Thursday, August 21, 2008

A Look at Remaining Strength of Schedule

From "How schedules will impact playoff contenders" by Dayn Perry at FOXSports.com:

Baseball's stretch drive is upon us, and when you've got so many hotly fought races going on, strength of schedule takes on an acute importance.

In MLB, you don't see as much variance among the schedules as you do in the NFL, but there's still enough to make a difference -- sometimes a pennant-deciding difference. So to get an idea of which teams have the easier or harder road going forward, let's have a look at each contender's remaining schedule. [...]

Diamondbacks

Remaining Opponents' Avg. Win%: 0.472
Home Games Left/Road Games Left: 20/16
Biggest Series: 9/5-9/7 @Dodgers

The Snakes will play the Dodgers six more times this season, with the final three-game set going down in L.A. Overall, give 'Zona the edge in schedule. The Dodgers play inferior opponents, but the home-road splits favor Arizona by a mile.

Dodgers

Remaining Opponents' Avg. Win%: 0.444
Home Games Left/Road Games Left: 12/23
Biggest Series: 9/5-9/7 Diamondbacks

As you can see, the Dodgers play almost two-thirds of their remaining games on the road, and this season they're just 26-32 away from Chavez Ravine. The mitigating factor, however, is that the rest of the way no contender plays an easier slate of teams than the Dodgers do. In rough terms, it's like playing the Reds every day from this point forward. Still, that's a lot of road games ...

(Hat tip: Rob at 6-4-2.)

2 comments:

Erin said...

I'm watching the Yankees game right now, and they just had a game break in which their in-studio woman showed Dodgers highlights, then told the viewing audience that the Dodgers have "now won three in a row, and keep putting pressure on the division-leading Diamondbacks."

Does the east coast bias make one that uninformed?

Orel said...

What sadder is that it should be true.