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Ariel Cohen’s 2018 Bold Predictions – Recap

The MLB playoffs are now upon us. We’ve had back-to-back one-game division title games! We’ve got a statcast broadcast! Hey … even hugs are a-plenty this postseason!

Just a reminder … I am recapping my bold predictions for 2018. You won’t see anything like “Giancarlo Stanton will hit at least 25 homeruns” – that would have been too easy a prediction. Sure, I could have filled up my list in March with much more likely calls to boast that “Ariel Cohen got 50% of his predictions right!” But that isn’t the point here. I don’t expect to get most of these correct.

The aim of the exercise is to choose a few unlikely outcomes, yet achievable upsides (or downsides) – so that the analyst can highlight certain players. My general rule for bold predictions is to target somewhere between a player’s 70th & 90th range of percentile possible outcomes, or in other words, predictions which are about 10-30% likely.

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2018’s Fantasy Baseball Auction Bargains

The date is March 19, 2018. You are about to compete in a live NFBC fantasy baseball auction. You are prepping vigorously for your draft auction. You are reading over your player lists, mulling over which OFs you will go for at the auction table.

Fast forward to September 27, 2018. Now that the season is almost all in the books, you can now look back at your fantasy auction and see all the good, the great, the bad and the terrible decisions you had made just 6 months prior.

Let’s start with a simple OF decision. Which player should you have bought back in March?

Mike Trout (OF, LAA)

OR

Eddie Rosario (OF, MIN)

Sounds like a fairly easy decision, no?  But to help you out, before you answer the question … I’ll provide you with some 2018 statistics (as of 9/26):

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Ariel Cohen’s 2018 Bold Predictions

Opening day is now just one short day away. The days this week seem to creep by ever so slowly for a baseball lover. We have already had our fantasy drafts and auctions, and now we want to watch/see how our teams will perform, both fantasy and in real life. Baseball is back … and this year, we get to watch real baseball games that start to count in March!

Below are my 2018 bold predictions. Some of them stem directly from a small stretch of the ATC Projections, which can be found here on FanGraphs. Others come from my own personal analysis on the player, or team situation. The rest arise from some sheer wild optimism, but I have convinced myself that it could happen.

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