An idea for an alternative way to run a pennant race.

            It bothers me quite a bit that the NCAA makes discretionary selections to the championship tournament.   Don’t get me wrong; the NCAA basketball tournament is one of the highlights of my year.   It’s a fantastic event.  

            But the gateway into this fantastic event is through a committee that meets in secret in a hotel suite somewhere in the midwest or the Middle East, where, fortified for the long days and long nights by hookers and gin, they sort out the difficult issues of who deserves a shot at the title.   This ordinarily results in squeals and appeals, of two types:

            1)  We shoulda been in, and

            2)  You seeded us what?

            This year not so much.   This year nobody was left out who had any good claim to be included, and even most of the seeds were fairly self-explanatory. 

            The NCAA committee, in general, does a really good job of deciding who should be in and where they should be.   I freely confess that

            a)  I couldn’t do nearly as good a job, myself, and

            b)  The system I am proposing here wouldn’t work nearly as well.  

            In fact, what I am proposing here is not really a system; it’s more like an idea for a system, with a lot of bugs to be worked out.   The point is not that I have a better system, the point is that, in my opinion, having discretionary selections is a weakness.   Sports need clarity.  

            The glaring flaw of many of the Olympic sports is arbitrary judging.  The athlete jumps, spins, twirls, tucks and flutters—and then, to decide whether she won or lost, some jackass holds up a card.   9.7.   Or 9.4; you never know.   The Cuban judge may give you a 6.1. No sport can thrive with that kind of a system to decide who won, because it is unsatisfying to the spectator.  You win in sports by running faster than the other guy, or jumping higher, or throwing more balls through the hoop, or scoring more touchdowns, or. . .SOMETHING.   Something we can see.   Something we can relate to.  Any “sport” in which the winner is determined by politics and joy buzzers isn’t a sport, it’s a soap opera with trophies.   It weakens the NCAA, in my view, to allow entry into the tournament to be allocated by these backroom Romanian apparatchiks making veiled promises and secret bargains.   It would be better if you knew what it was exactly that your team needed to do to get into the tournament, what they needed to do to get a one seed, what they needed to do to get a two seed, etc.   Clear, absolute, and enforceable rules.

            How do you make that work?

            Here’s an idea.   Every team in college basketball starts the season with 100 points—100.00000 points.  

            If you win a game on the home, you get 5% of the other team’s points.

            If you win a game on the road, you get 10% of the other team’s points.

            That’s all.   There are details to be worked out—neutral sites and what is a home game—and there are these rules as well, but these rules are implied by the other two:

            If you lose a game at home, you lose 10% of your points (which go to the other team.)

            If you lose a game on the road, you lose 5% of your points (which go to the other team.)

            The average team is at 100.00 on November 1, and the average team is at 100.00 at the end of the season.   The 64 best teams make the tournament.

            OK; we don’t have to be that radical.   We can still keep the rest of the system—automatic berths for each conference, to be allocated (by the conference) to the league or tournament champion.   But the at-large selections—those are determined by what you do on the floor, period.

            I call it the Claim Jump System.   The other team has 141.17 points going into the game, you have 118.02.   You beat them on their court, you pick up 14.12 points, and they lose 14.12.   All of a sudden you have 132.14, and they have 127.05.   You’re ahead of them.  

            Or, on the other hand, they may beat you. . ..probably will, in fact.   If they beat you on their home court, they get 5% of your points, which in this case is 5.90.   They edge up to 147.07.   You drop back to 112.12.   Since they would be expected to beat you and they do, the game has less impact.

            At season’s end the best teams—the number one seeds—would have something like 300 points, maybe 350.   To make the tournament you would have to have something like 160.

            This system incorporates many of the stated values of the current method.   We already talk about “big wins” and “signature wins” for bubble teams, and about playing well late in the season.  This system simply makes that an objective process.   You beat UCLA in Los Angeles in late February, that will get you something like 30 points.   You beat UC-Irvine on your home floor in December, that’s probably more like 3 points.  

            There would be problems.   Since all teams would start out with 100 points, there would be an incentive to play the worst teams early in the season, before their values have dropped.    If you can beat Appalachian State at home on November 14, 10 points.   If you get them in February, it’s probably two or three points.

            That would seem like a huge deal at first, until you realize that the early-season games don’t really matter that much anyway.   The system is designed to emphasize what you do late in the season, to a certain extent.   The early-season points tend to get washed away by the mid-season give and take, so that a 10-point advantage in mid-November would turn out to be a 4-point difference in March, even given the same schedule and same results after that—but the system might still be exploited in other ways.   It might be to your advantage, for example, to schedule road games late in the season, since road wins have the largest potential to make your case if you’re on the bubble.   I don’t know that there would be an advantage to that; I just don’t know that there wouldn’t.   It might be to your advantage to schedule more games late, after your opponents have piled up points that you can take from them.   

            I don’t know, but I do know this.   People would try to game the system.   People would try to rig their schedules to gain an unintended advantage, and we have to assume that some of those things would succeed.   That’s why it would be irresponsible to adopt a system like this without very rigorous testing to see what the effects would be.

            To study how this system would work in practice, I applied it to the National League’s 2007 season.   I stress that I am not suggesting that this system be used in baseball; hell, I’m not even suggesting that it should be used in NCAA basketball.  I’m just playing around with the idea.  

            Suppose that, in the National League in 2007, all teams started the season with 100.0000 points, and that this system was applied from that point forward.   What would have been the results?

            At the end of April, 2007, the NL Standings looked like this:

           But, under the Claim Jump system, they would have looked like this:

            Essentially the same as the actual standings, in other words, except that San Francisco at 13-11 has for some reason pulled ahead of Los Angeles at 15-11. 

            By the end of May, the actual standings had changed to this:

             While, by the Claim Jump system, they would have been this:

            Again, essentially the same as the actual standings, with some minor differences.   Interleague play started in mid-May, and, since the National League lost more than half of those games, once interleague play started the National league no longer balanced at 100.000.

            The National League pennant race in 2007 really started about September 10.  The actual standings at the end of that day were:

            While the Claim Jump standings would have been:

            Largely the same, but with two small differences and one dramatic difference.   Pittsburgh, playing well in August and early September, would have leapt into first place in the Claim Jump standings, which give more emphasis to recent games.  Otherwise, the standings would have been mostly the same.   

            From then, of course:

            1)  New York collapsed,

            2)  Philadelphia played well,

            3)  Colorado was in a zone.

            This made the final standings, not counting the Colorado/San Diego playoff game:

            While the final standings, by the Claim Jump system, would have been:

            We didn’t include the San Diego/Colorado playoff game because, of course, that game would never have been played if the Claim Jump system had been in use; Colorado would have vaulted far ahead of San Diego in the last few days of the campaign.

            Anyway, in the end, the same four teams that made the National League playoffs by the regular system would have made the playoffs had the Claim Jump system been in use—Philadelphia, Chicago, Colorado and Arizona.    I didn’t know that until I did the study, so that’s an interesting thing to see.   You can see how dramatically New York’s position changed as they went 6-13 in the closing weeks.

            At the same time, it is apparent that this EXACT version of the Claim Jump system would be inappropriate in baseball, because the “momentum swings” that it allows for are designed for a 34-game schedule, and would be entirely inappropriate to a 162-game schedule.   The Claim Jump system is designed to emphasize the late-season games.  That’s a good thing, and that’s part of what I am trying to do—but this exact version of the system over-does this to such an extent that it would have severe negative consequences in baseball.  The early-season games would become SO meaningless, by this system, that managers would more or less stop playing them.   They would become just exhibitions; they wouldn’t really count.   The pennant race would begin about July 15, and would be played out mostly in September. 

            To make a Claim Jump system work in baseball, what you would have to do is to change it from 5% for a home win, 10% for a road win to 1% for a home win, 2% for a road win.   That would stabilize the standings, and make the early-season games more meaningful.  2% in a 162-game season is like 10% in a 34-game schedule, the schedule of a college basketball team.

            I ran through the 2007 National League again, using the 1 and 2% adjustments.   The same four make the playoffs that way, too, but the swings are less dramatic.   The Mets, using the 5 and 10% adjustments, drop from 137.00 on September 10 to 58.46 at the end of the season.   Using the 1 and 2% adjustments, they drop from 119.83 to 102.19.   But they don’t make the playoffs either way.

            I’m certainly not suggesting that baseball should use something like this system. Baseball’s traditional standings are fine.   But I do think that there are serious advantages to this system.   I think that the emphasis on the late-season games, at a moderate level, is a good thing.   It keeps more teams at least theoretically in the pennant race.   The reality is, under a 1%/2% Claim Jump system, the teams with the best overall records are going to win their divisions the vast majority of the time.   But a Claim Jump system would create the theoretical possibility that any team could get hot in September, knock off the top teams in a series of games, and make a sudden and thrilling dash for the playoffs, by winning the games that they need to win.   I think that this would keep more fans involved in the season deeper into the schedule.

            A claim jump system would all but entirely eliminate meaningless end-of-the-season games after the pennant race had been decided, since it would be almost impossible to theoretically eliminate all of your opponents before about the 27^th of September.   I think it would be exciting, I think it would be fun, and I think it would work.   But I’m not seriously suggesting that we should try it.

            I am using baseball, which has an orderly schedule, to test the usefulness of a concept intended for a game with a less organized schedule.   In the NCAA (basketball), some team will go 29-4 while another team will go 19-15, but experts will agree that the 19-15 team is actually the better team.   The Claim Jump system should sort that out.   If, in fact, the 29-4 team has been beating teams of inferior quality, then they should earn very few points for that, while the 17-14 team should score better for breaking even with superior competition.   But you don’t have that problem in baseball.  In baseball, because the schedule is organized so that everybody plays everybody, a .600 team is always better than a .500 team.  I am using the orderly schedule to test the effects of the Claim Jump system.   Step one, we can see that it would work passably well with an organized schedule.   Step two would be to see what the effects would be with a less organized schedule.