Best Blue Jays team since 2015
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 fourteen 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 2021:
nW% | pW% | W% | |
---|---|---|---|
Dodgers | .658826 | .671906 | .654321 |
Giants | .635012 | .635058 | .660494 |
Astros | .615526 | .621593 | .586420 |
Blue Jays | .597655 | .609700 | .561728 |
White Sox | .595228 | .601244 | .574074 |
Rays | .588671 | .623192 | .617284 |
Brewers | .572128 | .576885 | .586420 |
Braves | .565929 | .584226 | .546584 |
Yankees | .550275 | .527828 | .567901 |
Red Sox | .528498 | .546295 | .567901 |
Cardinals | .526901 | .522565 | .555556 |
Athletics | .510203 | .535789 | .530864 |
Padres | .509499 | .513369 | .487654 |
Reds | .504500 | .515385 | .512346 |
Phillies | .499604 | .493195 | .506173 |
Mets | .498352 | .477557 | .475309 |
Nationals | .479903 | .443281 | .401235 |
Indians | .471884 | .493664 | .493827 |
Twins | .469998 | .438748 | .450617 |
Angels | .461637 | .451570 | .475309 |
Rockies | .459213 | .466059 | .459627 |
Mariners | .450767 | .467737 | .555556 |
Tigers | .448364 | .462894 | .475309 |
Marlins | .444847 | .446241 | .413580 |
Royals | .437805 | .436919 | .456790 |
Cubs | .422376 | .421055 | .438272 |
Rangers | .391132 | .380896 | .370370 |
Diamondbacks | .380847 | .377222 | .320988 |
Pirates | .373419 | .360502 | .376543 |
Orioles | .371278 | .336078 | .320988 |
So this year the luckiest team was the Mariners, and it wasn't close; they ended up almost sneaking into the playoffs with a 90–72 record even though they deserved a record closer to 73–89. The unluckiest teams were the Nationals, Diamondbacks and Orioles, but the unluckiest good team was the Blue Jays, who only finished fourth in the AL East even though they were really the fourth-best team in baseball. If all teams had the win-loss records they deserved, just two of the division champions would change: The Blue Jays would finish 2 games ahead of the Rays (and 8 games ahead of the Yankees) and the Dodgers would finish 4 games ahead of the Giants. If the ten actually best teams had made the playoffs, the Blue Jays would be in and the Cardinals would be out.
Based on the above results, it's reasonable to predict:
Rays over Yankees | Astros over Rays | Dodgers over Astros | |
Yankees over Red Sox | |||
Astros over White Sox | |||
Brewers over Braves | Dodgers over Brewers | ||
Dodgers over Cardinals | Dodgers over Giants | ||
But what I'm rooting for is very different:
Red Sox over Rays | Red Sox over Astros | Red Sox over Cardinals | |
Red Sox over Yankees | |||
Astros over White Sox | |||
Brewers over Braves | Cardinals over Brewers | ||
Cardinals over Dodgers | Cardinals over Giants | ||
I got all the statistics I needed for this analysis from these three pages: A B C