There, at the very very bottom of the standings, are the Houston Astros. Okay, that’s not a big surprise. The Astros were baseball’s worst team in 2011. They didn’t then undergo a complete roster makeover. But their projected record - which is the average of several projected records - is 60-102. That’s 60 wins, and 102 losses.
The thing about projected standings is that they tend to miss the extremes. Standings are projected by running a hundred or a thousand individual projections and then averaging them out. By doing this, the records are kind of regressed to the mean. So when you see an extreme record, that’s pretty telling. And I think it’s fair to say that 60-102 is an extremely bad record…..
Out of all the projected records above, the worst is 60-102, belonging to the 2012 Houston Astros (CAIRO) and the 2009 Pittsburgh Pirates (ZiPS). And between those two teams, the 2009 Pittsburgh Pirates were projected to have the better Pythagorean record, based on runs scored and runs allowed.
These 2012 Houston Astros might be historically significant, in whatever way that projected baseball standings might be significant. And while it’s very possible, if not probable, that the Astros aren’t actually the worst team ever projected, that doesn’t change the fact that CAIRO just thinks they’re really gross. And CAIRO’s fair. CAIRO doesn’t hold grudges.
If you glance at the Astros’ depth chart, that they’re projected to be terrible makes a whole lot of sense. Squint and you can like a chunk of the rotation. The pitching staff as a unit isn’t a complete disaster. But I’d really prefer to just not talk about the position players. I like Jed Lowrie, but when you can make an argument that Jed Lowrie is the best position player on a team, you should be worried about that team.
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1. JJ1986 Posted: February 09, 2012 at 05:48 PM (#4057500)For example, if I know the statistics of every player in baseball as of Opening Day, 1962, shouldn't I be able to generate a "if CHONE existed then" projection for the '62 Mets? There are probably some variables in the systems (platoon data, pitch by pitch data) that may not exist at different times but it seem like it should be doable for someone with a whole heck of a lot of free time.
BPro projected the 1998 Marlins to finish 73-89. Third place!
I think Dan once asked if there was interest in releasing Diamond Mind historic seasons based on ZIPS rather than actual results and I believe the response was an enthusiastic YES (I for one would purchase many disks), but I don't know what became of that.
They didn't trade Bonilla and Sheffield until May though.
Jeff Sackmann has Marcel projections going back to 1901 or so here.
So you could probably do projections for a specific year on Opening Day, although it would project players with no MLB time as league average.
I've run simulations with all the Diamond Mind projection disks going back to 1998, I can't remember how the 2003 Tigers projected though. I'll see if I can find it.
There are two options with Wandy. He's either terrible, in which case he won't help the Astros, or he's good, and he's traded off of the Astros in early June, when they're already 30 games out of first. Either way, he won't stop them from hitting the 100 loss threshold.
That article is hilarious. The very first line of prediction, re: the Braves:
Glavine won the Cy Young, Neagle put up 200+ IP at 117 ERA+, and Gallarraga and Weiss combined for 8.3 WAR. In fact, all of the writers HATED those two Rockies signings, and called John Schuerholz a lot of mean names. I didn't realize BP hated him so much back then.
And Piazza.
Det03 51.3
Tam03 52.1
Min99 56
Flo00 59.1
Mil03 61
Min00 61.8
Tam02 61.8
Det04 62.5
Tam01 62.7
Flo01 63.1
Mil00 63.2
KC02 63.9
KC06 63.9
Pit98 64.4
Det02 64.4
Flo99 64.5
KC07 65
Interesting. Ended up being Det 43, Tam 63.
If I wanted to do historical CHONE for 1962, the biggest obstacle would be getting minor league data from 1959-1961. Without that I could run it with only MLB data, but it would not be different enough from Marcel to justify doing it.
It would probably take a few hours to look through the code and change some things, like different league averages to regress to. I suppose I could try and automate that and set all the tables up with a year identifier, but again, don't think it would be worth the time when Marcel has already been done.
That article rules.
"Sammy Sosa is the most useless ten-million dollar man in baseball".
I enjoyed the heck out of reading B-Pro's commentary on those 1998 predictions. It's funny to read old predictions like that. Some of the comments about young players is prescient. But some of commentary seems humorous now. I notice that Keith Law picked the Marlins to come in second, stay in the playoff race until the late in the season, and finish with 85 wins. Law said that he liked what the Marlins did, and said more teams should do what they did. In a way, I think that may be a "ahead of his time" view. The comment that made me laugh is one of the B-Pro writers calling Jim Bowden the "smartest man in baseball."
$8.5 million was probably an overpay at the time (that was what pure HOFers like Griffey, Bagwell, Clemens were making) but I don't know if we would call it "colossally stupid" today.
The B-Pro attitude from that era was amusing, because they clearly seemed to think they knew a LOT more than anyone else. And they'd land up with more and more egg on their faces....
Yes, but frankly, I thought it was totally awesome. Couldn't get enough of it. When B-Pro scolded another team for not availing itself of the freely available talents of Billy McMillon or Creighton Gubanich, I was right there with them.
Well, the Marlins lost Brown, Leiter, and Alou in the off season, but the bulk of the fire sale came in-season. Sheffield, Bonilla, Charles Johnson, and Renteria all began the season with the club. So no, no one would project that team to be historically bad. As it was, they won their first game, then lost 11 in a row. By the end of April they were 10 games out and the fire sale was on.
Walter Young will prove all the sizeists wrong someday!
Good god, how did I survive?
Alcohol, and denial.
--we really need an Albright equivalent for BBC--why should she be able to click on photo links without that hint of creeping fear?
Boy, Bpro was really in favor of the Marlins' fire sale. They just liked to be sophomoric and contrary. Why were they taken seriously?
Apparently San Jose was trying to get itself on the map by offering to finance a stadium for the Giants or something.
As much as I love the retro-bashing of BPro, let it be said that absolutely NO ONE outside of the Braves scouting department and front office saw that #### coming, right? The consensus in Braves-land was that they should have moved Ryan Klesko to 1B and went after an OF, I believe. Everyone KNEW Galarraga was a creature of Coors Field with nothing to provide outside of the thin air of Colorado. We just KNEW it. I can't tell you how many jokes were made about the Braves scouts "liking his swing" when he visited Turner Field that offseason.
With that said, the yearly BPro prediction of Tom Glavine's demise amuses me to this day. Oh look, Jair Jurrjens isn't as good as his peripherals again! Awesome.
Roberto Petagine.
Lee Tinsley then had two of the worst months in Phillies history and was traded BACK to the Red Sox for a AAA reliever who then retired a couple months later.
Of course, there's a thread about the later Slocumb trade as well. Many people liked it for the Red Sox, but the best quote is from Jeff Joseph.
That's Jose Cruz Jr., who the Mariners traded on the very same day for Paul Spoljaric and Mike Timlin.
"Sammy Sosa is the most useless ten-million dollar man in baseball".
From the moment Sammy Sosa's signing hand made it to the first "m" on his $40 million contract, until the month he hit 30,000 home runs, Jon Heyman was incapable of writing ten consecutive words without finding a way to work in a complaint about Sosa's paycheck. He could have pulled it off while covering the White House Easter egg roll, a NASA launch, the sex life of the dung beetle, anything.
he's also offering bogusevic and bourgeois, who can at least play. we'll have an OF of jack cust, travis buck, mary jane schafer and justin ruggiano
and there's no one in hte IF except maybe jose altuve who can hit ML pitching. lowrie is gonna preak his something when he stands up
i'm not seeing where they are getting 60 wins from. livan hernandez and his 5.5 ERA?
plz
oh yeah - that is a TERRIBLE pic of kevin bass. he's on foxsports and i've seen him at the Box and trust me on this, i hope husby doo looks that good when he's old. his body looks GOOD in his suit, too. of course won't husby nevah be that lean...
Galarraga is one of the names Szym and I used to bring up when talking about the folly of using only road stats to project Colorado players after they move on.
Not that either of us expected him to play as well as he actually did. I'm pretty sure I hated the signing. Just not as much as the people who just looked at his road numbers.
I'm aware of that, but updated PRO+ stats were not instantly available on the web. Hell, back then B-R didn't get the last year's stats until deep into the offseason, IIRC. If it existed. I remember using a STATS Inc. program on AOL to get my statistics in the 90s.
The question is, how did people account for it on the fly? Just make mental adjustments?
And Dave Cameron is still doing this with Mark Buehrle, apparently.
Yes, but this was before their numbers could show a propensity for alcoholism.
In all seriousness, Baerga was a 27 year old coming off 5 consecutive >100+ OPS+ seasons. While Biggio had been considerably better, he was also over 30 and the aging curve wasn't been broken when they made their prediction.
Not that either of us expected him to play as well as he actually did. I'm pretty sure I hated the signing. Just not as much as the people who just looked at his road numbers.
Oh, I bashed the Galarraga signing. I bring it up not because I was right, but because it's a good example of (what I later verified when developing ZiPS) the idea that road stats added no actual useful predictive data once you've applied a generic park factor to the overall stats.
I know that's kinda the consensus, but it's not so according to BBRef dWAR's 91 thru 95 (Baerga's full seasons)
Baerga: -0.3 0.7 0.1 -0.3 -0.7
Biggio: -0.6 -0.8 -0.4 -0.7 -0.2
It's not a huge difference in Baerga's favor, but definitely doesn't fit the story Biggio being much better.
Could you imagine such a world? Lets all take a moment to think about how great it's going to be to look back in 5-10 on the threads of the impending Red Sox collapse this past year where Ray and others said their making the playoff's was a done deal. Do you really want to take that joy away? Think of the children.
EDIT: Assuming the world doesn't end in December...
Just wanted to echo the thought expressed here. Even outside of Braves-land, everyone at the time KNEW Galarraga was a creature of Coors field.
Using 20-20 hindsight, it's just another example of a little knowledge being dangerous. We all knew certain ballparks inflated offensive stats; we had known that for decades. What we didn't know (or, perhaps more accurately, fully understand) was how to properly adjust for such ballpark effects.
This is why Santo had such a tough time getting the writer's vote for the Hall. Everyone KNEW Wrigley inflated offensive stats; so, armed with that knowledge, writers just applied a general downgrade to Santo's Triple Crown stats, and decided that they didn't measure up to HOF standards.
How much more knowledgeable about ballpark context are we now? (Or, to re-phrase, how far has the common wisdom in this area progressed?) Perhaps a good gauge to answer that question will be how well Larry Walker's case for the HOF is viewed by the current crop of BBWAA voters.
DB
Here's a thread where someone says he's jealous of Pirates fans! (1990)
That was a theory post-Galarraga (and a couple of other Coors babies doing better than expected post-Coors.) No idea if it was ever validated numerically.
It was known that the Galarraga signing would be horrific for Atlanta in much the same way it was known that John Mabry for Jeremy Giambi was insane, in much the same way that it is known that the Marc Scutaro trade was insane.
I like to use that Pete Rose pic where he is wearing the manties.
This one?
When the six finalists for the 1993 expansion came out in 1991, they were Buffalo, Denver, Miami, Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Washington. I remember wondering why Phoenix wasn't on the list. The four finalists for 1998 were Northern Virginia, Orlando, Phoenix and St. Petersburg.
This one?
I think this is the funniest thing in the whole thread.
I've said a lot of dumb #### over the years around here. Well, around everywhere, it's just that here there's a record of it. I remember being dead sure that Matt Holliday was a really bad signing. That's just one. I'm sure there are roughly one billion others that I can't remember.
BP was taken seriously for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that they actually did do some good work. The attitude was part of the brand, calculated I'm sure to appeal to the internet generation that was their core audience -- young men who liked to be right, and already believed they knew more than everybody else in the world about a lot of things: music, movies, politics, etc, etc, etc. They found a way to commoditize baseball analysis in the same way Rolling Stone once did being a music snob.
The upshot, of course, is that they end up looking silly when they're wrong. Hilariously so.
Bowden must have been the Jack Zduriencik of his day.
The guy (NY businessman Martin Stone) that was putting the expansion bid together for Phoenix pulled out two weeks before the selection process, and the new guy (sports agent Gary Walker) had trouble putting together enough capital in time. There also seemed to be a thought that Denver was an overwhelming favorite, and MLB didn't want two Rocky Mountain franchises.
Just for the record, young men throughout history, in every generation, have believed that they knew more than everybody else in the world about pretty much everything. The internet generation was simply the first to have an easily accessible world-wide platform with which they could express these beliefs.
DB
the internet generation that was their core audience --young men who, in every generation, like to be right, andalreadybelieve they know more than everybody else in the world about a lot of things: music, movies, politics, etc, etc, etc.FTFY.
Bill James = Exasperated 'Why are people so stupid?'.
BPro = Arrogant 'Hah, you people are so stupid: bow down before my genius!'
If the internet is a factor, it has more to do with tone than substance.
You know, I don't think it was totally calculated. I think they really were just arrogant. That's fine, I was arrogant too. I was sure that I was capable (at age 17 or whatever) of making better decisions than many GMs. And I was right about some of those things ... I DID understand the importance of OBP more than most GMs, and even if I look back on myself as generally behaving as a kind of idiot, on some of those points I feel pretty well vindicated.
Choice quotes from the 1999 season preview:
True dat. In the 19th century Mark Twain said something to the effect that, When I was seven, my father knew everything; when I was fourteen, my father knew nothing; by the time I turned twenty-one, I was amazed at how much my father had learned in the previous seven years!
(It was probably that high then in most cases, too.)
If they hadn't canceled the 2004 World Series, I'm pretty sure I'd still be wondering how in the world Wakefield ever faced off against Williams in a game 1.
Anyway, as a Cards fan, I was pretty sure the MV3 would absolutely crush the 2004 Yankees, but after watching the Sox come back in seven games, I was in shambles.
fake Madelaine Albright link >> real pete rose manties link. Assuming that is real. I'm going to go wash my eyes out with soap, and hope I dream of M.A.
Walter Young, MLB, career: .303/.378/.424 (115 OPS+). Nothing wrong with that at all - it's a rare thing to see a 300-pound man hit his weight.
Read an article about him a couple months ago: Working as a prison guard, and still playing semi-pro ball whenever he can.
That's true, of course. To the best of my knowledge, Ken Cloude was never arrested for beating his girlfriend.
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