're remarkable consistent. Georgia Tech is an interesting entry here -- their only upset win to date is over Auburn, while they've only lost four to teams below them.

Now, the best case, of course, is for your team to be unbeaten and ranked #1. In that case, they're perfectly consistent. If your team isn't that good, though, you're probably better off with them being a bit inconsistent, since that means that the high end of their performance is a bit higher. Being able to beat everyone below #50 is useful, but it doesn't help if you lose to everyone above that. Even in, say, the second ten, you're probably better off having a chance of playing over your heads for a few days in the postseason balanced with a chance of going 2-and-q than being assured of a Sunday regional elimination. So, the next time they lose one to someone they have no business losing to, just grab a past surprise win and hang on to that for solace.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Hobgoblins and Little Minds

About the author, Boyd Nation