Division Three World Series Odds
May 28, 2010
As the Division One conference tournaments work toward their conclusions this weekend, a far different tournament gets underway. In Appleton, Wisconsin, eight teams will compete in the Division Three world series.
There isn't much in the way of prospecting to be done there, but there are some solid players and great teams. The storylines are even better. With the exception of Cortland State (NY), all of the teams are relative newcomers to the national finals. UMass-Boston never even made a regional before this year!
We don't have the same detailed game-by-game for D3 that we do for D2, so we'll approximate a bit.
D3baseball.com did us the huge favor of compiling in-region strength-of-schedule numbers, and we collected each team's pythagorean won-loss record. Combine the resulting strength rating with the bracket (it's amazing how many different formats an eight-team, double-elimination tournament can take!) and we can run a monte carlo simulation.
Team Strength Odds Johns Hopkins 0.900 36.3% Cortland State 0.852 17.8% Heidelberg 0.854 15.2% Shenandoah 0.831 12.6% Linfield 0.828 12.1% UW-Stevens Point 0.738 2.7% Mass-Boston 0.727 2.4% Illinois Wesleyan 0.664 0.9%
It's pretty clear who the underdogs are. The bracket isn't perfect, but it also isn't as lopsided as the Division Two assignments. The unlucky one is Heidelberg, who has to open against powerhouse Johns Hopkins, despite being the second-best team in the field. Playing your way out of the loser's bracket is tough.
On the flip side, Cortland and Linfield have a bit of an edge. They start against Stevens Point and Mass-Boston, respectively, and won't run into Hopkins or Heidelberg until Sunday. (If they're winning, anyway.)
Next Tuesday, we'll be watching to find out who really wins it all. There aren't any D1 games that day, so really, what else are you going to be doing?