Pandas, Plotly and Why the Brewers Will Make the Playoffs

I have been really impressed with how the Brewers have been pitching throughout September. Yes they have been winning ballgames and that helps but even the ones they did not win aside from the 10-0 drubbing by STL they have been competitive in. Either way, a definite sense of confidence has started to emanate from both the starting staff and bullpen. Sometimes it is hard over the course of so many baseball games to really know if what you think you are seeing IS what you are actually seeing. Feeling like our pitching staff has been stellar over the past 17 days of September is one thing, but knowing they’ve been good is another altogether more satisfying thing.

I went on ESPN.com and sorted team stats by pitching and then looked at the September splits. The Brewers are at the moment good enough for 3rd place September team ERA. That’s good. I felt like they’ve been that good. But then I wondered now that they are all of the sudden good maybe I want to know how bad they were too. So I looked at previous months splits and yeah they were bad. Simple enough, done looking at all these nasty numbers. My feelings were verified and I could go on about my day and stop wasting time on this endeavor. Not so fast. I wanted a line plot showing the Brewers team ERA over the course of the season to see if it matched up with how I would have described or felt their season has gone so far. I needed or at least wanted to tap on some basic python libraries, mostly pandas, I have gotten familiar with at work and one in particular, plotly, I’ve never used before to see if I could actually show that a line plot of the Brewers Team ERA would fall in line with the qualitative feelings I have had toward their 2019 campaign.

It all makes sense as the Brewers have solidified their pitching staff top to bottom, they have also re ignited their hopes for October baseball. Even losing a league MVP in Yellich cannot derail what good pitching does for a club. The next thing I wanted to see was how the Cubs and Cards ERA has been over the year. The most interesting thing to me was how all three clubs have really put their foot on the gas in September in terms of pitching. There is a scenario where they could all three tie for a playoff spot. This is a doomsday scenario but I’m told it could happen.