Looks like a 1:20pm Monday home game against the White Sox. The cross town classic which was once a two weekend event has been relegated to Monday afternoon. That said the commissioner of MLB still counts this game as either a W or L for either team. Let’s look at team status for the White Sox.
| BAT | PITCH | Rs | Ra | W | L | UR | LR | TeamID | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -35.1 | -1.8 | 421 | 473 | 38 | 57 | -11.5 | -0.9 | CHA |
Terrible hitting and average pitching making them -19 in the win/loss columns. That UR is very bad too which probably significantly led to them having a much worse record than estimated using the Pythagorean Expectation estimation on their run differential. The delta WAA is the difference between two teams calculated as:
deltaWAA = abs ( WAA[home team] – WAA[away team] )
abs is absolute value. The Cubs have a real WAA of +5 so the deltaWAA for this game is
deltaWAA = |+5 – (-19)| = 24
According to history the better team with a +24 deltaWAA wins 58% of the time without any other knowledge of the two teams. Home or away is irrelevant. This will be explained in more detail in a later post. Let’s look at what the Ouija Board thinks.
DATE 07_24 2:20_PM CHA CHN
LINEAWAY CHA [ 0.290 ] < 0.317 >
STARTAWAY -0.63(0.467) Miguel_Gonzalez_CHA
LINEHOME CHN [ 0.730 ] < 0.714 >
STARTHOME 0.44(0.532) Kyle_Hendricks_CHN
Welcome back Kyle Hendricks! The Ouija Board started out giving a huge advantage to the Cubs today. They dropped to 71.4% which means Cubs’ bettors pay out around 2.7 – 1 to make this bet. Miguel Gonzalez is a little under water right now. Let’s look at his career.
| Year | WAA | Name_TeamID | Pos | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 1.6 | Miguel_Gonzalez_BAL | PITCH | XXXXX | |
| 2013 | 0.4 | Miguel_Gonzalez_BAL | PITCH | XXXXX | |
| 2014 | 1.8 | Miguel_Gonzalez_BAL | PITCH | +165+ | |
| 2014 | -0.4 | Miguel_Gonzalez_PHI | PITCH | +165+ | |
| 2015 | -3.1 | Miguel_Gonzalez_BAL | PITCH | -039- | |
| 2016 | 1.4 | Miguel_Gonzalez_CHA | PITCH | XXXXX | |
| 2017 | -0.6 | Miguel_Gonzalez_CHA | PITCH | XXXXX | |
| Total | 1.1 |
A fairly average, capable pitcher who burns a lot of innings. Hendricks is coming off DL and he struggled a bit earlier in the season. If he’s back to 2016 form the Cubs have a clear starter advantage.
Here are the lineups for today.
| WAA | Name_TeamID | Pos | PA | 07242017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.61 | Melky_Cabrera_CHA | LF | 395 | |
| 0.23 | Yoan_Moncada_CHA | 2B | 7 | |
| 1.41 | Jose_Abreu_CHA | 1B | 401 | |
| 1.39 | Avisail_Garcia_CHA | RF | 346 | |
| 0.61 | Matt_Davidson_CHA | 3B | 280 | |
| -2.31 | Tim_Anderson_CHA | SS | 347 | |
| -0.65 | Adam_Engel_CHA | CF | 108 | |
| -1.24 | Kevan_Smith_CHA | C | 151 | |
| -0.06 | Miguel_Gonzalez_CHA | P | 2 | |
| TOTAL | WAA=-0.02 | PA=2037 | WinPct=0.500 |
White Sox have an even steven 0.500 lineup with a couple of good hitters and another shortstop who can’t hit as well as their catcher. Overall this lineup is better than their BAT derived from seasonal run differential.
| WAA | Name_TeamID | Pos | PA | 07242017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.57 | Jason_Heyward_CHN | RF | 262 | |
| 0.84 | Kris_Bryant_CHN | 3B | 389 | |
| 1.64 | Anthony_Rizzo_CHN | 1B | 419 | |
| 1.30 | Willson_Contreras_CHN | C | 307 | |
| -0.44 | Kyle_Schwarber_CHN | LF | 298 | |
| -0.78 | Ben_Zobrist_CHN | 2B | 265 | |
| -0.36 | Jon_Jay_CHN | CF | 211 | |
| 0.88 | Javier_Baez_CHN | SS | 287 | |
| -0.19 | Kyle_Hendricks_CHN | P | 20 | |
| TOTAL | WAA=3.51 | PA=2458 | WinPct=0.527 |
Cubs fielding around the same as usual lineup but it’s getting better. Cubs have a slight hitting advantage here with past stats but have a big advantage if these guys play like they did last season. Here is relief.
| TeamID | WAA | IP | WinPct | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHA | 6.05 | 344.7 | 0.579 | |
| CHN | 6.17 | 370.1 | 0.575 |
Both teams have decent relief. Cubs’ relief faltered a bit lately and the White Sox traded away a couple of their good relievers so we’ll see. If the White Sox didn’t have +6 relief they would be 25 games under instead of 19.
The Cubs need to mop up teams like this but that hasn’t been the case in the first half of the season so we won’t know which Cubs team shows up today. The premium Cubs’ bettors must pay seems kind of steep and we have seen them being overvalued at home all season. Hopefully the Ouija board is prescient today. We’ll see although whatever happens today does not prove or disprove the underlying true probability whatever that happens to be.