15 Comments

Hey Neil, really good content here, thanks for all your work! I saw today that the 6 top teams in ELO are all NL teams (though 6th is a tie). I think it's been the case for the last couple months that all or nearly all the top teams are NL. What's the deal with that? Is a quirk of ELO or do you think team strength really lines up that way? Is it historically rare to have this kind of ELO league alignment around playoff time?

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Terrific question, and thanks for the kind words. I believe that is because the NL has absolutely dominated Interleague Play for the past 2/3 of the season. NL has a 369-321 record overall, which equates to a 86.6 win pace per 162 if the average NL team played nothing but AL opponents. But since June, the NL is 263-207 (90.7 win pace per 162), and that figure is 129-88 (96.3) since the start of August and was 55-35 (99.0 wins/162) in September.

Basically, the NL has "stolen" a ton of Elo points from AL teams over the past 4+ months (no interleague games since September until the World Series), causing NL playoff teams' ratings to rise as they then divvy up those points the league took from the AL amongst themselves. I'd have to look to see if something similar happened before in the Interleague Era, but this all would indicate that the NL is a stronger league than the AL this year, and was pretty significantly stronger by the end of the regular season specifically.

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Hi Neil,

I just wanted to confirm something: you’ve listed the win probabilities with the Phillies and Dodgers as the home teams, but in these games, they are actually the visitors. As we discussed in the NFL section, the home team gets additional ELO points for playing at home, this changes the win probabilities, or I'm wrong?

With that in mind, I’m curious—how many ELO points advantage does the home team have in MLB?

Thanks for your time!

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That is an EXCELLENT catch! I had an error that was considering the home team from Game 1 to be at home throughout the series. That's fixed now in both the games table and the Elo CSV on GitHub.

In Elo, the home team gets 24 points added to its rating differential vs the opponent.

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I believe there may be a similar issue with NHL games, but I can’t comment on that section since I’m not a paid subscriber 😂

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I'll forgive you for that because you keep finding these bugs, LOL. But seriously, thank you -- and the NHL schedule is fixed as well.

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Haha, I'm glad I can help out, even if it's just a little in your great project! 😄 Thanks for fixing that too.

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My anxiety thanks you for giving the Phillies the second-best odds to win the WS

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Biased, but I wouldn't bet against Skubal in Game 1

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It's a good start so far...

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My recollection is that the SFG World Series winning teams between 2010-2014 had some of the lowest in-season Elo ratings to win a series, often with late season surges. Which makes me curious how this years Tigers would stack up against history if the make the playoffs after being 10 games back of the wild card at the start of August. Dyou have a historic ranking of teams that qualified for the playoffs and their lowest in-season elo for that year?

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Have you considered doing historical charts/graphs over the years for the Sports ELO Ratings like FiveThirtyEight did? Just curious.

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That would definitely be cool to recreate! I'd have to look into which charting service would make the best and most useful version of that, but it seems worth looking into...

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I would love to see how historically bad the White Sox are

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Thank you!!!!

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