The other day Dave Seminara of the NY Times wrote an article that looked at the MLB preseason prognostications made by the pundits. He looked at 133 baseball writers at 19 publications and sites.
The article talks about how not one person picked the A’s or the Orioles to make the playoffs with some like Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports going so far as to say the Orioles are a “sorry franchise” that was “ headed for its 15th straight losing season.”
I went through 83 of those 133 baseball writers to see how well they did at picking the AL & NL Division & Wildcard winners. As Seminara said not one of them picked either the Orioles or the A’s to make the playoffs. They did however all pick the Tigers to win the AL Central.
From a total of 10 categories to choose from them being the AL/NL East,Central and West Div. winners and 2 AL/NL Wildcards only 9 of the 83 got at least 50% of their picks correct with 2 getting 60% of their picks correct.
The 2 that got 60% you ask? It wasn’t Joel Sherman & Buster Olney. They only got 10% of their picks correct. No the 2 that got 60% are Peter Pascarelli of ESPN Radio & Carolina Guillen of ESPN Deportes.
The 7 that got 50% correct are:
- Pedro Gomez – ESPN
- Adam Rubin – ESPN New York
- Tom Verducci – Sports Illustrated
- Ted Keith – Sports Illustrated
- Stephen Cannella – Sports Illustrated
- George A. King III – New York Post
- Dan Martin – New York Post
To view the rest of the pundits and the choices they made click here.
As an added bonus I looked at two of the more popular sites on the net Metsmerizedonline and AmazinAvenue preseason picks to see how they fared as well. To view their results click below.
2 comments
NJstuckinTX
10/3/2012-11:31pm at 11:31 pm (UTC -4)
Who, in their wildest dreams, would have imagined the A’s would take the AL west. That, in itself, was wacky. But hey, Sandy birthed moneyball, so the Mets are due now, right?
srt
10/4/2012-7:29am at 7:29 am (UTC -4)
This is great, thanks for doing the work.
Two things I noticed right off:
1. So many were so wrong with several picks. And that’s the beauty of baseball. Anything can happen, anything usually does. That’s why you play the 162 and can’t count on anything going in.
2. Looking at the two most popular sites you picked:
– AA which we all know is heavily into sabermetrics
– MMO which we all know is the polar opposite when it comes to all things sabermetrics
**Neither site did much better at their predictions than the other. So while stats is a very useful tool (along with others) for evaluating players, you just can’t add up WAR for each and predict anything. It’s a long season. So much plays into it – injuries, career years, down years, and yes, even a bit of chemistry to an extent. It’s what makes baseball so fun. It’s what allows us to look at our team going in that might not look good on paper and still give us hope.
Looking forward to the off season moves now for the Mets.