Could the Cleveland Indians have won it all in 1994?

CLEVELAND - In April 1994, the Cleveland Indians kicked off their first season at Jacobs Field. It was also the first year for the brand new AL Central Division and the start of a winning season—something that had not been a reality for the Tribe in quite some time.

Fast forward to August 12, 1994—the Indians are just one game back from division-leading Chicago White Sox and are leading the AL Wildcard Race over the Baltimore Orioles by 2.5 games, when the season is brought to a halt by the players strike.

The abrupt end to a season with such a promising start led many to wonder--what would have happened if the Indians went to the playoffs in 1994? Might they have won it all?

While we will never know for sure, one senior of Case Western Reserve University has come close to predicting what might have transpired had the strike never happened.

Case senior Zachary Hass reported his findings in the paper “Recovering the Lost Season: Simulating the End of MLB’s 1994 Strike Shortened Season.”

Hass is a statistics and economics major from Shawano, Wis., and his report picks up where the season ended by using his knowledge of engineering, economics and statistics to simulate the 1994 season outcomes.

Using a formula he devised, Hass’ research had the Indians making the playoffs 82.7 percent of the time, and the Montreal Expos also making the playoffs a convincing 98.7 percent of the time.

As far as winning the World Series, Tribe fans will have to keep dreaming about what could have been.

To get his research as accurate as possible, Hass had to work through about 1,000 season simulations to arrive at his results. Hass said he got the idea for his predictive model from a case presented by Boleslaw Kopocinski of Wroclaw University in Poland. Kopocinski used a statistical program called Poison Regression to estimate the goals for Poland’s 1939 soccer season cut short by World War II.

"The parallel between the two situations are strong enough to extend Professor Kopocinski’s work to our situation,” Hass wrote along with his co-investigators, Professor Wojbor Woyczynski, and students Chris Yanasko and Erik Becker.

The report was Hass’s Senior Capstone Project. Capstones are projects seniors undertake before graduating that generally focus on a research project related to a student’s major.

Hass plans to pursue a master’s degree in statistics at Purdue University in the fall.