Today the Cubs play the Phillies again after losing to them yesterday so let’s take a look at this matchup.

PHI Team Status

During the last two weeks the Phillies went 9-4 gaining 5 games, including yesterday which is pretty good.  They have balanced BAT and PITCH, both of which improved.  Let’s look at game handicapping records.

PHI CHN 05_21_7:05_PM

The deltaWAA between these two teams is 9-9=0 making them even steven in the only stat the MLB commissioner cares about.  Vegas set the Cubs at 0.576 and TC Sim has the Phillies favored at 0.540 giving them an EV above our tentative threshold of 115.  The Tier numbers in Lineup (L) , Starter (S) , and Relief (R) show why.

Since we won’t have today’s lineups until later the above could change and perhaps significantly since the Cubs rested Javier Baez and Willson Contreras yesterday.  The 0.41 Lineup (L)  tier number is very low for the Cubs.  They usually field around 1.8 and sometimes a 2 ( one complete standard deviation above current league average ).

Zach Eflin is having a better year than Jose Quintana so far this year but both well above league average.  The difference in tiers from 2.08 to 0.85 is rather high for such little difference in WAA.  Standard deviations are very low in May because it’s still very early in the season.  Like in a  marathon, runners are bunched up at the beginning and the field slowly expands to reveal who is the better runner later in the race.

Right now starters are still bunched up where even greats like Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer have values around where Quintana is today.  The next iteration of this simulation is going to cap a minimum standard deviation which would lesson the difference between the above two pitchers as seen by Tier Combo simulation.  As the season progresses standard deviations increase for L, S , and R so a min cap would only affect simulations for May games.

It should be noted that the above numbers represent a career season for Zach Eflin if he keeps this up.  A 162 game season is long and baseball is littered with pitfalls

This is fodder for a simulation update post however.  Let’s look at the rest of this Phillies team according to this data model.  Roster data sometimes lags a day or two.

PHI Starters

That’s a pretty solid above average rotation.  Aaron Nola who was ranked #4 by this data model in 2018, is off to a slow start.

PHI Relief

Current average relief is 2.04 so PHI is slightly below average.  As a season progresses and bad players are replaced by new players negative value goes off the books so  averages continue rise across the league.

PHI Lineup 5/20/2019

Current average lineup is 1.85 with a standard deviation of 4.64 so this lineup is almost one complete standard deviation above the mean.  A no resting any guys Cubs lineup is almost exactly the same value as above.

That’s all for now.  Until then ….