Simulation Projects

Last updated: October 20, 2006

From time to time, we're asked to set up and run simulations for major web sites, magazines or newspapers. Here are a few notable ones:

The first and biggest of these projects was the All-time Greatest Teams tournament run by USA Today Sports Weekly (then Baseball Weekly) in 1993. Since then, we've simulated the missing regular season and postseason games from the 1994 season, a tournament involving the best New York teams of all times, and several other interesting series.

A matchup between the 1962 Mets and the 2003 Tigers was featured as ESPN.com's top story on August 20, 2003. ESPN's baseball editor, Scott Ridge, and senior ESPN writer Jayson Stark conceived the idea and asked us to set it up and run it. We were happy to do that. Jayson did a terrific job of writing up this dramatic seven-game series, and if you didn't see the ESPN story, you can browse all of the information for this series here.

The last weekend of the 2005 season featured a tight race for the NL wild card. Philadelphia won its last four but was left out of the postseason parade when Houston took care of business. The good folks at the Philadelphia Daily News wondered how a playoff game might have turned out had Houston dropped one of its weekend games to fall into a tie, and we were more than happy to help out.

During the 2006 all-star break, ESPN.com published an article by Rob Neyer that put forward an all-time all-star team for each league along with Rob's reasons for choosing those players. ESPN asked us to simulate an all-star game between those two teams, using Rob's selections as the starters and filling out the benches and bullpens with his honorable mentions. That simulated all-star game was featured on ESPN.com on Monday, July 10th.

On July 20, 2006, the New England Sports Network (NESN) aired a show called "What IF..." that was based around a Diamond Mind simulation of game seven of the 2003 series between New York and Boston. In the real game, Boston manager Grady Little chose to leave a tiring Pedro Martinez on the mound to protect a two-run lead in the bottom of the eighth inning. For the show, we ran simulations to determine the most likely outcome if Little had gone to the pen for Alan Embree instead. See "Revisiting Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS" for the rest of the story.

In late September, 2006, the YES Network asked us to simulate the upcoming AL playoffs for an article written by Jonah Keri for the network's web site.

The Wall Street Journal came to us for a series of simulations of the 2006 World Series for an article in the By the Numbers column, which appears in the Weekend section of the paper on Friday, October 2006. At the time of the request, we didn't know who would make it through the two league championship series, so we simulated all four possible World Series matchups and a few additional what-if scenarios.