“If I Risk Adjust the Philadelphia Phillies, They Have Only Won 40 Games This Year. Not 62 Games.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

If I risk adjust the Philadelphia Phillies, they have only won 40 games this year.  Not 62 games.

There are people who do things like that. Fangraphs takes strength of schedule played and strength of schedule remaining into account when forming an assessment of the likely number of games a team will win over the course of the entire year. Several sites run Power Ranking, where the number of games won is only one important factor in determining a team’s ranks. There are many circumstances in which the fans of a team in second place would feel better about the team’s chance of winning the division than would the fans of a team in first place.

Rob