Tuesday, October 2, 2018

MLB Postseason Predictions

Following up on my post "Predicting Baseball's Postseason", here is my prediction for the outcome of the 2018 MLB Postseason. I originally planned to develop two brackets, one optimized for percentage and the other for points (where the point value per correct prediction doubles with each successive round), but surprisingly the two systems produced the same result, and so I have only this one unified bracket to venture:


In the last month leading up to the playoffs, the clear outlier is the Brewers, who became very hot, culminating in a very strong finish, winning 11 of their last 12 games. Another surprising result comes from the Red Sox; they had the best regular-season record but finished relatively cold, losing 5 of their last 10, which quickly relegated them to the peloton of average teams.





Can the Brewers win their first-ever World Series? The odds look good for them this year. I ran Monte Carlo simulations with both "dynamic" and "static" Elo ratings, aka "hot" and "cold", and although they produced different rankings, the bracket outcomes were identical.

=====================================

Elo_K = 0.08;
Elo_k = 11;
h_f_a = 0.03;

Probability of winning World Series:
Elo_state: dynamic
Runtime: 10 sec
Simulations: 119140

1: Milwaukee Brewers, 42.66%
2: Colorado Rockies, 11.36%
3: Houston Astros, 8.53%
4: Chicago Cubs, 8.07%
5: Cleveland Indians, 7.57%
6: New York Yankees, 7.19%
7: Los Angeles Dodgers, 6.2%
8: Oakland Athletics, 4.5%
9: Boston Red Sox, 3.27%
10: Atlanta Braves, 0.65%

=====================================

Probability of winning World Series:
Elo_state: static
Runtime: 10 sec
Simulations: 121221

1: Milwaukee Brewers, 54.19%
2: Houston Astros, 8.6%
3: Los Angeles Dodgers, 8.09%
4: Cleveland Indians, 7.77%
5: Colorado Rockies, 7.04%
6: New York Yankees, 4.6%
7: Chicago Cubs, 4.3%
8: Boston Red Sox, 3%
9: Oakland Athletics, 2.02%
10: Atlanta Braves, 0.39%

Note: the predictions in this post were published at 2018-10-02 7:35 pm EST.

No comments:

Post a Comment