You Have to Know How (and When) to Pick 'em

Who was it who said "hindsight is 20/20"? Whoever it was, they must have had me in mind when I picked the New York Yankees to win the 2009 World Series of baseball this past weekend. It's only a minor annoyance that the series wrapped up last week, a couple of days before I got around to making my picks.

Clearly, Bruce Bukiet likes a challenge more than I, which is why he went to all of the trouble of picking the winner before the series began. But then Bukiet is a mathematician who is better equipped intellectually than I am to take on such challenges. Bukiet, who is a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), used mathematical modeling techniques to compute the probability of the Yankees and Phillies winning the World Series.

Who did he pick? The Yankees, of course. His model gave the team a 70 percent chance of winning. How did he pick them? Bukiet's method uses the 2009 regular season statistics for each player on each team's roster. He then applies a Markov Process approach to modeling production of runs in baseball games. Bukiet first presented this mathematical model in 1997 in Operations Research, and it has since been used for a number of purposes, including predicting how many games a team should win in a season, the expected influence of trades, the value of wagering on a game, and who is most deserving of Major League Baseball's most prestigious awards.

But Bukiet doesn't stop there. No, he has to put a little extra mustard on his ballpark hotdog by picking the Cy Young winners, too. In doing so, he considers that the player's contribution is most heavily influenced by how well he has kept players off the basepaths over a large number of innings. According to Bukiet, Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals deserves the American League Cy Young Award, while in the National League, the Cy Young Award winner ought to be Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants.

So you're probably wondering who I picked for the Cy Young Award. Hang on to that thought ... I'll let you know in a couple of weeks.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:57 PM  Permalink