Behold, Team NERD.

I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking, that if there’s one formula you’d like to be a part of, it would be the one called “Team NERD.”  It’s the creation of Carson Cistulli, who, if he had his druthers, would innately know what baseball nerds everywhere want to see when they watch games.  Since he doesn’t, at least not innately, he has brewed up this concoction to help quantify our collective tastes in baseball teams.

In the process, Carson mentions my post from a few months back, where I attempted to show which teams were “lucky” or “unlucky” based on how well their production had been converted into runs.  In doing so, I piggybacked off of a different FanGraphs article to create a BaseRuns-adjusted spreadsheet of the current MLB standings.  I haven’t really updated it often, but the nice thing (if your version of Excel supports this feature) is that it will automatically refresh data from FanGraphs and Baseball Reference whether I manually update it or not.

If you’re not a FanGraphs reader (and why aren’t you, if you read what I sporadically write about baseball?), check it out on a regular basis.

Among our stops:

• Steamtown Mall (Scranton, PA)
• Freedom Trail (historic sites in Boston, MA)
• Prudential Tower (Boston, MA)
• Fenway Park (Boston, MA) for the 6/20 Dodgers-Red Sox game
• At least 6-8 different Dunkin Donuts locations
• Legal Sea Foods (Boston, MA) restaurant
• Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
• Several Maine coastal towns
• L.L. Bean store (Freeport, ME)
• Barnacle Billy’s (Ogunquit, ME) restaurant
• Several retail stores that were inexplicably playing country music despite not being located in the South
• Plymouth Rock
• Cape Cod National Seashore
• Newport, RI mansions (The Breakers)
• Hershey’s Chocolate World (Hershey, PA)
• Gettysburg, PA

We passed through 13 states in 9 days, staying the night in five of them.  (The complete list: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine)

The highlight for me was (of course) Fenway Park, although it really was one excellent stop after another.  Some of the historic sites nearly take your breath away, while you leave others thinking, “that’s all?”  Regardless, they were each interesting in their own right.  I tend to enjoy visiting places like the Freedom Trail sites (Bunker Hill, USS Constitution, etc.) but not dwelling on them.  There were few sites where I could have spent more time (Gettysburg chief among them), while others left me glad they were just a quick stop (Plymouth Rock).

I put together a slideshow of my favorite pictures below with a bit more detail in the captions.  (It will take a few minutes to go through them – there are 157.)

It’s good to be home now, and I’m going to have to rest up for another exciting weekend ahead, seeing the Braves in Atlanta.

The theory is that you can break runs scored and allowed into their components and remove some of the “noise” in projecting wins based on run scoring.  BaseRuns is probably my favorite run estimator because it ties closely to actual run scoring even in very high and very low run environments (i.e. college baseball or the MLB dead-ball era).

I wasn’t able to duplicate Matthew’s numbers exactly, so I’ll be up front about the formulas I used in case anyone wants to correct my work:

BaseRuns formula (with the “calibration” mentioned)
I used the second version (with SB/CS) for hitting and the third for pitching
Pythagorean Wins formula (with the “more accurate” 1.83 exponent)

Download the regular Excel version here.  The stats will update daily via Fangraphs, and the standings will do the same via Baseball Reference.  I didn’t make a regular Google Docs version because the web queries wouldn’t work right.

What you’ll notice on the “summary” tab is that the teams are sorted from “luckiest” to “unluckiest.”  Let me be quick to say that this is a rough estimate, so take any notions of “luck” with a grain of salt.

Based on their hitting and pitching components, though, we would say that the Rays have been the “luckiest” MLB team, and that they would finish with a record more like 100-62 (including the games they’ve already played) if they play at their current level the rest of the year.  The Orioles, perhaps unsurprisingly, are playing four games below their current BaseRuns expectation.

Braves fans may notice that the pitching staff has looked a little better from a BaseRuns perspective (83 BsR allowed, 91 actual), but good pitching can only do so much, as has been evident over the last eight days.

If you have any questions about what I did or a suggestion for how to improve it, drop me a line in the comments.

That’s right – I was one of the few non-Duke-alumni not rooting for the underdogs in last night’s NCAA championship game.  My college basketball allegiances are probably a story for another time, but I’ve been rooting for the Blue Devils since I reached middle school and started watching college basketball.

It’s really no fun to root against a team like Butler, a mid-major school which (as was evident last night) absolutely deserved to play in the title game.  The “David and Goliath” storyline existed only to drum up some interest in an otherwise star-less game.  Butler has an excellent team and a terrific coach, and they proved once again that they could execute against a bigger team.

In Duke and Mike Krzyzewski, Brad Stevens’ Butler team met their coaching-and-execution match, finding a team that was every bit as tenacious as they were and just a smidge more talented.  Duke finally wore down Butler’s defensive rebounding presence to get some second chances in the second half.

That was Duke’s calling card all year: efficient offense through offensive rebounding and passing to an open shooter.  On the other end of the floor, they played pressure defense around the perimeter, and Matt Howard couldn’t do enough inside to get them to back off Mack and Hayward.

The three seniors – Scheyer, Thomas, and Zoubek – played about as well as they could all year, and they’ll be remembered as champions, while other recent Duke greats like Williams and Redick moved on the NBA empty-handed.  Juniors Smith and Singler were bigger contributors in the tournament, and if they both return, they’ll be the keys to a title defense in 2011.

So, congratulations again to Duke.  Now it’s time for the Summer of Jason Heyward to get underway.  I know some of my readers moved on long ago (you’re still there…right?…….right?), but now I’m with you.