Challenge Completed

First off, let me apologize to all the contestants of this year’s 25 Man Roster Challenge for the delay on revealing the winner. I guess I could try to give you all some cheese dick reason why it happened this way but I just don’t want to do that. In my defense, I attended the Blue Jays home opener, the Buffalo Bisons home opener and the epic Fuck Farrell Friday bonanza this week so free time was at a premium. Two openers in two different countries was a pretty special opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up. Mix in some recovery time between games and the attention that this post deserves wasn’t available until now.

The Blue Jays opening day roster in 2013 contained a few wrinkles to say the least. Most notably the absence of Brett Lawrie due to a freak WBC injury and Ricky Romero’s epic melt down that resulted in him being held back in Dunedin to fix his "mechanics".

These developments made for another interesting roster challenge this year but in the end, the winner came from the ballot that was most selected AKA The Favorite. 23 out of a possible 25 was a good enough score to take the crown this year and as expected the tie breaker - the Blue Jays spring training record - factored into determining a sole winner.

Here is where it got interesting. Actually, it got very interesting.

Tiebreakers chosen by the nine contestants that needed tiebreaking were as follows.

Action Jackson: 22-10

@gregorMLB: 18-14

@gideonturk: 17-15

@AndyMc9293: 16-16

@swannsky: 15-17

Team Fightin’ Clints: 14-16

Mr. Defending Champion Sir: 14-18

@trodge: 12-18

@AHume92: 12-20

Blue Jays spring training record: 16-17-1

So yeah, no one nailed the tiebreaker dead on. To further complicate things there was a pesky tie mixed in. Even more annoying than that, the Blue Jays played 34 spring games and most of the contestants but not all chose a win/loss total based on a 32 game record.

What to do? What is the most fair thing to do in this situation?

My initial reaction was to go by wins. After discussing it with a few people – people both involved in the roster challenge and neutral third party observer types -  that was quickly discarded. If the only thing that mattered was the win total, we would have only asked you to guess how many wins the Blue Jays would have this spring. No, losses needed to be validated and factored into this equation.

The next thought that wasn’t immediately rejected was winning percentage and the more we all talked about it, the more it made complete sense. Most importantly we felt it was the fairest way to determine a winner. Once we decided to run with this idea a few things that we naturally didn’t consider presented themselves.

First up, we needed to determine what the Blue Jays actual winning percentage was in spring training.

Courtesy of the always trustworthy WIKI answers

Question: How do you calculate winning percentage with a tie?

Answer: Generally, most organizations count a tie a one half win and one half loss when computing winning percentage. The National Football League is one of the organizations that does this.

So, should a team in the NFL have a record of 5 wins, 4 losses, and 1 tie (5-4-1), their winning percentage would be .550. This is calculated by taking the number of games (10) and dividing into the number of wins (5.5).

Seems legit and makes perfect sense to us. Hey, if it's good enough for the all knowing, all powerful NFL then surely it's worthy.

That means the Blue Jays record for our purposes was 16.5 – 17.5 which works out to a winning percentage of .485 if you go to the traditional third decimal point.

Now let’s re-examine the list of contestants using the same principles and see what their winning percentage is.

Action Jackson:  .688

@gregorMLB: .563

@gideonturk: .531

@AndyMc9293: .500

@swannsky: .469

Team Fightin’ Clints: .467

Mr. Defending Champion Sir: .438

@trodge: .400

@AHume92: .375

Even after all this simple math was done, there was still some healthy debate on who actually won the 25 Man Roster Challenge. Do we go Price Is Right style rules and say the closest without going over? Or do we just say fuck it at this point and go with whoever has the closest winning percentage to the Blue Jays actual winning percentage and crown them the champion?

It was decided at the end of the day to say screw you Bob Barker and Drew Carey, we are going with the raw data this time.

@AndyMc9293 was  0.015 over

@swannsky was 0.016 under

So with that, we have our champion.....@AndyMc9293 in what can only be described as a photo finish. Congratulations good sir! We will be in touch shortly to arrange to have the prizes sent to you.

Please note that this formula will be used in future 25 Man Roster Challenges as it is now the gold standard. We hope you can all see why based on the unique set of circumstances that presented themselves this year.

The integrity of the 25 Man Roster Challenge was the ultimate driving force behind any decisions made with respect to the tiebreaker - from this point on to be referred to as the modified tiebreaker - changes.

Thanks again everyone for playing and we hope you can join us again next year! (when our roster is even more stacked)