Best of the Best of the Worst

Alright, I was able to come up with an easier way to look at the best and worst category weeks ever than just scrolling through 22 pages of scores, so here's the result.



So the average category is little different from the roto ranks presented earlier this week. The Best and Worst are whats interesting to me here. Should probably have accounted for the all-star week for all the counting categories, but, you can probably assume that a good chunk of the worsts are from that week.

I'll break it down by category.

Runs:
Best Best: by Burt and Chaos
Best Range: 41 to 48.
Worst Worst: Chaos
Worst Range: 11 to 19.

Best and Worst by the same team. Crazy. Not a lot of disparity.

HR:
Best Best: Barry Jive
Best Range: 12-18
Worst Worst: LLL and Dunbars
Worst Range: 1- 7

Tots worst was 5? Man, they should have done better in this league. I mean, HRs mean Rs and RBI. He must be terrible at this. And somehow I missed that the Bulls always have at least 7 HRs. Man, that's formidable.

RBI:
Best Best: Barry Jive
Best Range: 38-56
Worst Worst: Wangdoodles
Worst Range: 7-18

Best had a huge range with 3 people over 50, 6 in the 40's and 1 under 40. A bunch of teams had worsts around 11-14. The Bulls again kicked everyone's worst ass with 18. 7 RBI for the Doodles? Really?

SB:
Best Best: Burt Reynolds
Best Range:7-18
Worst Worst: 0 - 2
Worst Range: Several at zero (BJ, FU, FD, OC, TS)

Stolen bases, along with saves, tend to be a flightly category with crazy week to week fluxuations. 3 of the 5 teams in the playoffs have a weekly best of less than 10.

AVG:
Best Best: Wangdoodles
Best Range: .317 to .365
Worst Worst: Limber Lesbian Lefties
Worst Range: .197 to .247

The Wangs worst was only about .050 lower than average, while the Lefties were about .100 left.

K:
Best Best: Who the hell you think
Best Range: 52-95
Worst Worst: Organized Chaos
Worst Range: 13 - 33

I am more than a little shocked that Burt had the 2nd worst worst K week. Also, the BJ's and Dunbars worst was 33, which I partially attribute to both of us checking our teams and rotating in starters on a daily basis.

W:
Best Best: Burt
Best Range: 5-10
Worst Worst: FU, OC, and WW
Worst Range: 0-2

I'm surprised I never topped 5 wins in a week. Only Burt had a worst as high as 2, everyone besides the 3 worst worsts listed had a week with 1 win. 1 stupid win.

SV
Best Best: Burt
Best Range: 4 - 13
Worst Worst: BT, FU, LLL, OC, WW
Worst Range: 0 -2

Half the dang league has had a week without a save. Speaks to the randomness of saves and the value of having at least a closer or two in head to head leagues (you'll play at least 4 of those 5).

ERA
Best Best: Dunbars
Best Range: 2.686 to .923
Worst Worst: Fairyland Unicorns
Worst Range: 7.412 to 5.211

Not a lot to say here, except there's some extreme variation from high to low (and from average to either extreme). Also, the lowest worst ERA belongs to the Reynolds, so I make the leap of logic that the sheer totals of pitching were able to mitigate some of the extremely bad performances of any one or 12 pitchers.

WHIP
Best Best: Chaos
Best Range: .761 to 1.094
Worst Worst: Wangdoodles
Worst Range: 1.839 to 1.527

As WHIP is not the easiest category to visualize, I'm having trouble figuring out if there wasn't a lot of variation or if there was a crapload of it and I just don't get it. I don't feel like standardizing the numbers to find out. That's all I'm saying about this category, so no analysis.

Best Wins by Amount:
10: Bulls and Barry
9: Burt, Uni, Dunbars, Limber
8: Tots
7: Chaos and Doodles
6: Selleck

I had not to this point realized that the Sellecks best week resulted in barely winning. That's bad. Real bad.

Least Wins by Amount:
3: Burt
2: Dunbars, Bulls
1: BJ, FU, LLL
0: BT, OC, TS, WW

The worst the Burts ever did in wins was half of the best the other staches ever achieved.

I'll ignore losses because its mostly the opposite of wins.

Ties: The best line just shows the most ties you ever had a week.

Most ties ever by amount:
3: LLL, OC, WW
2: BT, BR, FU, FD, HB, TS
1: Barry Jive

I don't know why I was allergic to ties this season, but apparently I repelled them like sweater vests to pretty girls.

Here's a roto of just the teams best best in each category:


Not a lot of surprises here except that both OC and the Doodles both had some crazy good weeks in one category at a time, thus jumping them up in these roto rankings.


And here's a roto of the worsts.



This, along with the above look at each category, leads me to the idea that the Bulls have been the most consistent team this year. Even his bad weeks weren't ever uncompetitive. As I said a post ago, Burt and Barry were both pretty consistently good, but have had hot and cold streaks.

All this is another way of showing that the Unicorns are never, ever, great, sometimes terrible but they still have a good chance of winning the league.

I'll write about this later, but I wanted to get these pics up.

Brew Plop Weekly Wins

Alright, here's the weekly wins numbers I was able to whip together for my lunch break.

What you see is the division standings if we used winner take all scoring instead of 10 individual games per week. The W-L-T columns were based solely on whether your win total for the week was greater, less than or equal to your loss total (so 5-5-0 is a tie, but 5-4-1 is not).

Next is the winning percentage from this reality, then your actual winning percentage, and lastly a + or - to indicate whether you would have been better or worse off for that time period using the winner take all system.

Not surprisingly, everyone who ended up with winning records for the year would have done better with the winner take all while everyone with losing records would have done worse. There was more nuance in the first half, as the Sellecks and Wangdoodles would have done better and the Bulls and Unicorns would have been worse. All told though, the rankings would remain the same.

Barry Jive and the those Limber Lefties both managed a half a season where they won 8 of 11 games. To put that in perspective, 3 teams were unable to win 8 weeks of the full season of 22, with another just hitting that mark. Organized Chaos managed a league low 1 weekly win for the second half of the season, which, may or may not be a large factor in the OC having the overall league high of 16 losses (next closest were the Sellecks with 13, so OC wins losses in a landslide).

Four teams (Bulls, FU, Reynolds and LLL) had better second halfs than first, while the other five teams had worse (though the Dunbars had almost exactly the same half twice).

More Brew Plop Summaries

Alright, this chart is probably way too large to view in a blog, but you wanted it and you got it. (You should be able to click on it to view it in a new window, or find your own way to do the same thing).

The chart above shows the percentage of time a team won a particular category in both the first half, second half, and total.

At the end of each line is my subjective W-L-T based on your percentages (I think I went 44-56 is a tie), followed by your actual winning percentage for that time period.

Let's go team by team:

Barry Jive: The first half of the season, I locked up R, HR, and RBI at the expense of steals. In the second half, I cooled off a bit as now I have toss ups in R, HR, and SB, but still win RBI more than I lose. My pitching, especially starters, were better in the second half. Overall, the only category I didn't have much chance in was SB at the beginning, but that has changed going into the playoffs.

Tom Selleck: Went from as much good as bad with a few toss ups in the first half to mostly bad in the second (something about a daughter or something, I'm just saying that extra kids never seemed to deter Bobby). Basically, Pujols won HRs for the lesser staches, and that was the bright point.

Limber Lesbian Lefties: Improved in nearly every category in the second half of the season, which resulted in edging into the playoffs with little wiggle room. Second half was as dominant as just about anyone and has a chance to make a good playoff run, unlike his Angels if they have to play the Red Sox in the first round again.

Burt Reynolds: The offense was as terrible as pitching was plentiful in the first half, but something clicked in the second half that made the greater stache more competitive in the hitting categories. The second half winning percentage was the second best half in the league, partly because of destroying the top two teams head-to-head. Not sure how it happened, but even with the streaming, the team traded complete dominance of the counting pitching stats in the first half, for just strong showings, but added relevance in the average pitching stats.

Fairyland Unicorns: As average in the second half as the first. This team basically defines "just good enough". Not a single dominant category, but I guess always being competitive in all 10 categories wins you some games.

Wangdoodles: Without changing the roster, the team went from dominant in SB to losing most weeks. On the flip side, the power categories went from awful to just bad. Did manage not to win saves once (did tie 0-0 once, which is something).

Organized Chaos: One of the two team names seems to describe this team better than the other, but I can't figure out exactly which. This team was... bad, and then got worse, as more and more of the "contributors" left the playing field without losing their spot in the starting roster.

Fighting Dunbars: Gained SB in the second half, but lost R, RBI, and AVG in the process. On the flip side, improved in every pitching category in the second half, to the point where he was a favorite for those five each week. Behind the Lesbians, perhaps the biggest turn around from 1st to 2nd half. Ran out of time, but made a serious run at the playoffs near the end.

Blithe Tots: Informed me that love would die if I didn't post more analysis. Hard to see exactly what happened besides falling off the cooling coattails of Raul Ibanez. Wasn't much worse in the second half, but all the toss ups seemed to go the other guys way. Managed to lose a playoff spot with just a few weeks to go, before making a last ditch failed effort to claw his back in. I changed his name on the league page, because I actually prefer Blithe Tots to the alternative.

Hackensack Bulls: There may be no Einar Diaz, but this team was probably the most consistently good. While BJ and the Burt both had more dominant half seasons, his winning percentage was the 2nd best in both periods, so that explains how he ended up with the big numbers. The offense was great in both halves, though he somehow swapped a tossup in average for almost dominance in SB. The pitching went from 4 of 5 tossups to only 2 of 5 tossups, which probably helped create the season long hot streak.

Up next is probably weekly wins. We'll see.

Brew Plop Final Regular Season Analysis

I'll put a bit of prose here, but mostly, there will be a lot of graphs outlining different ways of looking at the 2nd set of regular season final standings (no analysis from last year).

First are the normals:

Nothing all that surprising here, as the standings haven't changed drastically since the Bulls caught and passed the Uptown Five after 17-18 weeks.

The one flip-flop in the standings comes in the 2-3 spots because the ranks I'm using don't account for divisions. Burt Reynolds won the Lager division handily, but remains 4.5 games behind the Bulls for the 2nd best regular season record.

Not sure if this means anything, but the team with the best record in the league has the least number of ties (6) while the 2nd best team has the most ties (17).

There's an extreme drop-off after the #7 Dunbars, as no team was ahead of the next more than the Dunbars over the Wangdoodles (18). In fact, no other team was 10 behind the next best team.

With 10 wins a week and 22 weeks, I count 220 possible wins. Of the 10 teams, 3 won more than half the possible games, a 4th won exactly half of the possible games and another 2 won more games than they lost. Only one team made it to a .600 winning percentage and only one team managed to have less than a .400 winning percentage.

Next up, the "what would our league look like in Roto mode" standings:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2608/3897634301_2243c9f4bc_o.jpg

Reynolds would win the roto standings, though its recognizable that the standings are largely skewed by the starting pitching streaming. The Bulls are probably the most balanced team, at least of the contenders. The Dunbars would make huge leaps up in the standings, and again, somehow, the Unicorns would fall from their charmed existence.

Number of Categories the Team is in the overall top 3 for:

BR: 6

HB: 5

BJ: 5

FD: 1

LLL: 4

BT: 3

WW: 4

FU: 0

OC: 2

TS: 0

Put this way, its most surprising that the Unicorns made the playoffs and somewhat surprising that the Wangdoodles did not. However, that would ignore a whole lot of other important factors like, you know, having players playing and not a bunch of DLers.