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Player 5150 move Rather than spend this afternoon adding more pictures to my Route 66 website, as I planned to, I played Excel spreadsheet wizard again.

I love Excel. You can do magic with that program; if there’s a cure for cancer to be found, it’s in Excel. When I ran the NCAA Tournament Pool at work this year, I spent several hours crafting a worksheet that allowed me to simply put in the final score of a game and it would automatically calculate all the points; in future years I simply have to put in the tourney bracket and the pick of each invididual (assigning each team a unique identifier, like 1.1 for the top seed in the first regional and 3.4 for the four seeed in the third regional) and the bracket will function like a cliche similar to a well-oiled machine.

The point: the other day I was thinking about which division in Major League Baseball is superior, because I do things like this. I’m not talking about this year, but going back to 1995 when the current six division format began (since 1994 doesn’t count, work stoppage and all.) Rather than ask a magic eight ball to decide, I devised this spreadsheet.

Each division has its own page with the standings for each year, beginning in 1995, along with playoff results. Points were assigned as such: one point for winning percentage x 100 (a .506 divisional percentage in a year gets you 506 points,) 25 points for a wild card berth (every division has a winner, so division titles are meaningless here,) 50 points for a league pennant, and finally 75 points for a world title Caprica on dvd . Additionally, your playoff record is taken x 10, plus the number of wins x2 The Robe psp Sniper 3 release , so a 5-6 record in the playoffs nets you 55.45 points (5 divided by 11 is your winning percentage of .450, that times 10 is 45 points, plus 5 wins times 2 points is 10 more points. The point is to make the postseason winning percentage valuable, and wins moreso, yet not enough to eclipse the importance of the regular season.)

Your result, to no one’s surprise, is that the AL East is the dominant division over the last eleven years.

There’s a big gap between the AL East and the AL Central, for a few reasons. While there have been sucky teams in the East (Tampa, I’m looking at you,) nothing says suck like the Midwest Junior Circuit. Minnesota had some damn bad years, not to mention Detroit’s near-record suck several years back. Oh, and then there are the Royals. Post-season success is the big difference, with the East scoring five world titles, seven pennants and eight wild cards, compared to just one series win (the Sox last year) for the Central, to go with just three pennants and (didn’t realize this until today) NO wild card appearances. The NL Central has no world titles and just two pennants, but with four wild cards and a better winning percentage (.490 vs .479) they eek out fifth place over their AL counterpart.

The AL West has the same number of world titles as the NL West (one) the same number of wild cards (three) and two less pennants (just one,) but, again, beat them out on winning percentage (.519 vs .505.) In fact, the AL West has the best winning percentage overall by a whopping .013 over the NL East, partly due to 2001 and 2002 when it racked up .565 and .566 respectively. During the 2002 campaign, when Oakland won 103 games and Anaheim pulled of a wild card win with 93 victories, the latter rolled to the title and a gi-normous 804.26 points for the division that year, easily the top on the charts, beating second place NL West (669.10) quite easily.

The lowest yearly scores: 459.26 for last year’s (2005) NL West and 483.79 for 2003’s AL Central. The former saw San Diego go 0-3 in the playoffs, winning the division with an 82-80 record after the West carried a pathetic .459 winning percentage (not the lowest ever; the 2002 AL Central pulled a .452 thanks to Detroit and Kansas City both losing 100 games, but the Twins made the ALCS and the division got 48 playoff points.)

Nitpick: as solid as the results sound (“the numbers never lie,”) this entire enterprise is rather subjective. The formulas are geared to achieve what I believe to be an equitable balance between regular season/cross division success and post-season results. Even if someone agreed to the desired balance, they may assign different point values (50 or 100 points for a world title rather than 75.) Looking at the spreadsheet, you’ll notice that every year the world champion’s division is first and the other team in the World Series is in second; this is because the formulas reward postseason success, the only true measure of a good team in Major League Baseball. That said, the regular season bears much weight on just how much you win by: remember the 2002 AL West, which had the best record of any division not because of a dominant world champ (the best two postseason teams of the era, the ‘99 Yanks and ‘05 Sox, fall short of the “average” Angels) but because of the regular season totals and because two teams went to the postseason.

That seems to be the key: get the wild card. Afterall, the AL Central never has, and they’re dead last, an average of 110 points behind the AL East. This season, at least, I think no one in Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland minds.

Parked the movie New stadium! Yay!

My first trip to Busch III was Monday, as Emily and I took in the Cardinals and Astros on Memorial Day. Because it was a day that the Cardinals played a baseball game, Albert Pujols won it for the Birds with a three-run shot, and all went home happy. Except that guy in a Morgan Ensberg jersey outside the home plate gate before the game.