Yankees: 98.6% Div, 1.4% WC, 100.0% PL

I know you retired from the guarantee business, but…if Yankees sweep, are you going to guarantee the playoffs?

Sort of interesting that the playoff % goes up for the RS if they go from 2-1 to 1-2 in this series.  Probably just comes out of the randomness. 

This might be heretical, but it seems like the games are no longer important.  I’m probably just missing the subtle yet huge importance of these games though.

RS sweep: PL 68.9% PL
RS 2/3: PL 69.1% PL

I still think you want to run one sim ignoring this weekend then add in the scenarios afterwards.

[1] Do it, SG!

I know you retired from the guarantee business, but…if Yankees sweep, are you going to guarantee the playoffs?

I’m no Brett Favre.  I’m staying retired.

This might be heretical, but it seems like the games are no longer important.

This is very heretical.

I still think you want to run one sim ignoring this weekend then add in the scenarios afterwards.

Not sure I follow, can you expand on this?

If the Red Sox xweep

I hope the scenario is buried after tonight.

Does a “xweep” involve weeping? If so, I doubt that will be off the table after tonight.

If the Sawx sweep they’re 68.9% to make playoffs, if they’re swept its 67.8%.  Can that be correct or did I toatlly misread something?

It’s the randomness built into the simulator causing that counter-intuitive result.  Focus mainly on the division title odds.

Is it the randomness, or the fact that the projections like the Yanks and Sox as the two best teams in the AL, so even if the Sox lose the next three, they should still be able to fend off the Rays and Rangers for the wildcard?

“I still think you want to run one sim ignoring this weekend then add in the scenarios afterwards.”

“Not sure I follow, can you expand on this?”

As it stands, you say that come Monday the results will be a, b, c, or d, now let’s run sims for each starting with the next games and see what the sums are.  Totally uncorrelated stat errors.  You could instead say that come Monday the teams will have about the same estimated strengths as now, so let’s run one sim for the rest of the season with the current settings and then tack on a, b, c, d for the weekend afterwards.  Totally correlated stat errors, which are sqrt(4) smaller.

Is it the randomness, or the fact that the projections like the Yanks and Sox as the two best teams in the AL, so even if the Sox lose the next three, they should still be able to fend off the Rays and Rangers for the wildcard?

Even if that was the case, losing three straight shouldn’t lead to improved playoff odds, although it’s a small difference and probably just random noise over this many iterations.

As it stands, you say that come Monday the results will be a, b, c, or d, now let’s run sims for each starting with the next games and see what the sums are.  Totally uncorrelated stat errors.  You could instead say that come Monday the teams will have about the same estimated strengths as now, so let’s run one sim for the rest of the season with the current settings and then tack on a, b, c, d for the weekend afterwards.  Totally correlated stat errors, which are sqrt(4) smaller.

The problem is the simulator does all the playoff calculations automatically, based on the season ending win totals, and I’m not sure how easy it would be to tweak it to work differently.  I think if I run it without the built-in randomness it will behave similarly to what you are proposing, because I am holding team strength constant as of the time the simulations are run, regardless of which of scenarios a, b, c, or d I choose.

Assuming you can access the per-game results, you could also just run starting today then do the odds by script adding the results for the weekend scenarios in turn.