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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
When you do a lot of work with projections, one of the things that takes some getting used to is the inevitability that your soothsaying will miss the mark on several occasions. Baseball teams have a lot of moving parts, and over half a year there's great potential for assumptions to go awry, askew or afoul.
With a quarter of the season already behind us, we have a great deal of new information on teams -- some good, some bad -- and unless Bud Selig comes up with some crazy new idea to make the All-Star Game "count" even more, there are a lot of wins and losses in the books that nobody can go back and erase. Missing the mark here and there really isn't so bad -- if we could predict the future perfectly, things would be rather boring.
So, which teams have changed their potential position in the standings at the end of the year by the greatest degree?
To answer this question, I used updated ZiPS projections and a set of Monte Carlo simulations to estimate wins during the rest of the season, adding them to this morning's standings. The good news is that most teams still project in the same neighborhood, with 25 of 30 teams coming within six wins of the preseason projection edition.
But if you have a tendency to see your glasses as half full, as I do, that leaves five teams that ZiPS is likely, at season's end, to have missed by more than six games.
Bonus to those that catch the Mr. Show reference.
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1. Bitter Calculus Instructor Posted: May 22, 2012 at 04:18 PM (#4137937)Glad to hear it!
Also, here are Baseball Prospectus' playoff odds for comparison: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/odds/index.php?dispgroup=div&standings_sort=divpct
It would be awesome if they had a massive pigpile on the mound after tonight's game, sprayed champagne, etc.
... and one time, all three!
It would take a lot of injuries to the Rangers but they would only have to beat one team. I guess beating the best team in the league is harder than sneaking past the field.
Don't forget there are two wild cards now, and the A's share a division with the best team in baseball.
Only 18.5% percent for the Nationals playoff odds, huh? Yep, the BP machine is still a ridiculous Garbage In, Garbage Out broken piece of trash.
That's fine though, we'll just keep on beating people's asses, and eventually people will come to realize that this is a good team now, whether they like it or not.
If it makes you feel any better, it took an awful long time for the actual results to overcome the D Backs bad projections last year.
Maybe they fixed it overnight. The Nats playoff odds have skyrocketed since yesterday.
I just looked, and you aren't kidding! An almost eleven percent increase sure seems like a pretty darn big jump after a three-run win in May, doesn't it?
I would sure love to be able to get a look at that software to see just what the heck is really going on in there.
And yet you keep posting...
Being 2 games up on the 4th-place Mets really screams "playoff lock".
No, we're not a "playoff lock"; that would be a ridiculous thing to say. I merely said that the 18.5% they had us at a couple of days ago is absurdly low.
Even though they moved us up a little, I think they still have us too low. Although it's still early, I sincerely believe that the Nationals are one of the top four or five teams in the National League now based on talent, though a lot of it has to do with the league being so weak.
I will readily concede without argument that the Braves, Cardinals, and Dodgers are clearly better teams than we are. As for the rest of the Central and West outside St. Louis and L.A., they're basically crap and I don't concede any of the rest of those teams are better than we are. The Phillies are an injury-prone, decrepit old team that is clearly headed downward and at the end of its run of greatness, and your Mets are a total collapse just waiting to happen. Enjoy their record while you can bro, because it's not going to last too much longer.
The Marlins actually scare me a little, because there is a lot of talent on that team. If people want to put them ahead of us I wouldn't argue it too strenuously. But if I'm right and we're in the top five, plain old common sense tells you 18.5% is obviously way too low, now that there are five teams who make the playoffs.
Fair enough.
BPro completely ignores 2012 performance and relies solely on preseason projections to project team W-L for the rest of the season.
The truth is probably somewhere between the two, but I’d lean towards BPro this early in the season.
I agree with the basic idea here, but I also think that we're not that far away from the point of the season where performance should be starting to take precedence over the projections.
Isn't that what Dan is doing with his projections?(you know the article that was linked here---that most of us couldn't read)
Yes, I believe so, but none of my comments in this thread were critical of Dan or his projections. All my comments were directed at Baseball Prospectus, because frankly I find a season projection system that completely ignores all performance during that season to be idiotic.
It's a weighted average, actually, with the weight on current-season performance increasing as the season progresses.
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