Diamond Mind Baseball Statistics Guide: Standings

Expanding on the help files.

Diamond Mind Baseball Statistics Guide: Standings

While Diamond Mind Baseball has a fairly robust help file, it doesn’t explain many of the common statistics that are reported in the game. Let’s take a look at some of these, using the most recently statistics from my 1949 replay.

We’ll start with the standings page first. I know, I know — you’re thinking that all of this stuff is far too basic. However, there are a few things that might be interesting to you.

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Basic Standings

This is actually pretty basic.

Team: The name of the team. Note that it also includes the year, which is helpful if you are playing with teams from different eras.

W: Wins

L: Losses

Pct: Winning percentage

GB: Games behind. This is calculated by subtracting the first place team’s losses from its wins, then taking the team in question’s losses and subtracting it from their wins. You subtract the second team’s total from the first team, and divide the whole thing by 2. Wikipedia gives us this formula:

You can also make a few adjustments to the formula; the result is the same:

Occasionally, the team in second place will seem to have a better record than the team in first place:

The most famous example of this comes from the 1915 Federal League:

Don’t ask me why we still use this method instead of just looking at the winning percentage. It makes little sense.

L10: Record in the last 10 games

Strk: Current winning or losing streak

Mgc: Magic number. This is the number of additional wins the front-running team needs to clinch the pennant — or, alternatively, the number of losses the team in second place (or further back) needs to be eliminated. Wikipedia provides the formula:

RF: Runs scored. I’m guessing this stands for “runs for,” which is strange.

RA: Runs allowed

Mgn: Runs scored minus runs allowed

W: Real life wins. You’d think that Diamond Mind would give this a different heading from simulation wins…

L: Real life losses.

Pct: Real life winning percentage.

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Split Standings

These are also pretty basic.

Home: Record at home

Road: Record on the road

Grass: Record on grass

Turf: Record on artificial turf, which is there even if your league has no artificial turf stadiums

vsLHP: Record versus left handed starters

vsRHP: Record versus right handed starters

Div: Record against other teams in the division

InterL: Record in interleague games

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Advanced Standings

Lead7: Record when ahead in the 7th inning

Tied7: Record when tied in the 7th inning

Trail7: Record when trailing in the 7th inning

1-run: Record in games decided by 1 run

Extra: Record in extra-inning games

PD: Also known as “luck,” this is the difference between expected wins according to the Pythagorean Winning Percentage and the wins the team actually has.

Let’s talk about this a bit. The concept was developed by Bill James, and shows the winning percentage a team is expected to have given their runs scored and runs allowed. Here is the formula, thanks to Wikipedia:

You can also simplify this equation:

That will give you a decimal number, which you can multiply by games played to get expected wins. Games played minus expected wins give you expected losses.

Now, Baseball Reference uses 1.83 as the exponent instead of 2, for reasons that strike me as obscure at best:

There is a brief discussion about why 1.83 works better than 2 on Wikipedia. You can judge for yourself. I find it unconvincing, as it seems more an attempt to make the projection fit the real winning percentage post ex facto than anything else. I’m more than happy to listen if anybody can explain to me why 1.83 (or any number less than 2) works better.

Diamond Mind uses 2 as the exponent, not 1.83.

PyPct: Pythagorean Expected Winning Percentage

SimPct: Winning percentage in simulation

RLPct: Winning percentage in real life

More to come next time!