What Predicts Postseason Success?

Celebrate Opening Day by doing some regression analysis with you friends at Yankees Files.

I frequently find myself in discussions with people who insist that they know for sure the secret to postseason hitting, and that the Yankees, with their heads in the sand, are clueless as to how to build a team that will mash in October… So I built an app to test their hypotheses. Spoiler alert: they’re all wrong. The postseason is too short and too random. Almost every relationship people insist must exist is all noise and no signal. Try it out for yourself below!

The Fixed Analyses tab has some… fixed analyses… that address common hypotheses about postseason run scoring. For example, do teams with a lower standard deviation of runs per game perform better in the playoffs? No, they don;t.

The Stat Explorer tab lets YOU decide what team-level RS and PS stats you want to compare.

The Player Predictor tab shows you how good different wOBA splits are (this year’s RS, career RS, career PS, and most recent PS) at explaining the player’s next postseason batting performance (they’re all bad at it).

The democratization of access to data and tools that can analyze it is a huge boon to baseball fans like us who want to test hypotheses that help us understand the game better. This app can help you test some of your hypotheses too!