The bbcardstats-eries is ready to fill the void created by the widespread lack of interest in this year’s World Series!
Here’s how it will work:
- Select a team, 1 player per position, from draft pool below. Total team salary cannot exceed $33. Post your roster and team name in a comment responding to the Sunday Challenge™ tournament announcement or in the comment space below. Players can be drafted by multiple teams. One team per participant (we know how you think).
- The draft period, and thus the tournament entry window, will close at noon on Monday, Oct. 28, or when 32 teams have been submitted, whichever comes first.
- The entered teams will be assigned randomly to brackets. Bracketed opponents play best-of-7 series with winning teams advancing to play other winners in best-of-7 series until a final team triumphs.
- At each stage of the tournament, the opposing teams’ 7-game series will be simulated by BBCS-imulator 9000. See this post for a description of how this astonishing application of modern technology operates. A Monte Carlo simulation, consisting of 2500 simulated series, will be run only for the purposes of identifying the favorite and odds for each bracketed matchup (not that we are promoting wagering or anything); to determine the outcome of any given matchup, a single 7-game series will be simulated, thereby affording chance the same influence it has in the real world, where best-of-7 playoffs are, of course, played once, not thousands of times!
Runner-up gets this–an amazing mug with 1932 Yankees cards embossed on it! - The sum of a teams’ players’ batter and pitcher WAR162s will be used to determine team strength. Player salaries generally correspond to the players’ respective WAR162s. But the correspondence is not perfect. Indeed, the “skill” element of the tournament consists in participants’ GM acumen as reflected in their detection of any potential discrepancies between player salaries and WAR162s and their assessment of how to take advantage of the same in constructing the strongest possible team.
- Before the first set of series, team rosters will be posted on bbcardstats.com.
- Before every stage of the tournament, matchups and odds (determined as indicated above) will be posted. Results of the series from that stage will be announced thereafter, likely at the same time the next stage’s matchups and odds are posted. Obviously, you can follow the progress of the tournament by checking this site periodically (or ESPN if the contract now being negotiated is completed in time). But announcements of each series posting will be made via Twitter/X tweets by @x5ms2.
- Participants whose teams advance to the finals will each receive a prize: the winner a stunning bbcardstats.com t-shirt (choice of black or white); and the runner-up a breathtaking bbcardstats.com “1932 Yankees” coffee mug.
- The tournament will not follow a rigid predetermined schedule but will conclude, for sure, before the Sunday Challenge™ of Nov. 2, 2024.
Okay, let’s go!
Draft pool:
Update: 10.28.24:
The teams have been created. There are 16 of them (which is great, because that’s a power of 2). To see rosters, as well as payrolls and “scouting reports” (i.e., individual player and team total WAR162s), just click here.
These are the first-round matchups.
The percentages in red represent the predicted probability of the indicated team winning the upcoming best-of-7 series. Those projections were determined by the BBCS-imulator 9000 on the basis of 2,500 simulated best-of-7s. (The team roster spreadsheet supplies all the information you need to fire up the simulator yourself with the “generic” version of the Monte Carlo script in the data section.)
But remember: the actual bracket matchup will consist of just a single series simulation. So some upsets are—well, very probable!
I should also reiterate that the matchups for this round were made randomly, and not on the basis of any sort of seeding. Accordingly, some stronger-than-average teams have already experienced some bad luck by being matched with even stronger opponents.
But that’s how real-world outcomes in baseball, and in many other domains, are determined: by a chaotic mix of skill and chance!
The anticipated “game times” will correspond to tomorrow’s World Series Game 4, so that people who are bored with the battle between Judge et. al’s Yankees and Ohtani et. al’s Dodgers will have something more interesting to do.
Update: 10.30.24:
Round 2 is now complete.
In a startling development, the heavily favored Motown Goons were handily dispatched in 5 games by the “‘Not the closer’ Jones.” Goons GM @thecultofBen is now rumored to be conspiring with Sopranos GM Vandy Accountant (whose ungracious disparagement of the Inebriates can be seen in the comments section) to entice Babe Ruth, Josh Gibson, and others to jump to a rival league.
The results of the other contests were comparably dramatic. The final four are set to square off next; predicted outcome probabilities, as well as previous-round series lengths, appear in the updated brackets.
Stay tuned for future reports of on- and off-the-field developments!
Update: 10.31.24:
The BBCS-eries has finally concluded. In an epic battle—capped off by a string of Game 7 fielding errors that ungenerous fans are attributing to the Inebriates’ premature consumption of celebratory libations—the Fizzicists emerged victorious. Series MVP Roy Campanella fashioned a pennant out of a BBCS t-shirt and affixed it to a pole, leading the team in a triumphant march around the field.
The tournament was an adventure the excitement of which, I’m sure, will leave a permanent impression on all of us. As Commissioner, I commend all of your for your spirited participation!
2 Responses
If there’s still room, I’ll take:
Foster -2
Hiller-1
Campy – 3
Pujols – 1
Gehringer -3
Schmidt – 5
Ozzie – 3
Williams – 5
Oscar – 2
Ruth – 5
F. Thimas – 3
I demand a recount! I drafted a righty-heavy lineup because I was sure I would be facing a lefty. Inebriates swerved me!