It has been noted that in many professional sports leagues a good predictor of a team's end of season won-loss percentage is Bill James' Pythagorean Formula RS obs RS obs +RA obs , where RS obs (resp. RA obs ) is the observed average number of runs scored (allowed) per game and is a constant for the league; for baseball the best agreement is when is about 1.82. This formula is often used in the middle of a season to determine if a team is performing above or below expectations, and estimate their future standings.
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Steven J. Miller (2007) studied this question.
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