I once made some bold predictions for 2016. Then I checked in on them. Some looked OK, some not so much.

The season is over now, and I can’t think of any better way to distract myself from the multiple painful ends to otherwise fantastic seasons I just endured than to review my bold predictions. Fellow RotoGrapher Justin Mason kindly said he “think[s I] nailed the boldness level. He also said, “Alex, you don’t know how [to] use [brackets].” Pffffft, whatever, Justin.

I would say I’m proud of these predictions, but honestly, I barely remember half of them. There are three I remember fondly, though, and I’m excited to see how they turned out. Let’s do this!

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Prior to the season, RotoGraphs writers submitted lists of 10 bold predictions. We’re kind of known for them. After playing it semi-safe in 2015, I decided to go especially bold in 2016. The results, as you might expect, are a bunch of big whiffs. Imagine Steven Moya’s violent swing. When he connects, he’s in good shape. He’ll often miss the ball by multiple feet.

Before we get into reviewing my 2016 picks, I’d like to call one back from last year. Behold:

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Truth be told, I’ve been dreading this piece for months. Before joining Rotographs this season, I always enjoyed this series as much for revisiting the predictions at the end of the year as reading them in the first place. But of the 30 or so pieces I’ve written this year, Bold Predictions is easily my worst. Not only did I miss but I missed spectacularly. I missed in part because I went too bold but most painfully because I was sloppy. Want to know what I mean by sloppy? I predicted Greg Bird would out-perform Mark Teixeira. Seven weeks after he was lost for the season. I also got too specific, ambitiously adding milestones when broad declarations would have more than sufficed. I’m not going to enjoy what follows but without further ado, let’s Bring the Pain.

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The regular season is officially in the books! Sad faces galore. I hope all of you, every single one of you, won a league. Hopefully, it was thanks to some of my bold predictions (which, as I type this, I still haven’t looked at since the preseason). 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 article.

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The subject line of an e-mail we got from a Yahoo Group one of us belongs to made our blood freeze. “It’s been raining David Crosby,” it said. Oh no, we thought; again? Closer inspection revealed merely a Youtube clip of pre-Byrds solo-folksinger Crosby performing “It’s Been Raining.” It’s completely harmless, especially if you don’t watch it or listen to it. It occurred to us, though, even as we heaved sighs of relief, that “Raining David Crosby” might be a good metonym for our disappointing-to-catastrophic 2016 Fantasy Baseball season.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of fearless scientific accountability, we must now review our 2016 predictions, “Bold” and otherwise. We’ll look at preseason predictions this week and in-season ones next week. We’ll concentrate, as always, on the outré and the cut-rate; we can’t really take credit for predicting, say, that the Cubs would win the NL Central, though they undoubtedly will, or that Trea Turner would be NL Rookie of the Year, though he arguably is. Read the rest of this entry »

My colleagues have been reviewing their Bold Predictions this week, so I figured I would follow suit. Here is the link to my original Bold Predictions piece. I am going to take a slightly different approach when reviewing them, however, since most of mine turned out to be pretty brutal. If I were to give legitimate odds on most of these, giving them a 1% chance of working out would be rather optimistic. So I decided to break down each prediction three-fold:

What works with this prediction?

What doesn’t work with this prediction?

What would be the more reasonable prediction at this point?

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Everybody’s doing it, so I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way.  However, I will admit I’m now quite embarrassed by these laughably bad predictions.  They are so bad that forcing you to read them again might be considered insulting.  You deserve more, so the least I can do is leave you with some classic real insults (courtesy of the interwebs) for your own repertoire.  Here goes:

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I promised myself I would make a mix of positive and negative predictions this year, and I aimed to make them really bold, refusing to make any prediction that was less bold than one made by another writer about the same player.

Let’s see how that is working out as of the All-Star break.
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I thought I would spend this month reviewing some of my preseason work. Unfortunately, because I was working on a piece for The Hardball Times last week, I didn’t get to post anything. However this week, I will review my Bold Predictions article and next week I will give an update on my BARF league team. Read the rest of this entry »

Forgive me for some recycling some of last week’s introduction:

Back in March, I made some bold predictions, as all RotoGraphs staff do. Some bold predictions I make simply for the sake of being bold. Or for the sake of making a prediction. One of the two.

We don’t all review our bold predictions — some of us, like Mike Podhorzer, like to wait until October. Some of us don’t have the discipline for such delayed gratification. And, I speak for the group, whether they like or not, but all of us forget most our bold predictions anyway. I remembered a couple, but looking back on them — man, sometimes I wish I hadn’t.

Enough talk. Let’s dig in.

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