We’ll be playing with the kids in August & September with the expected results.

I’m sure that if you looked at all the projected seasons that PECOTA ran, in the majority of them some team played over .600 ball. But it was a bunch of different teams, no team doing so often enough to set that as their level.

I’ll bet almost every year the best team and the worst team are better and worse than any of PECOTA’s projections. They’re telling us what each team is, more or less, at their average performance. Of course some teams will play better than their average. And of course PECOTA can’t predict which teams will do so. Their projections still tell you something useful about the relative strength of the teams, and a team projected to win 73 is a lot less likely to overachieve to .600 ball than a team projected to win 93.

Nah, what it explains is why I’ll still be getting those postcards begging me to come back every year for the foreseeable future…

It happened in the NL the last two seasons, and in the majors overall in 2000. And it’s FREQUENTLY been just a couple of games away from happening. It’s not an unreasonable place to start at all. It’s much more likely than to have a extreme outlier. Baseball is a parity sport, much more so than the others. Something about those 162 games….

The NL? yes. The entire MLB? No. The NL is crappy and had/has zero outstanding teams. When it happened in 2000, the Giants had a .599 win %.

PECOTA had the Yankees maxing out at 93 wins, I’d be shocked if one team wasn’t over .600. I take those results with a salt lick.

Okay. I guess I’m just thinking about this shit too hard.

PECOTA is reasonably accurate, but by no means are the predictions assured of happening, so let’s not rush to stick the nail in the coffin for 2007- oh wait, I forgot what blog I was on.

Accuracy with Pecota is dependant on context. Offensively, i’m very, very confortable with it’s projections (correlations are over .70 typically). Pecota can’t handle pitching nearly as well though (projection correlate to actual roughly around .45) which makes sense I guess.

So if there is any saving grace here, its that the Ms can make up wins because Pecota has missed on the pitching side of things. Looking at the staff though, I’m thinking that’s more a case of hope springs eternal.

Then there is some marginal stuff you can consider that might pick up a few wins. Having Guillen’s arm in right with Ichiro’s in center might be collectively good for 7-8 runs (maybe a win?). Then you can hope that the two do something special in high leverage situations that could get you another win or two…

Of course that California sliding into the ocean (while Texas is at Oakland) idea sounds like a winner…

Careful what you wish for though, the Ms might be at Anahiem that weekend….

- To the issue of teams not being the same, that’s certainly true, but for the most part, team composition doesn’t change that much in the aggregate. No team gears up or tears down entirely in any single year.

Look at this as more of a start-of-season rough cut: “If these guys perform at their weighted mean forecasts and we’re more or less right about who gets what playing time, here’s the relative strength of the teams.”

I don’t view these as having any real predictive value – but they are still interesting.

Since that aligns pretty much with what I’ve been thinking since the offseason, OK, then.

As for the Mariners being terrible, well, PECOTA hates Ichiro, always has, probably always will. I take the 73 as the probably low end scenario- Guillen’s a shambles, all the veterans decline collectively, and so on. The problem is that for a team payroll that has 9 digits, we should be looking at a win total that’s much closer to three digits than what we’re getting.

What this DOES seem to say is nobody in the AL West is going to blow the doors off anyone else…

But that’s exactly what I mean by getting lucky. The systematic agorithm takes in a wide variety of variables and possiblities and projects an outcome based on what it knows at the time. But if the variables change over the course of the season, and last season’s July / August / September / October team was not the same as the one that PECOTA originally projected, how can we credit PECOTA’s outcome as being accurate when it was?

I’m just saying that looking at PECOTA’s past results for teams and applying it to current projections for teams is irresponsible unless one looks at the entirety of the data.

And before anybody else jumps in here to make offhanded comments, I’m not knocking PECOTA at all, nor am I claiming USSM is pessimistic. I’m knocking our interpretations of the results of PECOTA’s projections and our general laziness to question when it’s needed.