Dirtbags Baseball - Long Beach State 49ers

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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Boyd Nation's Take On The Long Beach Regional

In his latest Breadcrumbs Back To Omaha piece, Boyd Nation (Boyd's World) has this on the Long Beach Regional:

I'll have a table included in my discussion of each regional, so I need to describe the columns.

W-L -- Won-loss record
RPI -- Pseudo-RPI ranking
ISR -- ISR ranking
Probs -- The probability of the team winning the regional, super-regional, and championship, respectively, according to the method based on ISR gaps I usually use....
                          W-L   RPI  ISR   Probs

Long Beach State         36-20   17    7  41/16/ 3
Southern California      37-19   16    5  35/15/ 3
Pepperdine               38-21   34   10  24/ 9/ 1
Rhode Island             34-19   90  136   0/ 0/ 0
The good news is that Beach got to host (although that's probably so they had a place to park all the California teams they couldn't squeeze into Fullerton). The bad news -- well, look at that ISR column. From a spectator point of view, I suppose it's nice that you have three of the top ten teams in the country meeting somewhere besides Omaha, but it's not exactly good from a fairness point of view. The fifth-best team in the country has a roughly 15% chance of getting to Omaha, and almost no chance of winning it all. This just cements my recent contention that Pepperdine has been the most mistreated team in the country in recent years. Add to this the fact that the winner of this bloodbath gets to go to Corvallis to face what should be a well-rested Oregon State team, and it just gets worse.

There is another way to look at it. If the Dirtbags take care of business and win the Regional, they will have faced some of the toughest competition in the country. That makes a baseball team better. Boyd discusses each of the regionals, in turn, in the article.

Update: As each game is played, the probability of winning at each level changes as well. So a win generally improves all the odds, and the opposite is true for a loss. But the probabilities are also dependent on how other teams standing in the way of the Beach perform.

posted on 6/01/2005 by Jeff Agnew

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