Adding another twist to this "unusual study" of 2nd half season teams that improve the most from their first half, we decided to take it one step further and say "Only count comeback wins and blown losses for a team IF they were still qualified to make the playoffs".
Why?
Whether it's a "real thing or not", we were decided to include a "human motivational factor". We are not saying this is true or untrue but we are just coming to a hypothetical conclusion that "if you're still qualified to make the post season, you will be working even harder to come back from behind/or-tie to win the game -or- prevent losing the lead/tie to lose the game".
By all star break, team's are all mathematically in it so all of those wins and losses will still be counted. As the season draws on to a close in the later months, teams will start to be eliminated from post season contention. For those teams, we no longer count their rally wins or blown leads. Those teams may have September callups or other players and/or situations that may not be considered a part of the regular population. Teams that are "still" in playoff contention will continue to have their comeback wins and blow leads included "up to the day where they get eliminated". All playoff teams will have all 162 games worth of comeback wins/blow leads included. As a result of this, the zscores will tend to rise for the playoff teams. From a motivation stance, it makes sense that the playoff teams will still want to win as they'll be competing for ranks within the post season (home field advantage, etc..) so the motivation to will will still continue.
With all of this data available to us now, we can have fun asking other questions with additional criteria such as "how did they do when..?". So we thought that would be an extra fun thing to do.
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