Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Gauging the MDS Model as a Leading Indicator of a Team's Win %

Warning: Bill Simmons-esque bias to follow.

My favorite baseball team is the Tampa Bay Rays, and when I do my weekly updates for the MDS Model, I've noticed the Pyth and Composite ratings (which are designed to be predictive) are consistently higher than the team's current win percentage. My hope is that these ratings are leading indicators of the team's actual win percentage; i.e. that these higher ratings will predict subsequent improvement by the team winning games.


As depicted by the above chart, the two percentages seem to move in lockstep, rather than one following the other. The correlation between these two is very strong: 0.895. I then checked the correlation between the MDS Win % and the next week's actual win percentage. This correlation was also positive, but much weaker: 0.296. So, it seems my hypothesis is just wishful thinking.

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