Vegas Watch

After thrilling us with their AL predictions yesterday, ESPN released their NL team capsules today. They're all linked from the MLB Index (although the Rockies' link is broken; their preview is here). I don't really care about the actual previews at all, but the win predictions for each team from ESPN's analysts sure are fun.

These previews have predictions from Jayson Stark, Tim Kurkjian, Buster Olney, Keith Law, and Steve Phillips. I'll get to the more interesting specific predictions next week, but first some more general stuff.

Average Win Predction
This is not complicated. If all 30 teams play a full season, the average team will win 81 games. I don't think this requires any further explanation.

Kurkjian: 82.1
Stark: 82
Olney: 81.3
Phillips: 81.1
Law: 81

Congratulations to Keith Law. The only ESPN analyst who can add. Give that man a raise.

That money should probably come out of the paychecks of Kurkjian and Stark. I would like to see the process these individuals go through when making their predictions. I am pretty sure they look at the list of teams, arbitrarily assign a win total to each one, and that's that.

Here is my question: what's the point? Clearly, the guys who don't consider numbers at all are not good at this. Would it be that hard to add up your predictions and make sure that they're, uh, possible? Also: do they not have editors? If they do, do they not know how to add?

PECOTA Correlation
Law: 0.93
Kurkjian: 0.81
Olney: 0.80
Phillips: 0.80
Stark: 0.78

This is not rocket science. Law's predictions will most likely do very well. He clearly at least put some thought into this. The others will do about as well as yours or mine would do if we arbitrarily picked numbers for each team. I find it amusing that ESPN trots out these predictions like they mean something. They do not.

Standard Deviation
Phillips: 10.7
Olney: 10.4
Kurkjian: 10.1
Stark: 9.7
Law: 9.0

For reference, PECOTA's standard deviation is 8.4.

Phillips is so absurd. Here's my favorite little stat from all of these: he has 14 teams winning 88 or more games. Think about that for a second- that's one team away from half of baseball. Here is my prediction: Steve Phillips' predictions will not fare well in this post at the end of the year.

ESPN now has their AL team capsules linked on the MLB page. Each capsule has five anlalysts' predictions on how many games that team will win. For example:


88 Wins + Bedard = 92!! The man does have a history with this team, I suppose. It's the predictions of the first three that really surprise me. Law's "voice of reason" title has never been more appropriate.

Much more on these after the basketball this weekend.

I am going to Tucson for the weekend. Hopefully they can hang with UCLA on Sunday. Probably not. At least it'll be warm.

Tiger at +1015 to win the Grand Slam? Not so fast.

Pomeroy with a fascinating look at shot selection.

A fan asked Steve Phillips to sign his jersey, "Steve Phililps, Met Killer". That is awesome.

60 Minutes is going to run a feature on Bill James.

Comparing this year's Rays team to the '69 Mets.

Jon Heyman makes up a new derogatory term for the sabermetric crowd: VORPies.

Yahoo:

A leaner, more muscular Victor Martinez stepped into the batter’s box Friday morning on one of the back fields at Chain of Lakes Park.

You know it. The Indians also won their ST opener.

This was a lot of fun, and there's more to look at, so I thought it deserved another post.

First, the final standings. Methodology is slightly different, as I'm using RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) rather than just average error. This penalizes large misses more (sorry, Buster), and is more widely used.

As we'll see, Neyer comes out on to pretty much any way you do this. Notice the top five are all at least based on statistical systems. Be sure to remember that when you're watching Baseball Tonight next March. Your time is probably better spent subscribing to BP.

Just for fun, I also looked at how many of the Vegas over/unders everybody chose correctly. A lot of this is luck- if the line is 83.5, and your prediction is 84, you get the same credit if that team wins 84 or 104. (BTW, Silver is Nate Silver from BP; he's the "PECOTA guy", among other things. As I understand it, he took the PECOTA predictions and just made adjustments where he saw fit.)Again, pretty meaningless, but Caple and Law both jump way up. Gammons is last, but I wouldn't be too worried about that- I'm pretty confident he didn't place any wagers.

Now, the following is very interesting. Sky beat me to this (although I believe he did straight difference rather than RMSE), but if we really want to know how good these predictions were, we should look at Pythag record.

Basically, Pythag record is how many games a team should have won, based on how many runs they scored and allowed. It's a better at predicting future performance than actual record, and thus is a better indicator of team strength. It's great for this exercise, so lets take a look.

These numbers are noticeably lower. This makes sense- there is less variation in Pythag record than actual record (I think). I found this table to be very interesting. Sports Interaction jumps up considerably, which doesn't surprise me. Think about how much money these guys have at stake with this stuff. It's their job to post a number that will entice people to bet equally on both the over and the under. I would hope they are good at it- it's a lot different than Steve Phillips handing in a list of completely arbitrary numbers to some ESPN editor.

Beyond that, the list is once again dominated by the "numbers guys". I am somewhat surprised that Olney did so poorly.

The obvious next step is to see who got lucky, and whose picks were better than they originally appeared. Since the average Pythag miss was 1.39 smaller than the average actual miss, I have taken that into account in the final column. A negative "Adj Diff" means you got lucky.

Phillips' picks were poor to begin with, and he got unlucky on top of that (which is only fair, considering his recent good luck in other areas). Olney had the worst picks according to Pythag by a pretty wide margin, but had luck on his side, which allowed him to almost catch up to Phillips.

The numerical systems all obviously did better than others regardless of what metric I've looked at, but they were also on the lucky side. I would be interested to see if this is also true in previous years (which would indicate that it's not actually luck). The PECOTA predictions for each year since 2003 are readily available, so when I have time I figure I'll look into those.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been very critical of ESPN analyst Steve Phillips on this site. First it was his prediction that the Yankees would miss the playoffs, and the Mariners would be the Wild Card winner. Then, in looking back at the accuracy of preseason predictions, Phillips came in dead last.

Today is different. Today, Steve Phillips is smarter than all of us.

On the morning of August 14, the Mets had an 85% chance of reaching the playoffs. At 65-52, they had a three game lead in the East. The Postseason Odds Report had them winning the division 70% of the time, and having the Wild Card to fall back on half the time they didn't. Nobody was picking the Mets to miss the playoffs- despite their flaws, all logic pointed towards the Mets playing in October.

Not one to be deterred by logic, Phillips predicted that the Mets would fall short of the playoffs. I can't find a link to him specifically saying that, but MetsSox wrote about it on August 16. In the days prior to that, he was all over ESPN telling anyone who would listen that the Mets weren't going to make it. His reasoning? (Beyond, you know, this...)

"Chris (NJ): Thoughts on moving John Maine to the bullpen if Pedro comes back healthy? That could be the right handed reliever the mets need.

Steve Phillips: Boy I would not dream of doing that if I were the Mets They are going to have to find a solution from within, but Maine is to critical to remove from the starting rotation. I have some concerns as to wehther Pedro can comeback and be a force, as shoulder injuries are very hard to comeback from. I think Pedro takes Brina Laurences spot in the rotation. I think what you see is what you get from the Mets right now and I have pretty significant concerns about their pitching over the next month and a half."

I'll ignore the typos (Brina Laurence?), because I'm a nice guy. From that point on, the Mets' team ERA was 5.13, as they suffered through the second worst collapse in baseball history, missing out on the postseason after having a seven game lead with 17 games to go (without even needing a Monday playoff, which is truly incredible).

So sorry about being so critical, Mr. Phillips. Apparently you had this all planned out the whole time.

Update: OMDQ points out that this situation could potentially come back to haunt us.

Bristol, 2014: “Steve, Prince Fielder will not win the Cy Young award this year. He’s not a pitcher.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re probably right, I’ve never been good with these predictions. Remind me- who won the NL East in 2007?”


Related: What happened to the guys who managed some other teams that fell apart down the stretch?

Everybody makes baseball predictions in late March/early April. A lot of people just predict who will win each division, and who will advance to the World Series. Anyone can do this- you really only have to have a general knowledge of the top teams.

There are also people who predict how many wins each of the 30 teams will have. There are various complications with this (Jayson Stark's predictions have the average team winning 83.6 games, which is quite unlikely), but the thing about this is you actually have to know what you are doing. People make these predictions differently- some rely strictly on numbers, others on "feel".

I found 13 sets of these predictions- 10 from ESPN (Gammons, Stark, Crasnick, Olney, Neyer, Kurkjian, Phillips, Law, Caple, Karabell), two from BP (PECOTA and BP Hit List), and also the over/unders from SportsInteraction.com (via SoSH). I thought I'd take a look at some of the best and worst individual predictions, as well as whose overall predictions were most accurate.

(Note: These lists aren't just based on who was the closest- I also factored in how far off the other predictions were. So predicting at team within two games if the average prediction was eight games off would be higher than predicting a team exactly if the average was just three games off.)

The Best

1. PECOTA, Chicago White Sox
Predicted wins: 72
On pace for: 71.0

The over/under for the White Sox was 89.5, and the ESPN analysts average prediction was 84.6. Chicago won 90 games in '06 after winning 99 in 2005. Much was made of PECOTA's pessimism, but this turned out to be, pretty easily, the best prediction of the year.

2. Jayson Stark, Seattle Mariners
Predicted wins: 85
On pace for: 86.6

The average for everyone else was 76.5, and PECOTA had them winning only 73 games. They only won 78 games in '06, while finishing last in the AL West. ESPN's preview had JJ Putz under "Bust", as they were worried about his elbow pains. I feel like that turned out OK for him.

3. Steve Phillips, Minnesota Twins
Predicted wins: 78
On pace for: 78.6

Steve Phillips: Not Smart! Well, for now at least. Nobody else at ESPN had the Twins winning less than 83 games, and PECOTA pegged them at 90. On the ESPN Message Boards, Twinsdude08 remarked that, "The Twins just have too much talent to not win the division." I don't know how Phillips came to 78 wins, but, as well see later, this accuracy certainly isn't a trend.

4. Rob Neyer, Washington Nationals
Predicted wins: 69
On pace for: 71.1

People (especially Buster Olney), thought the Nationals were going to be really bad. The second most optimistic ESPN prediction was 64 wins; six had them losing over 100 games. Neyer, who always refers to his predictions as "running the numbers", was more realistic- it's hard to lose 100 games in the NL, since all the other teams are really bad too.

5. Peter Gammons, Colorado Rockies
Predicted wins: 84
On pace for: 87.2

The Rockies have far exceeded all expectations- their over/under at SportsInteraction was 74.5 wins, and nobody else had them winning even 80 games. Even Gammons didn't see this coming, but everybody else was so far off that his prediction makes the list.

The Rest (Predictor, Team, Prediction, Actual Pace)
6. Phillips, Orioles, 70, 69.4
7. Karabell, Pirates, 69, 68.9
8. Caple, Marlins, 68, 68.6
9. PECOTA, Oakland, 80, 77.3
10. Stark, Red Sox, 96, 96

Now for the fun part...

The Worst

1. Buster Olney, Washington Nationals
Predicted wins: 49
On pace for: 71.7

Pretty much everyone was a little off on the Nats, but this one stands out. Sure, things didn't look good back in March, but 113 losses? No NL team lost more than 96 games in '05 or '06- it would be quite amazing if someone was actually that bad. Olney is a smart guy, but I'm not sure where he got 49 wins from.

2. Jim Caple, Kansas City Royals
Predicted wins: 54
On pace for: 70

I don't know, maybe people just think it's funny to pick teams to be amusingly bad. I kind of see Caple's reasoning here, as he predicted the other four AL Central teams to average 89 wins. But seriously, how did he see this playing out? Did he figure they would all go like 16-3 against the Royals? Thats the only way they could average 89 wins, since they have to play each other so many times.

3. Steve Phillips, Boston Red Sox
Predicted wins: 82
On pace for: 96

This only came out third in my little formula, but that may be generous. Boston was a mess in '06, and they still managed 86 wins. Nobody else had the Red Sox winning less than 90 games. Between this and repeatedly predicting the Yankees to miss the playoffs in August, I feel like Phillips just makes predictions for the shock value of them.

4. Keith Law, Seattle Mariners
Predicted wins: 65
On pace for: 86.6

Law and Stark didn't quite see eye to eye on this one, as their predictions were 20 wins apart, the highest such margin. Seattle has surprised people, but their over/under was 79.5 wins; there really wasn't any reason to think they would approach 100 losses.

The Rest (Predictor, Team, Prediction, Actual Pace)

5. Philips, Diamondbacks, 78, 90.8
6. Phillips, White Sox, 92, 71
7. PECOTA, Devil Rays, 78, 66.4
8. Karabell, Cubs, 75, 86
9. Stark, Reds, 85, 74.2
10. Karabell, Astros, 88, 70.5

Now, let's look at whose overall predictions were the most accurate. The table on the right is ranked by how close people were, on average of all 30 predictions.

The top three are all predictions based on numbers. PECOTA is 100% quantitative, and both Neyer and the Hit List rely heavily on numerical predictions.

Those are the only three that did better than Vegas. Neyer did really well- his picks are 19-10-1 against the over/unders so far. Even more impressive, of his seven predictions that had large discrepancies with Sports Interaction, he was right on six of them.

On the other end of the spectrum is, not surprisingly, Mr. Phillips. If you watch Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter (or are a Mets fan...) this probably doesn't come as much of a surprise. Luckily, Steve Phillips isn't paid a lot of money to analyze baseball for a living- if he was, his incompetence would be pretty embarassing.

Pictures: Pecota, Phililps, Olney, Law.

In case you somehow missed any of Steve Phillips' August ESPN chats, here's a recap:

August 15:

"Mike (Fresno): True or false - the Yankees will make the playoffs.

Steve Phillips: False. The easy thing to say right now is that they will make it because of how they have played out of the All-Star break. But the reason they are winning now is because of their offense, which is very, very good. But to be a playoff team you have to pitch. And I have my doubts that the offense will continue to go as it is going, and I do not think they have the pitching to bail them out when the offense is not there. But they deserve a lot of credit for fighting their way back into this race, because myself, along with many others, counted them out a long time ago."

Yankees' team ERA since August 15: 4.80
Mariners' team ERA since August 15: 5.66


August 22

"Vinny (New York): With a gun to your head, still Seatle over the Yanks for the Wild Card? Yankees are looking pretty impressive, just taking care of most people's "best team in baseball."

Steve Phillips: The Yanks looked good beating an undermanned Tigers team, I agree with you. But I think the Mariners will hold on and win the Wild Card. Their starting pitching is just good enough and their bullpen in unreal. They have one of the best defenses in babseball, and they are starting to produce on offense. I think it is too little too late for the Yankees to make the playoffs."

The Seattle Mariners are third to last in the majors in Defensive Efficiency.
They have scored 4.24 R/G since August 22. This season, the Royals are second to last in the AL at 4.49 R/G.


August 27

"Lee, CT: With the Mariners up 2 games in the wildcard why does this team not get talked about more as a team that is making noise in the AL?

Steve Phillips: Well, I feel like I talk about them just about every show I do. think they will win the Wild Card despite their difficult schedule down the stretch. They have everything you want from a playoff contending team excpet that dominanting starting pitching, but they make up for it with their amazing defense and quality bullpen. This is a big series this week against the Angels, as the Mariners have no fared that well against them (4-8 this season), but most of those loses came earlier this seasson before the Mariners became what they are now. "

Current Wild Card standings:


Photos: Steve Phillips, Steve Phillips, Steve Phillips.