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AccuScore
Soriano Injury Impact
Stephen Oh
AccuScore Analyst

It does not take a supercomputer to tell Cubs fans that Alfonso Soriano's injury is going to hurt the team, but it does take the AccuScore supercomputer to tell you exactly how much. The Baseline simulations below show the Cubs' current simulation winning percentage for each game of the series. We then re-simulated the games with Soriano healthy and playing. The Cubs' winning percentage improved by more than 5 percentage points.

TEAM 20-Jun 21-Jun 22-Jun AVG
BASELINE 54.8% 56.5% 47.0% 52.8%
W/ SORIANO 58.0% 63.2% 52.3% 57.8%
IMPACT 3.2% 6.7% 5.3% 5.1%

A five percentage point improvement in winning percentage is huge. If you extrapolate that over 162 games that translates to 8 more wins (an 89-73 record compared to an 81-81 record).

Even though the Soriano injury hurts the Cubs, many are definitely overreacting with their doomsday predictions for the Cubs. AccuScore simulates the full season thousands of times in order to calculate each teams' project win-loss record, chances of winning their division, and making the playoffs. As long as Alfonso Soriano comes back in six weeks and stays healthy the rest of the season the Cubs are still finishing the season with the best simulation average win total (94.8 wins). If Soriano were not injured, the simulation average win total is 96.5.

TEAM WIN DIVISION MAKE PLAYOFFS WORLD SERIES
CUBS 73.4% 89.0% 38.4%

AccuScore is a computer and does not care about the variety of curses that haunt Cubs fans. AccuScore expects Soriano to miss six weeks (32 games). The Cubs have won 63.6 percent of their games this season and if they won that percentage of 32 games they would have a record of 20.4 – 11.6 If Soriano's absence results in a winning percentage of 58.5 percent of these 32 games then they have a record of 18.7 – 13.3. The difference in wins is 1.7 on average, or 1 or 2 fewer wins in real terms.

The Cubs have a 2.5 game advantage on St. Louis. With Albert Pujols' injury the numbers indicate that the Cardinals will likely gain around 1 game on the Cubs (Pujols out 3 weeks, Soriano 6). The next closest team is the Phillies who are 3.5 games back of the Cubs.

In other words, if Soriano comes back healthy in six weeks, the odds are that the Cubs will still be first place in the National League. The lead may be 1 or 2 games and not the 5+ game lead they might have had with Soriano, but it is still a lead that they can ride potentially to the World Series.