college baseball Banner Achievement Utilization Metric

For my first FanPost on Arkansas Expats I would like to introduce a College Baseball post season power metric, it shall be entitled the Banner Achievement Utilization Metric (BAUM).  Thanks to heathhog for helping with the name.  My idea for the BAUM started while sitting at the Razorbacks opening game last Friday.  The outfield wall is starting to get fairly crowded with postseason appearances, in fact, most fans have come to expect the Diamond Hogs to at least make a Regional, if not host one.

The item running through my mind at that game was, how many other teams have made it to the post season as many years in a row as the Razorbacks.  A little review came up with the following teams that have made the postseason since 2002.

Arizona State
Arkansas
Cal State Fullerton
Florida State
Miami (FL)
North Carolina
Oral Roberts
Rice
South Carolina
Texas

Much more after the jump.

This list is fairly impressive, the Hogs are in great company here.  Any parent's-basement-dwelling-baseball-numbers guy can't help but wonder how these teams compare to each other, so I put numbers to it.  The first attempt looked something like this.

0.34 Florida State
0.35 Texas (2002, 2005)
0.37 Arizona State
0.40 Cal State Fullerton (2004)
0.44 Rice (2003)
0.44 Miami (FL)
0.46 South Carolina (2010)
0.52 Arkansas
0.60 North Carolina
1.01 Oral Roberts

The numbers in front are not the BAUM, but they do represent the BAUM in its adolescent form.  The number in parentheses are years in which that team won the College World Series between 2002 and 2009.

Adolescent BAUM explained:  I took the regional seed for each year and divided by 2011 minus the year to give more recent appearances more weight (i.e. Arkansas would get 3/3=1 for 2008 because they were a three seed and 2011-2008 is 3).  All nine years added up and divided by nine gives you the teams value.  Hind sight has me wondering why I divided by nine, it was meant to give some kind of annual value, but it was not necessary.

Wow, look at that!  The Hogs are a top eight team over the last nine years!  This is; however, flawed logic at best.  There are some big teams missing here that deserve comparison (namely LSU and Clemson).  Is it fair to say that if you missed one year in the last nine, you should not be considered comparable for post season success?  Maybe it is, but I had a gut feeling some teams would out do the Hogs when stacked up in some kind of magical power metric.

At this point, some reference should be made to past work.  Bruinstyle2001 did some similar work on this back on ought nine (link, must be logged in to view).  No more waiting! here is the most awesomely magical college baseball postseason power metric, the BAUM.

The BAUM:

How to put value to certain appearances?  Here's how:

1    Regional Seed 4
2    Regional Seed 3
3    Regional Seed 2
4    Regional Seed 1
5    Lose Super Regional
6    Win Super Regional
7    1 Win at CWS
8    2 Wins at CWS
9    Runner Up
10    Win CWS

Of note is that you barely get more for a four seed than not going.  This also weighs in the regular season a bit by using seeding instead of regional performance.  It also doesn't give some astronomical importance to winning the CWS, or else we could simply add up trophies and rank people, how much fun is that?

How to weight last year more than previous years:

1.00    1 old
1.33    2 old
1.66    3 old
2.00    4 old
2.50    5 old
3.25    6 old
4.00    7 old
5.00    8 old
6.50    9 old
8.00    10 old

These numbers are dividers, so the older an appearance, the fewer points you get.  This has some number massaging trickery in it, we geeks call it a log scale.  Basically, you get many more points for resent appearances and it falls off fast near the end.  I like this because in college baseball, teams can really reinvent themselves in just a few years.  So data that is ten years old is approaching irrelevance.

You may already notice that this is the inverse of adolescent BAUM in that it is better to have a larger number.  It also goes back an entire decade, instead of just a Hogcentric nine years.  Data was pulled from d1baseball.com for 2003-2010 and wikipedia.org for 2001-2002.  I continue to divide the overall number by the number of years, in this case ten, for I refuse to let go of this irrelevant step.

181 teams have made the college baseball postseason in the last ten years, of them, here is the top 30 by BAUM.

1      4.752    Arizona State
2      4.716    Cal State Fullerton (2004)
3      4.652    Texas (2002, 2005)
4      4.646    North Carolina
5      4.431    South Carolina (2010)
6      4.339    Miami (FL) (2001)
7      4.246    Clemson
8      4.232    Florida State
9      4.212    Rice (2003)
10    3.652    LSU (2009)
11    3.129    Arkansas
12    2.929    TCU
13    2.806    Florida
14    2.776    Virginia
15    2.720    Stanford
16    2.664    Oklahoma
17    2.651    UCLA
18    2.391    Georgia
19    2.382    Mississippi
20    2.358    Oregon State (2006, 2007)
21    2.162    Georgia Tech
22    2.141    Coastal Carolina
23    1.988    UC Irvine
24    1.978    Louisville
25    1.798    Texas A&M
26    1.720    Alabama
27    1.651    Vanderbilt
28    1.493    East Carolina
29    1.448    Baylor
30    1.440    Southern Miss

There you have it, top 30 BAUM for the decade 2001-2010.  I am considering looking at this by conference.

Opinion:  Great job coach D on handing a valuable program over to DVH.  Great job DVH on continuing and building on that valuable program.  Arkansas may not have a national championship yet, but with continued post season appearances comes greater probability of getting hot at the end and winning it all.