DrungoHazewood

I want two 16-team leagues with no divisions and whoever has the best record in each league gets a big 20-foot long pennant that says League Champion to fly over their stadium forever. After that you can have any kind of October Madness tournament or tournaments you want, and even give whomever happens to get through that a trophy, too. I'd even have an 8-team NIT among the eight teams with the worst record and whomever wins that gets the #1 draft pick. Whatever fixes you make to the playoffs as they exist today are largely window dressing. Nothing is going to change the fact that short series, be them 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 or whatever games, are just slightly weighted coin tosses to declare a champion.

So... a bunch of old players banned from the sport for throwing the World Series will come back as ghosts to enable some dude in Iowa to generate enough revenues to keep his farm?

Want to win. But understand that the playoffs are set up such that the best team loses 80%+ of the time.

I don't think our hypothetical situation here involves a world where some less-than-stellar observed outcomes over a short stretch of games from 40 years ago determine outcomes in the future. I'm going to assume our time machine will import Eddie and his true talent at his peak.

Yea, I moved beyond "minor league performances are meaningless" in the 1980s. When put in context of competitive level and player experience minor league numbers can be more significant than old MLB data.

I refer back to this page a lot. It's a Fangraphs article that lists stabilization points for various statistics. As Tom Tango has reminded me, "stabilization point" means that the signal is as big as the noise, that talent has just passed random variation as the driver. Strikeouts, walks and power reach meaningfulness pretty quickly. You can start putting some weight on K rate after a few weeks, walks after maybe a month, HRs maybe a couple months. What is driving O'Hearn's improvements? His HR rate is pretty close to his career mark, so not that. His K rate is down a little, and that's probably real. His walk rate is actually the lowest of his career, and in 368 PAs we can probably trust that. Actually his LD, GB and FB% are very much in line with the rest of his career. So what is it? I go back to the shift/no shift splits. He's actually not having his best MLB season if you throw out the PAs where he was shifted on. When there was no shift against him he actually hit better in 2018 and 2021 than this year. So I think his much higher BABIP is a pretty direct result of the shift ban. That might be pretty sticky, since it looks like the shift isn't coming back any time soon. But BABIP also takes 800+ PAs to reach significance, so we'll have to wait and see what next year brings.

So his 3.16 ERA in the minors... smoke and mirrors? CGI?

I answered this, but you're just spouting nonsense. Why would you weight last year's 18 innings more highly than all of the other data we have put together? That's the only way you get a 10.00 ERA projection from a guy with a 2.11 this year and a 3.16 in the minors.

I don't think you have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Either that or you're wildly exaggerating to try to make the point that the nerds are stupid. If I had a system, which I don't, it would weight Cano's 2023 performance pretty heavily since that's the best data we have. It would account for his 18 bad innings last year, but weighted even less than 18 innings because the data is a year stale. I would leaven the projection with a bit of his 3.16 minor league ERA. I would throw in a little bit of the fact that he's out-performed his FIP. And in the end I'm sure I'd come up with a healthy 2024 line of something like 60 innings of a 3.00.

When do you declare the change to be real? As Corn said, a lot of folks here were declaring Mateo's April to be really real. Like, what are we going to do with like three legit MLB shortstops? Clearly gotta trade somebody and soon! In O'Hearn's case, and really everybody, I'd do something like a 4-3-2-1 weighting of his last four seasons. If I miss a little bit because of that on the rare step change in real performance I'm perfectly fine with that because 95% of the time I'm much more right than wrong. The problem with more specialized models over general are that you often over-think yourself and start believing what's not real. Prospectus has (had?) a model that was based on similarity scores instead of just straight past performance/age/regression, and in the end it was worse than a simple model like Marcels because it tended to think, say, Adam Dunn and Dave Kingman were similar and if Kingman had a bad year at 33 it throw Dunn's age 33 projection into chaos. Or take the stock market - you get all kinds of people who claim their individually-tailored investment experts will beat the market and give you a leg up, but most of the time a simple diversified mutual fund will do as well, or better. In baseball tailoring every projection based on more detailed knowledge may occasionally get you a big win, but more often will trick you into thinking that random variation coupled with a plausible narrative is the secret sauce.

Did you know that calling someone a nerd doesn't really make it all that much more likely that Ogre is going to come beat up Booger and the gang and make them take back their geeky math-talk?

No, no. Because it's not like observed performances always have a much larger spread than predicted because you can't predict random variation, or anything like that.

You never know the cryptic motivations of baseball's deep state.

I mean, they could just use metadata and/or your IP address to geolocate you and redirect to a page that bumps the team in that area up 4-5 spots in the rankings. Certainly would make them more popular, if also ethically suspect.

To summarize this thread: Fangraphs says there's a 94.5% chance the O's don't win the World Series, and a 93.9% chance the D'backs don't win it, and that's TOTAL FRIGGIN' BS BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS THE ORIOLES REALLY HAVE A 91.8% SHOT OF GOING HOME DISAPPOINTED!!!!! IDIOTS!!11!

I'm guessing that in 1968 when the Sporting News pre-season edition said the Orioles were going to finish 4th you wrote a letter to the editor telling them that their projection wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and you don't understand why anyone would waste their time with such a BS publication.

And they do things like assume that Ryan O' Hearn's last five years of performance are meaningful, and that he's likely not a .850 OPS guy going forward. Orioles fans look at O'Hearn playing awesome for Orioles, and pretty much throw away whatever he did with the Royals. Fangraphs almost certainly weights more recent performances more, but they don't throw away his last four years of a .633 OPS. If you're a fan and you want to assume the 29-year-old O'Hearn had a transfiguration and you want to throw away everything prior to 1 April 2023 in your personal projections, good on you. If a widely read site with a projection system did that I'd assume they're not serious. Similarly we see Tyler Wells as a potential playoff relief beast because he's 6' 8" 260 and looked real good the last week of the season. Fangraphs sees a guy with a 3.64 ERA and a 4.98 FIP, and a last two years of a 4.20 ERA/4.20 FIP. Dean Kramer out-performed his FIP by .4 runs/game. I don't know how they treat Grayson Rodriguez, but I doubt they're just assuming he's a postseason ace based on the information available. They see him as a 3.93 FIP. When the Orioles have an unexpectedly good season part of that is players out-performing reasonable expectations. You can't expect a projection system to throw out reasonable expectations sometime in the middle of the year and say "Screw it! We're on the Orioles bandwagon now! They're winning it all baby!" You make the best model you can, and whatever happens happens. Every year a fanbase or three will have a 338-page thread about how you hate them because you don't have them as odds-on favorites. That's just part of the deal.

Here's a relevant quote from Tom Tango:

If you strictly limited online content to things that are positively moving the human race forward we could probably host the whole Internet on a few dozen Commodore 64s.

They're all wrong. Because even if you set up the league such that you 100% knew the true talent of every team on April 1st and you evened that talent out so everyone was a 81-win team, as the season played out some teams would win 70 and some teams would win 98. Random variation is largely ignored, but tremendously important.

I nearly 100% guarantee that any of their analysts would admit with little or no prodding that the uncertainty in their forecasts, as is true with all baseball team forecasts, is much larger than the separation between many of the teams. Everyone knows, or should know, that when someone says the Blue Jays will win 87 games what they really mean is that the center of the probability distribution is 87 wins, but nobody's gonna be too surprised if they win 77 or 97. If that means you think nobody has a really valid projection system, that's not wrong. But that's a lot different than singling out anyone in particular like Fangraphs.

I'm not an ortopedic surgeon, but I'm pretty sure: Velocity may not go up if you were already throwing 103 freakin' miles per hour.

He was 12th in the 6-team Central League in ERA (min 100 innings). His 2.79 looks superficially good, but the league ERA was 3.19. So even before you start talking talent differences, if you want to translate his numbers of the Majors you have to multiply ERA by about 1.44. So his '23 performance was something like a 4.04 ERA in a AAAA league. What would be a fair price for a 32-year-old with a, say, 3.75 ERA in AAA? Even if he's a good clubhouse guy.

Since it's the Rangers don't you have to think about going to find Joe Saunders?

It rarely "works" because they crown the champion based on a small handful of short series between relatively closely matched teams, so that the odds of even a 110-win team ending up on top are far less than 50-50. While there are exceptions like the Rays and the Mets, if you did a correlation between wins and payroll over multiple years it would be pretty high. I'm pretty sure over the last 25 years the Yanks have both the highest payroll and the most wins in the sport, and if not it's close. The Dodgers' recent regular season performances are dynastic, and that coincides with them surpassing the Yanks' payroll several times. The issue I have with spending is that it papers over any number of shortcomings. You can win without a high payroll, but only if you're run extremely efficiently and you take full advantage of things like the discounts in young player salaries. But it's really hard to beat a well-run team that's flush with cash. Imagine if Angelos told Elias he could acquire anyone he wanted in July? The O's might have approached the late 60s, early 70s teams' win totals.