Dirtbags Baseball - Long Beach State 49ers

Welcome to Dirtbags Baseball Blog! The blog is interactive. At the end of each article is a link that says "Click here to read comments posted by others or to post your comments." Please feel free to click this link and add your own comments. This link also takes you to comments that have been left by others. You need to register with Blogger to leave comments, which is free (there is a link on the comments page to do this).
RSS Feed

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

RPI Versus The Polls

I thought it would be interesting to see, at this point, how the current RPI compares to the human opinion rankings and polls. The following is ranked in RPI order, with Baseball America (BA), Collegiate Baseball (CB) and Sports Weekly/ESPN (SW/ESPN) rankings shown in the columns moving left to right:

Team                   RPI  BA  CB  SW/ESPN

Texas                  1    3   3   2
Tulane                 2    2   1   1
Miami, Florida         3    5   7   4
Baylor                 4    10  11  15
Florida                5    6   4   7
Mississippi            6    21  25  18
North Carolina         7    14  14  9
Georgia Tech           8    8   6   6
Louisiana State        9    16  13  8
College of Charleston  10   NR  26  NR
North Carolina State   11   23  NR  NR
Oregon State           12   4   9   10
Arizona State          13   18  17  22
Vanderbilt             14   NR  NR  NR
Clemson                15   NR  NR  NR
South Carolina         16   19  18  13
Cal State Fullerton    17   1   2   3
Long Beach State       18   11  10  12
Louisiana-Lafayette    19   20  19  16
Auburn                 20   NR  NR  NR

RPI is often criticized for bias against teams in regions of the country with relatively fewer Division I baseball programs. Most notably, the far west. The bias comes from the fact that teams in the west all play each other, drawing their records relatively closer to .500. In contrast, teams in the southeastern U.S. have many, many D-I schools to choose to play, so they don't all play each other during the season. The result is records relatively further from .500.

If the human rankings have any validity (debatable, but on average and over time I believe they do), then the RPI bias is revealed in the above table. Take College of Charleston, a school in South Carolina. Their record is 35-9, but they have played the 116th most difficult schedule. Running up a great record against other teams with good records, none of whom plays virtually anyone any good, gets you a great RPI (10th), but the human rankers know it doesn't mean you are a top team. In their case they aren't ranked by Baseball America or Sports Weekly/ESPN, and are ranked 26th by Collegiate Baseball. You can see other examples of southeastern U.S. teams also ranked high in RPI, but a fair amount lower in the polls, above.

In contrast, look at some of the top teams in the far west - notably Fullerton, Oregon State and Long Beach State, each of whom is ranked in the top 10 in at least 1 ranking. The greatest disparity is for Fullerton, 17th in RPI, but ranked 1, 2 and 3 in the polls. The Dirtbags are 18th in RPI, and ranked 10, 11 and 12.

posted on 5/03/2005 by Jeff Agnew

Comments: Post a Comment