Orioles are pretenders

Predicting the baseball postseason is an annual tradition on this otherwise 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 five years, essentially factoring out each team's luck to see how good they really were this season.  (Actually, I'm so busy I'm just adapting last year's post with new data but no new detailed analysis.)  The Nostradamian, Pythagorean and actual win percentages for all teams in 2012:

	nW%	pW%	W%
Nationals	.589195	.593822	.604938
Rays	.583080	.585590	.555556
Cardinals	.575973	.575360	.543210
Rangers	.571450	.560788	.574074
Yankees	.570996	.583977	.586420
Angels	.555373	.542371	.549383
Tigers	.547411	.536659	.543210
Braves	.542011	.570060	.580247
Athletics	.541275	.567967	.580247
Reds	.537664	.558771	.598765
Giants	.527751	.546093	.580247
Diamondbacks	.526562	.529575	.500000
White Sox	.517898	.546172	.524691
Dodgers	.515708	.529635	.530864
Brewers	.506830	.526057	.512346
Phillies	.506569	.502683	.500000
Orioles	.503351	.504520	.574074
Pirates	.487526	.484121	.487654
Mets	.483991	.460334	.456790
Padres	.474604	.460393	.469136
Red Sox	.467745	.457294	.425926
Mariners	.462011	.476956	.462963
Marlins	.455711	.421519	.425926
Royals	.444776	.455043	.444444
Twins	.439111	.422255	.407407
Blue Jays	.432886	.458587	.450617
Indians	.430236	.393439	.419753
Rockies	.426849	.427078	.395062
Cubs	.405081	.403487	.376543
Astros	.384377	.362327	.339506

So this year the luckiest teams were the Orioles, Reds and Giants; the unluckiest were the Astros, Red Sox and Cardinals.  The Nationals deserved to have the best record in baseball but the Rays were actually close behind, even though they finished third in the AL East and missed the postseason.  The Rays and Angels didn't make the playoffs even though they were really better than more than one team that did.  Every team in the playoffs was lucky to win as many games as they did except for the Cardinals (very unlucky) and Tigers (slightly unlucky).  The Orioles are by far the worst team in the playoffs; they deserved to finish barely over .500, but they finished just behind the Yankees and earned a wild-card berth.

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

	Yankees over Rangers	Yankees over Tigers	Nationals over Yankees
Rangers over Orioles
	Tigers over Athletics
	Reds over Giants	Nationals over Reds
Cardinals over Braves	Nationals over Cardinals

But here's what I'm rooting for:

	Rangers over Yankees	Athletics over Rangers	Athletics over Reds
Rangers over Orioles
	Athletics over Tigers
	Reds over Giants	Reds over Cardinals
Cardinals over Braves	Cardinals over Nationals

I got all the statistics I needed for this analysis from these three pages: A B C