PECOTA projects the 2008 season
DMZ · February 15, 2008 at 11:09 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Subscriber-only, unfortunately for those of you who haven’t shelled out for the PECOTAs.
73-89. That’s with Bedard, as Nate noted in the blog entry, though the M’s depth chart doesn’t reflect that yet. And it has “Bryan Morse” getting some playing time.
They score about 30 runs less and allow 10 runs more than the ZiPS-based sim seasons I did.
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Ouch.
That’s Stu Scott-level bad.
Mildly OT- [deleted, ot]
73 wins doesn’t seem likely.
It’s going to be a long ugly season…
In my opinion, I think if someone can’t even get a player’s name right, it substanstially lessens their credibility.
I doubt it’d be as low as 73. think Dave’s estimate of 82-83 seems alot more likely.
Yeah, like that time you couldn’t spell Joel Pineiro’s name right repeatedly.
I’m just pointing out there’s room perhaps to let it go. Bryan Morse is a player — they’ve got the wrong guy, not the wrong spelling.
There’s really no difference between 73 and 82-83. Other than Bavasi will be gone at 73 and the Mariners will get a higher draft pick. 82 or 83 wins will keep fans thinking there’s a chance for play in October… I think Dave Niehaus needs to read this blog so he can come back to reality about how the season is going to go.
Bryan Morse was a player. According to B-R, he never got above A ball and was last seen in 2001. Ryan Morse is a current minor league player in the Rays’ system. But AFAICT, Mike is the only major league Morse. At least since 1929, when Newell Obediah Morse quit.
Anyway, I’m holding out for a .500 season. And a pony.
Sod it all; it’s 1.30am, I’m listening to the Pogues and drinking whiskey.
Uck. Saw this tonight. And the sad thing is, 73 wins wouldn’t surprise me. It seems low, but it’s not out of the question.
How long until a straggler enters we hear the following: “PECOTA is just too negative all the time, using arbitrary numbers like stats and stuff to twist an argument in their favor.”
On a serious note: when nearly 60% of your offensive production is centered around Vidro/Lopez/Betancourt/Wilkerson/Sexson…the season can get ugly pretty quick.
The truly sad part is if we actually put the positions that *should* be up for grabs to the best competition in spring training (LF, DH, 1B), this team would be significantly better. But, since the FO can’t face the fact two bench players would have a combined salary of $19M (or the fact they so grossly misused said moneys), that will never happen.
Vidro sucks. Sexson sucks. Ibanez’s fielding sucks. Until someone upstairs has an epiphany, those three will be boat anchors.
How accurate have spring Pecota team projections been anyway? Googling turned up this bit (or portion of a bit; I don’t have a BP subscription this year. Yet.) by Nate Silver which showed some hits — and some pretty substantial misses — from two years ago:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5609
Alright if its going down this road (and I highly, highly doubt that this season will be below 80 wins), then hell I hope they win 70 games because it will give the organization a clue that they need to rebuild. And fire Bavasi, replacing him with someone better hopefully.
I think if the M’s had a player named Newell Obediah they’d have a much better shot…
Reminds me of the uproar last year when PECOTA hated on the White Sox. I’m sure most of us recall who won that argument in the end.
DMZ, how does the model out THAT poorly? I realize 88 isn’t the baseline based on last year. But 82 seems reasonable — they were outscored but they also had an awesome bullpen. Guillen for Wilkerson is a drop off but Bedard for “crap” is a bigger gain that. Silva is likewise an improvement over Weaver. Otherwise it’s the same team. Is the fall off of the players in decline that much larger than the gains of players we can expect to improve?
My question in 13 was not meant to suggest that PECOTA is crap or anything like that. More precisely phrased, I was wondering what, for example, the standard deviation of spring team projections have been for the last few years. It seems like a point projection for the composite performance of 25 (or 40) athletes who each are evaluated on a bucket full of individual statistical projections may not be the most useful way to look at the information.
5 Рtouch̩ Derek, touch̩.
That has to include PECOTA’s annual “We Can’t Figure Out Ichiro” projections, I’m assuming
Let me be fair with my previous statement: I’m not a BP subscriber. I don’t really have the time to go through the oodles of information they have to warrant spending money on it. But I know that they have a hard time projecting Ichiro annually because of his historic uniqueness.
Be that as it may, the difference in win values between Ichiro’s PECOTA projection and his real values wont be significant enough to think that the projections here are absurdly low. One or two wins added when your projection is 73 wins wont make a ants’ nuts worth of difference.
-#21 Exactly, even in the article linked by #13 there are hardly any misses as bad as +17 (just the Cubs at -19 if I’m not mistaken), which is what it would take to to push the M’s up to the 90 win threshold. We can hope it’s one of their worst projections ever, but at this point that’s all it is sadly.
Wowsers, that’s with WFB getting less than 200 PAs too….
BTW, why does BP make it so hard to figure out how they project playing time on their depth charts?
Wow…73-89?! Sure sounds like a rip-roaringly-exciting summer to me! >:(
This might actually be a good year to subscribe to Extra Innings to watch some of the other teams.
My question in 13 was not meant to suggest that PECOTA is crap or anything like that. More precisely phrased, I was wondering what, for example, the standard deviation of spring team projections have been for the last few years.
I ran some rough numbers on this last weekend looking at some DMB 2007 preseason projections, Nate Silver’s PECOTA projections, Nate Silver’s predictions after he tried to adjust things manually, Joe Sheehan’s projections, and the preseason predictions from a poll of espn.com baseball writers. I don’t have the numbers handy right now, but the DMB and PECOTA projections did the best, coming in with a reduced chi square statistic of about one. Nate Silver made his predictions worse by deviating from PECOTA, but not a whole lot worse. The espn.com writers were a fair bit worse (reduced chi square of around 1.5 I think) and Joe Sheehan was last in the group with a reduced chi square of around 1.7.
Basically, the objective preseason predictions did remarkably well if you’re comfortable with the idea that a team’s win total is the sum of 162 random binomial events. The standard deviation on such random variable is going to be about 6 wins over 162 games, which gives a sort of limit on just how well you can predict the season (like there’s a limit as to how well you can predict a series of coin tosses.) If that’s the case no one is going to get much closer without being really lucky (or if games are somehow more pre-determined with match-fixing or something like that.) And for all of the “adjusting for the human element” that analysts can do by hand, they did a fair bit worse than the objective systems in 2007.
2007 could turn out to be special, but I doubt it.
DMZ, do you know why the Bill James projections seem to be so much more optimistic for the M’s? I was looking at the numbers on Fangraphs and almost everyone on the team has better numbers than in PECOTA or ZiPS. I’m not very familiar with how each projection is made, but I’m curious as to why James (and CHONE to an extent) seem to love the M’s while PECOTA and ZiPS hate us.
I do not know of a systematic reason why one system would rate a particular team’s players high or low in one system compared to the others, except the obvious park effects.
Thanks, I was just wondering (read: hoping) if there was a reason to believe the James projections over the others. I guess it’s just wishful thinking, haha.