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February 28, 2006

The World Baseball Classic

Davenport Translations, Part One

by Clay Davenport

Thursday night, at 9:30 eastern, Korea and Taiwan will face off in the first game of the World Baseball Classic. There’s a good chance that it will be one of the most important games of the round, as the winner is likely to advance and the loser isn’t. For those who are getting desperate for a baseball fix, it will be televised--live on ESPN’s Deportes channel, and taped (at 1:30 in the morning) on ESPN2. I, for one, will be setting my TIVO to record it.

If you have been in a box all winter, the WBC (and, just for the record, sharing acronyms with organizations that govern boxing cannot be considered a good thing) is a 16-team tournament that will be played like a baseball version of the World Cup. Players will compete for their “home” country, with some latitude for determining just what their “home” is--although people familiar with soccer’s World Cup, or even the Olympics, are already familiar with how national ties can be established. The Italian and Dutch teams, in particular, stand to benefit from having American-born and raised players of the appropriate ancestry to supplement their teams.

Provisional rosters for all teams were released last month; final rosters won’t be needed until the teams are actually ready to play. We have good, reliable statistics for the past few years for the vast majority of the players in this tournament; the need to obtain them for this tournament has kicked me into researching some of the others. I think we are now in a position to make a reliable estimate of the relative strengths of each team.

I don’t really want to get involved in discussions of how much pride, prestige, or other nationalistic ambitions of various countries are riding on the results of the tournament, except to say that, in a real baseball sense, it won’t prove anything. One of BP’s catch phrases has always been that small sample sizes are essentially meaningless; the appropriate phrasing for current purposes is that “anything can happen in a short series.” The WBC as a whole is a short series--teams will play between three and eight games, depending on how they fare, and it is further broken into even shorter series. The first round of the tournament consists of four four-team round robins; essentially, a three-game tournament. Half the field will be eliminated, and the second round will have two more four-team round robins, a second three-game tournament. The four teams that survive that will move to a two-game single elimination tournament.

With only three games to play in the round robins, the question of who advances is frequently going to be based on tiebreakers. Before considering what kind of tiebreakers will be used, it is useful to realize this: that in a four-team round robin, there are only four ways for the standings to turn out. Yes, you can have different teams filling each slot, producing 38 permutations of the standings (64 if you count the different who-beat-whom forms of ties), but they reduce to just four basic forms.

The most orderly one involves one team going 3-0, one going 2-1, one going 1-2, and one going 0-3. This is the only one of the four that does not require a tiebreaker. The 3-0 team is the winner of the bracket (meaning that they will get home field advantage in the next round), and the 2-1 team finishes second and advances.