Coolstandings.com: Know Where Your Team Really Stands!

Your team is six games back in August…What are their realistic chances of winning the division, winning the wildcard, or just making the playoffs? A couple of MIT alumni can help you there.

Theta Chi buddies Greg Agami '93 and Sean Walsh'93  started coolstandings.com in 2005 when these Red Sox fans thought it would be fun to know exactly what chances the Sox had of making the postseason. Within a few months, coolstandings.com was online, simulating the remainder of the MLB season one million times each day to determine the playoff probabilities for every team.

“The model uses a modified version of the Bill James Pythagorean Theorem to determine the chance each team has of beating other teams on its schedule,” Agami says. “Home/away statistics and recent team performance are used as variables for the Monte Carlo simulation, and we even implemented the various tie-breaking rules as needed to determine divisional and wild card winners. We've used historical data going back to 1903 to evaluate and optimize the model.”

These days, you can follow football and basketball as well as baseball in the real season and a fantasy pre-season. And this is not even their day jobs—Agami is an engineer at Motorola, while Walsh is CTO at DestinationWeddings.com.