Trends

When I think about my beloved team, The Ackbars, I often slip into the dream and actually believe that my team is a real team.  I find myself saying, "I am going to give Alex Rios a day off to rest that knee," or "I hate to drop Alberto Callaspo, he is such a great locker room guy."  The most frequent uttering to myself from myself in a world with only myself is, "My team is finally coming together and the guys are really clicking together."  Of course, these guys are all on real life teams and have nothing to do with eachother and, beyond the ten of us, are a completely boring agglomeration of playaz.  This week, however, I looked to see whether there was any truth to any of my notions that my team was "coming together" and if any of the categories were actually showing a trend upwards. 
I got the data together for each of the weeks for each of the teams and then performed a linear regression.  If a line that best fits the data had a positive slope, my thinking went, my team would generally be trending up in that category.  When I first did this, I actually did the graphs and, suffice to say, the "best fit" data was pretty far in left field when compared to the actual data point.  I got the R-squared for each of the data points and filtered the best fit lines through this measure of how well the line fits the data and only took those lines where r-squared is greater than 0.5 (on a 0 to 1 scale).  Those categories where, by this interpretation, the data had actual relevance are highlighted in nice calm blue.



The first thing that will stand out to you is that, really, there are very few trends for each of our teams.  The average for each week doesn't have any trends of significance, and even before the r-squared filter, the slopes of the lines were very low, showing that if there were any trend it would be very minor.
Second, I was heartened to see Omar's general offensive upward trend.  While I am happy for Omar and all of that, I was more pleased to see that, with his homers, his RBIs, avg, and OPS also were trending up, meaning that in general, this type of analysis works.  In the actual league, it appears that Omar is raking as of late, and his recent surge in the standings isn't simply the product of weaker opponents, as previous analyses have demonstrated. 
Conversely, I was disheartened to see that the Peachz'z pitching is generally staying pretty stable, with the exception of K/9.  The Peachz'z pitching has been dominant thus far into the season, and, unfortunately, it seems like it wasn't just a hot start. 
Other than that, my team the Ackbars, Woo Woo, and the Andrus Reclamation Project all seem to be pretty stable, which I know for my team is a mixed blessing; our hitting has been pretty good thus far, but the pitching has been very hit or miss, and it looks like it is going to be a long summer of hoping that with each start, the ERA and WHIP will go down, but after a few tenths, them just rising like my schlong when I see a picture of that Chelsea Clinton.  Hubba Hubba, Baby!