I stumbled across a interesting baseball website this morning while looking into “magic numbers” and “elimination numbers”. The site is called RIOT Baseball. RIOT stand for Remote Interactive Optimization Testbed. It is an offshoot from both the Engineering Department and Haas School of Business at UC Berkley. The site is run by a handful of professors. One such Professor being Ian Adler who is both a professor and head of the Industrial Engineering Department. His Rate My Professor page paints him in a pretty good light.
For those new to the site, here’s what we do: RIOT, an ongoing project at the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department of the University of California-Berkeley, provides users exclusive data for each team, including:
- Number of additional games, if won, guarantees a first-place finish
- Number of additional games, if won, guarantees a playoff spot
- Number of games team must win to avoid elimination from first place
- Number of games team must win to avoid elimination from playoffs
These numbers are more informative than magic numbers, since they take into account each team’s remaining schedule of games. More details about the numbers and the method of their calculation are available.
Information is updated daily, so be sure to return every day
What the site does is give the minimum number of games that a team must win to remain in contention for a playoff spot. To put it very simply, this is done through analyzing match-ups of who is playing who. There is a nice example and explanation available on the site. The example uses the 1996 NL East and West playoff races as of September 8th, 1996. This is a ridiculously complex calculation to make. Think about all the different possible outcomes.
This is the amazing part about high education and top tier research universities. How awesome is it to be able to run a project like this.
Link: RIOT Baseball (berkeley.edu)
