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How much does the Sabathia trade help the Brewer's playoff chances?

Hopefully this kind of represents the kind of analysis Doug and the gang did when determining if the Sabathia trade was the right move to make.  The plan is to calculate how much better this makes the Brewers then calculate how much this move increases their chances of making the playoffs.  The first part boils down to determining who gets bumped from the rotation and the net effect of the pen.  I ran several trials very similar to what cwyers did using ZIPS and some PECOTA numbers and every trial had the Brewers increasing their wins between 1.4 and 1.7 wins.  This is before I heard Suppan was headed to the DL so this actually this study might over estimate things.  Anyway, I assumed that the Brewers would be about a 1.5 win better team from here on out.  If you add that to BaseballProspectus' third order winning percentage of .510 you get that the crew is about a .530 team from here on out.

I then set up a monte carlo similar to what they use at BP with the full schedule and a .541 home field advantage (stolen from Tom Tango).  I then simulated the rest of the season 100,000 times using the regular BP numbers and came up with the Crew making the playoffs 55% of the time with the Cubs at 91% and the Cards at 35% of the time.  This matched up well with what BP gets so now I am ready to plug in the new winning percentage of .530 in for the crew and when I do that I get this breakdown:

Team%Div%WC%Playoffs
Cubs68.1720.4588.62
Brewers26.4739.5065.97
Cardinals4.7116.6521.36
Reds0.450.601.05
Astros0.200.600.80
Pirates0.000.300.30
The simulation had the crew winning 90.3 games which is about what you would expect from the input.  This isn't a perfect setup as Sabathia will mostly help only on his turn in the roation instead of spreading his help out but this is really the only way to do something like this unless I put in the projected starting pitchers for each team in and the results seem to match up quite well.  Anyway, it appears that adding Sabathia only increased the Brewer's chances by ten percent.  Honestly that is smaller than I expected.  It may make them a force if they get into the playoffs but right now they only look like a two in three shot.  The team that takes the biggest hit is the Cardinals who lost slightly more than the Brewer's gained.  This might actually be the case as instead of fighting with the Brewers for the wild card it is possible they end up fighting a good Cubs team as well.  The crew catch the Cubs and wins the division in one out of four simulations which is where most of their gains are coming actually.  Winning the division likely mean home field advantage though I didn't check those numbers.

Obviously what this doesn't include is the future production in the upcoming years from the minor leaguers we traded away but hopefully the front office has some guess as to how much LaPorta and the others would help the winning percentage in the upcoming years.  Then you can really do a full analysis but I think this is a very fair representation of the crew's current chances for the playoffs and how much Sabathia has helped them.

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

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