MLB Playoff Betting Thoughts: Regular Season Head To Head Records Are Meaningless

Added on Oct 04, 2010 by Jack Thurman in

MLB

They don’t cover sports as broadly as USA Today, but on a pound for pound basis there’s no national sports media outlet that provides better information on a consistent basis than the Wall Street Journal. The USA Today gives you page after page of meaningless blather and pointless trivia–essentially a print version of ESPN Sportscenter. The WSJ, on the other hand, offers a page or two of insightful news and analysis–often with a statistical emphasis that can be applied to the sports betting discipline.

In today’s issue there’s a fascinating column about the significance–or rather, the lack of significance–of regular season head to head records in the postseason. They conclude that there’s no statistically significant advantage for a team having won the season series over a playoff opponent:

Since Major League Baseball expanded the playoffs in 1995, there have been 90 postseason series where one team had a head-to-head edge in the regular season. Of those times, each side has won the October series exactly 45 times. The correlation between head-to-head regular-season winning percentage and postseason winning percentage was 0.04, which means there was basically no relationship between the outcomes.

More interestingly, that concept holds true even with lopsided season series results. The WSJ looked at the eight playoff series with the most lopsided head to head regular season matchups (you can see the chart here). In all cases one team either swept the other during the regular season or lost only one game. In these series the team that won the regular season series was only 4-4.

This year we’ve got a matchup between the Yankees and Twins in the first round, and New York has manhandled Minnesota in head to head play posting a 4-2 mark this season and a 20-6 record in the last three years. It may give New York more confidence, but from a handicapping standpoint it is essentially irrelevant.

Head to Head Records: Throw Em’ Out