How to Accurately Predict Who Will Win the PBL Championship

While sitting at work bored the other day I found myself checking out some of the history of the PBL on the website. After looking through some of the scores and champions from past seasons I started comparing wins and loses, and runs for and against to see how the Milleteers championship teams have stacked up to previous champions. Historically articles and notions of the league had shown it as being a very offensive minded league, and that the Milleteers have changed this perception somewhat as they have been able to win with good pitching depth and defense, despite a mediocre offense.

 

In comparison, champions of the past often blew teams away in football score type blowouts. The worst one of these was a 47-7 massacre by Armena over Tofield back in 2006. That Armena team averaged a shocking 14.8 runs per game. Score keepers running out of ink wasn’t just a common occurrence in the regular season, but playoff games also saw their fair share of football scores. Comparatively the Milleteers were by far the lowest scoring champions. Some of it could be attributed to wood bats or an increasingly competitive league, but even so their offense was so much lower than previous champs and ranked much lower as compared to teams that they competed against that year that their championship teams must be considered much different than previous champs.

 

Here is where it gets interesting though. Playing guerrilla baseball doesn’t always guarantee a championship. That 2006 Armena team failed to hoist the cup despite scoring ten more runs per game than the 2009 champion Milleteers.

 

Year Champion RF/G Rank

2001 Ryley 2

2002 Armena 2

2003 Armena 1

2004 Armena 1

2005 Camrose 2

2006 Bardo 3

2007 Camrose 1

2008 Bardo 1

2009 Leduc 5

2010 Leduc 4

 

I then remembered an article Kris Kushnerick wrote that listed the champs from the last decade and their ranking in the regular season to try and find some patterns to help predict future champs based on their regular season performance. I then did the same exercise with the highest scoring teams. I found that the team that scored the most runs won four titles. The second best regular season offense won the championship three times, with the third best, fourth best, and fifth best offenses winning one title each. Not a sure fire way of predicting, but generally a good offense leads to playoff success, which would make sense.

 

Defeated, I turned my attention to trying to compare how dominant the Milleteers run has been the last two seasons compared to champions of the past. At times last year there was some sentiment from some bloggers that the Milleteers had become such a juggernaught that other teams would have to send their back of the rotation starters against them in order to save their best arms for games they had a better chance of winning. After comparing run differentials from past champions it became apparent that the Milleteers were generally less dominant with closer games and fewer blowouts than previous champs.

 

While doing the run differentials I also charted runs against, which essentially tells you about the quality of a team’s pitching and defence. Naturally the Milleteers numbers were the lowest, as they have had the lowest runs against since joining the league, and their numbers have stayed basically the same even after the switch to wood bats. There were some other teams that had some pretty good runs against numbers as well. The teams from the Armena dynasty with Peterson and Boettger leading them on the hill had some lower numbers, as did the 2008 Bardo Athletics.

 

 

Of course all these stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. First off the sample sizes are quite small due to the regular season only being 12 to 16 games. Secondly the park effects in the league are enormous. It is a lot easier to score runs in the Ryley band box then the cavernous diamond in Leduc, and with the small sample size you can’t really factor it out. Also the transient nature of senior ball from not only season to season, but game to game is the cause of many a blowout. When teams can consistently ice their best lineup they will rarely get blown out, but when you have to get cousins and fathers out of the stands just to avoid a forfeit, that is when you find yourself on the wrong end of a football score. Pitching depth is also a big issue as any team can find themselves shutting down an opponent when their ace is on the mound, but when you get into the bullpen or have to start your number four starter who’s ERA is probably five runs higher than your ace’s, that’s how scores soar. It is probably also a good indicator in why the Milleteers give up so few runs as they have the best bullpen and one of the deepest rotations of the modern era.

 

After wasting all this time at work coming up with some fancy graphs and some interesting, but fairly useless statistical analysis, I still had not found any concrete answers that I had sought out. Then it hit me. Although the Powerline Baseball League had historically been looked at as an offensive league, when looking back at the past champs the teams that scored the most runs did not always win….but the teams that allowed the fewest did! Remember that 2006 Armena team that scored more runs a game than a lot of high school football teams. They didn’t win, but Bardo did, and they had allowed the fewest runs against in the regular season that year. In fact nine out of the last ten champions have allowed the fewest runs during the regular season. The only champion who didn’t achieve this feat was the 2008 Bardo Athletics, and they weren’t necessarily an anomaly as they still had one of the better runs against per game of all the champions. 

 

Year Champion RA/G Rank

 

2001 Ryley 1