The Tigers May Need to Gamble

Of course, there is a lot of luck in baseball (especially from a managerial perspective) and you never can tell exactly where you will wind up.  The Tigers (just like every other team) have what would be referred to as a ‘probability distribution’ around our EV of 84 wins.  If I knew exactly what that was (which I don’t), I could tell you the odds that we would beat our projection by two wins, and if I knew the Twins probabilities too then I could tell you the odds that we’d beat them in the race.  Somebody (or somebodies) in Vegas actually get paid to do this stuff, I’m sure.

Know all that stuff, and you’d be able to put a number on it.  To estimate that the Tigers have, say, a 12% chance of winning the division in 2011.  So what?  Well, the way I see it the strategy of a dark horse team, a team that isn’t expected to win the division, should be quite a bit different from the strategy of a favorite.  The reason, is that a lot of the risk and variability that any team takes on is due to front office decisions.