I’m not sure I have this whole bold predictions thing figured out. As has been the case for me in the past, several of my predictions this season produced useful fantasy advice. In particular, avoiding Jake Arrieta and drafting Jose Berrios, Dylan Bundy, Ender Inciarte, and Luke Weaver would have helped your team. But that was not enough to make any of my predictions actually correct.
Since I seemingly enjoy embarrassing myself at the end of the season, I go one step further from just the regular bold predictions. I also boldly predict the league leaders in each of the five fantasy hitting and pitching categories! Here are my picks and initial thought process. It’s a miracle if I even get one of these correct. Let’s see how I did.
American League
Batting Average – Manny Machado
I keep choosing him thanks to his strong strikeout rate and massive power, with the hopes he could finally cure his pop-up problem and enjoy some good batted ball fortune for a change. Not this season! He actually posted a career low .265 BABIP that led to a weak .259 average. Not only did he fail to correct his pop-up issues, but he also forgot how to hit line drives. Since he finished strong, he probably won’t come at much of a discount next year.
0 for 1
I talked a big game about my bold predictions this year spawning from research. Like, instead of just being gut instinct types of things, or just being bold for the sake of being bold. Truth of it is I didn’t do as much research as I would’ve liked. My rotisserie-league drafts were not particularly strong, and while I hit the trifecta (1st, 2nd, 3rd) in my three home leagues (I live modestly), I could simply feel my drafts, as well as my bold predictions, were inferior relative to what I hoped they’d be.
You probably don’t care, though, so this is all filler text, for all intents and purposes. You want to cut to the chase. I don’t blame you! Let me drag this out a bit longer. I’ll review each prediction from March with their corresponding midseason “probabilities” of being correct from July before finally reaching a verdict. I don’t remember half the predictions and I honestly have no idea how I’ll do until I reach the end.
Last year was my first attempt at making bold predictions here at RotoGraphs, and it didn’t go very well (1/10 correct, with Kyle Hendricks my lone win). This year things looked better at mid-season, but let’s take a look at the final results!
I take immense pride in my ability to set a sufficiently low bar. Exhibit A: 2016’s Bold Predictions. I got one. One right. The downside to that is self-explanatory. The upside is that any improvement would make for a dramatic one. So let’s see how I did?
All rankings used are from ESPN’s Player Rater Read the rest of this entry »
Time for the final review of Bold Predictions. I checked in on them back in mid-July and unfortunately, things didn’t get much better for me!
James Paxton Is A Top-15 Arm.
In the end, the injury sank this one as Paxton wound up with just 24 starts. However, he posted a 2.98 ERA and 1.10 WHIP in the 136 IP and still slotted 18th on ESPN’s Player Rater among SP. It’s a loss by the letter of the law as he’s not a top-15 arm at season’s end, but even with the sub-150 IP output, I can’t imagine anyone feels like they lost out by taking Paxton. I’m going to take half-credit on this one if that’s OK.
0.5 for 1 (.500)
It’s that time when I go back through and see how my preseason BOLD predictions held up. Usually, this process is humbling but after I reviewed them mid-season, I knew I may be in for a career year.
Note: For all the rankings, I used ESPN.com’s Player Rater.
BOLD prediction #1: Trea Turner will perform 20 spots worse than his ADP suggests.
The regular season is officially in the books! And what a season it was. I hope all of you, every single one of you, won a league. Hopefully, it was thanks to some of my bold predictions, of which I have completely forgotten the specifics since my midseason review. I have no idea how I did, so let’s be surprised together. For a referesher on my thought process behind each prediction, check out the original bold prediction article.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
We’re back again to savage my terrible preseason 10 Bold Predictions. Without further ado:
1. Robbie Ray finishes as a top-10 starter in the NL
I’m pretty proud of this one. ESPN’s player rater in 5×5 has him as the No. 10 pitcher overall, and No. 6 among NL starters behind Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, Stephen Strasburg and Gio Gonzalez. Ray has been terrific this season in 160.1 innings, as he’s fanned 217 batters with a 1.16 WHIP, 2.86 ERA and .200 BAA.
Batting: 1-for-1 (1.000)
We’re back after a long silence—too few things to say, too few good ways to say them, too few time—to review our Bold Predictions for 2017. Our forecasting shtick, as some of you may recall, is to detect Fantasy merit among the cheapest of the cheap—the fourth outfielders, fifth starters, and sixth men out of the bullpen who, in defiance of logic but in our view, might have value in the coming season.
So our Bold Predictions were ten guys who either cost a dollar, went in the reserve round, or weren’t taken at all in the Tout Wars Mixed League Auction the week before the season started. As we reckon it, two of our picks were derailed by injury, two (all right—three, but one of them was too whimsical to really count) were bad, one was not-bad, and four were quite good indeed. If you convened a panel of Roto experts and asked them to pick ten $1 players, would they do better than we did?
Really, we have no idea, and we’d like to know. One way or another, we actually had most of these guys on our teams this season. But then again, we played in enough leagues to have had most of the rest of MLB as well. Hope we’re at least a bit responsible for at least some of you having at least some of the guys who panned out. Read the rest of this entry »