Numbers Don't Lie
Sabermetrics Deep Dive
Five days of games instead of the usual seven, one factual error in the official round-up, and a two-game set at Rick Astleys Park that will tell us more about the pennant race than the other sixteen games in this window combined.
The round-up circulated for the five days ending Tuesday listed Nicaragua at 4-1 for the week, with a loss buried in there against Fugging. That is wrong. Going back to the actual line scores, the Crepe Wrappers won all five games they played—two extra-inning survivals against Iron Knob to open the week, then a three-game sweep of Fugging to close it. Nicaragua went 5-0.
Rick Astleys and Huanca, both of whom drew nothing but Oak Ridge and Panama City Beach across these five days, went a combined 9-1. Iron Knob, Knockemstiff, Nicaragua and Fugging—who played each other exclusively—split 10-10. That is not a coincidence, and it is the same story the computer ledger has been telling all month.
The Astleys and the Wankers did not just win these five days, they spent capital doing it. Rick Astleys now has just four games left on the schedule against Oak Ridge or Panama City Beach—fewest in the league. Huanca has five computer games left. Between them, the two clubs have all but exhausted the softest part of their calendars with five weeks of season still to play.
Iron Knob is the mirror image. IKE played zero games against Oak Ridge or Panama City Beach this window and still has twelve computer games in the bank, the most of any contender. Twelve banked wins in September do not do a thing for the standings on Wednesday morning.
Everything above is prelude to the two games that were always going to matter most in this window: Iron Knob visits Rick Astleys on Wednesday and Thursday, six games back, with nothing left on the schedule this week to hide behind. The math is not complicated. Our projection had IKE going 4-3 across this full stretch, which already assumed a losing series against the league's best record. Instead, Iron Knob is 2-3 heading in, which means anything short of a sweep leaves the club worse off than the pace we had already priced in as disappointing. A split makes it 3-4 for the week and drops the deficit to seven with the softest part of the schedule still weeks away. A sweep gets the deficit back to four.
Rick Astleys has treated the last five days as a formality—4-1 against clubs a combined 39-201 will do that—and arrives having barely had to use its rotation's top options. Iron Knob needs these two games considerably more than Rick Astleys does, and everybody in both clubhouses knows it.
Knockemstiff and Nicaragua both get a pair of computer games worked into the schedule and both clubs are already ahead of their August 20 projection, meaning those two games are pure upside. Fugging has no such relief coming. After an 0-5 week that dropped the Honey Badgers to 66-56 and sixth place, the club now draws two games at Huanca—the league's hottest hand, winners of five straight and outscoring opponents 33-13 in that stretch—before closing the window with two more at Rick Astleys. Three wins in four to salvage the original projection was always a stretch; after the week Fugging just had, it looks close to impossible.
Five days told most of the story. The last two, Wednesday and Thursday in Rick Astleys Park, will tell the rest of it—and unlike everything else on this week's slate, there is no computer schedule for Iron Knob to hide behind while it happens.