Another postseason without the Jays

Predicting the baseball postseason is now a tradition on this otherwise near-defunct blog, so, as busy as I am, I'll take a few minutes to do the same kind of analysis I've done the last two years, essentially factoring out each team's luck to see how good they really were this season.  The Nostradamian, Pythagorean and actual win percentages for all teams in 2009:

	nW%	pW%	W%
Yankees	.617779	.588215	.635802
Dodgers	.604922	.609897	.586420
Rockies	.557546	.553467	.567901
Red Sox	.554619	.576957	.586420
Cardinals	.551377	.559907	.561728
Rays	.548008	.528773	.518519
Braves	.543312	.562280	.530864
Phillies	.531833	.566153	.574074
Cubs	.531712	.523212	.515528
Angels	.530636	.567610	.598765
Twins	.520369	.530050	.533742
Rangers	.517763	.526400	.537037
Marlins	.512924	.503570	.537037
Blue Jays	.508989	.515742	.462963
Giants	.503124	.533160	.543210
White Sox	.498027	.494973	.487654
Diamondbacks	.497025	.462281	.432099
Mariners	.496602	.464322	.524691
Tigers	.482815	.498770	.527607
Athletics	.479727	.498796	.462963
Brewers	.468335	.481170	.493827
Mets	.459683	.445051	.432099
Indians	.454076	.448735	.401235
Reds	.451787	.467261	.481481
Padres	.448974	.415383	.462963
Royals	.443433	.407340	.401235
Nationals	.435496	.406054	.364198
Astros	.419356	.418277	.456790
Orioles	.417295	.424023	.395062
Pirates	.408288	.414566	.385093

So this year the luckiest teams were the Angels, Tigers and Phillies; the unluckiest were the Nationals, Diamondbacks and Indians.  The Yankees had the best record in baseball and deserved to.  The Rays, Braves and Cubs didn't make the playoffs even though they were really better than some teams that did.  Every team in the playoffs was lucky to win as many games as they did except for the Dodgers, who were about three games unlucky.  The Twins are the worst team in the playoffs, but they were better this season than the tiebreaker-losing Tigers.

Based on the above results, it's reasonable to predict:

Yankees over Twins	Yankees over Red Sox	Yankees over Dodgers
Red Sox over Angels
Dodgers over Cardinals	Dodgers over Rockies
Rockies over Phillies

Unlike last year, what I'm rooting for is very different from my predictions:

Twins over Yankees	Red Sox over Twins	Red Sox over Phillies
Red Sox over Angels
Cardinals over Dodgers	Phillies over Cardinals
Phillies over Rockies

For what it's worth, I got all the statistics I needed for this analysis from these three pages: A B C

As for my Blue Jays, my last blog post must have cursed them.  They were legit, but, after an ultimately disappointing season, they fired J. P. Ricciardi, their general manager, and hired his assistant, Alex Anthopoulos, on an interim basis.  I'm not sure yet what I think about the move since I liked J. P. but recognized his flaws and I know little about Anthopoulos.  The funny thing about J. P. is that he seemed to be able to build a better team with less money; increasing the team's payroll seemed to decrease the wisdom of the contracts he gave out.  Theo Epstein has done a better job taking advantage of the huge bankroll in Boston.  What really makes no sense to me is that the Jays fired J. P. but kept Cito Gaston as manager.  Cito's a good guy but is certainly not the manager to squeeze every bit of value out of a team's players.  I'll always regret that the Jays decided not to hire Davey Johnson before the 1998 season, and now I wish they'd replace Gaston with someone like Manny Acta.

Anyway, would they still have fired J. P. if the Jays had won the 82 games they deserved to given their performance on the field this year?  It takes a long time for the luck to even out in baseball.