Today is another day without any baseball. Thanks, Obama! To fill the void, many backseat fans decided to bag on Jeter getting the starting nod in the All-Star Game (it need not be said that fans voted Jeter to start the ASG). The prime argument is that “the games matter!” I’m here to show you how little it matters.
We can’t precisely measure how the switch of Aybar (the deserving candidate) and Jeter changes World Series fortunes, but we can at least establish an upper bound. What that means is that I’m going to calculate what the change could be, at most. For most teams, it would be much less, and it would be unreasonable to assume it’s more for any one team.
I’m going to calculate three variables: the chance that the most likely team to make the World Series makes the World Series, the difference between having home-field advantage at the World Series and not having it, and the difference between winning the ASG with Aybar receiving 2 PA instead of 0 (which was the difference in the actual game. I am assuming that Ramirez would have received his 2 AB in either case).
If we check on FanGraphs, no team is better than a 29.3% chance to make the WS. We’ll call it 30% (rounding up to get a better upper bound here). That means that in the best of cases, your team already doesn’t care about this result 70% of the time.
Next, we check the effect HFA has on the World Series. Per the excellent book Scorecasting, the last century or so has the advantage at 54% (the home team wins 54% of the time). If we extend that to a 7-game series, I’ll omit the gory math and just state that the home team wins a 2-3-2 series 63.65% of the time, which means that the difference between having it is around 27.31% (63.65-36.35). I’d argue that the difference is less for World Series games, but let’s be safe and just round up again to 30%.
Last, we have to measure the effect that Jeter stealing 2 PA from Aybar would typically have. Aybar has a WAR of 2.9 this year, and Jeter has a WAR of .6 (a difference of 2.3). Multiplying that by .4 (since 2 of 5 PA are only being replaced), and the difference is .92. If we assume the average AS has 3 WAR (a fair assumption), we see that the 27 WAR the AL would ideally have is now only 26.08. If we plug that into the Pythagorean W/L model, we see that the AL goes from a 50% winning percentage to 48.5%. Let’s be charitable and call it 2%.
So, we can see that this number is going to be pretty low. .02 * .3 * .3 = .18%. That means that in the absolute best of cases, Jeter is only stealing less than one fifth of one percent from your team’s World Series aspirations (and only from AL teams! This actually “helps” every National League team).
Derek Jeter went 2-2 in the All Star Game, with a double and run scored.