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It’s not quite Bold Prediction season, but we’re starting to close in on it. After all these years of boldly predicting, I’ve picked up a few hacks. I’ll never jam them past you readers – you’re always sharpening the “not bold” knives – but I can usually squeeze through a few open-ended scenarios.

Today, I’ll share 10 which might look bold at first blush but actually are pretty tame. I expect at least a 50% win-rate on these.

These are not my 10 Bold Predictions.

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To me, the purpose of bold predictions is twofold – to say “bold” (i.e. crazy) things and to signal some unexpected outcomes I believe are more possible than others might credit. This season, I performed strongly on the signal portion of this challenge even if I didn’t get many right. I aim for a success rate of about 20-30 percent although it’s fair to say that some of these predictions were always likelier to come true than others.

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As per tradition, I made some bold calls at the beginning of the season. Knowing that FanGraphs has built its reputation on reasoned and measured analysis, I used my preseason column as an opportunity to go out on a ledge that I would not usually walk out on during my regularly scheduled writing. A few of them actually came true. Here’s how I did:

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How was your season? Ours was pretty good—a Draft Champions win, some in-the-money finishes, and our proudest achievement: 7th overall (and first in our 15-team league and among Fangraphs scribes after a bitter struggle for preeminence with Shelly Verougstraete) in The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational, where the elite meet to tweet and compete.

Our Bold Predictions, however, weren’t so great. That’s how it is when you confine yourself, as we do and did, to players who will cost no more than a dollar. We wonder, as we always do, how our results would compare to anyone else’s ten-cheap-player picks. We like to think we’d be competitive, but who knows? Let’s do the post-mortem: Read the rest of this entry »

The good news…I didn’t get all of my 2019 Bold Predictions wrong. But I came pretty close. Let’s take a look and see what exactly went wrong.

1. Gary Sánchez will set the major league single-season record for home runs by a catcher.

This prediction was inspired by a bold prediction made by my wife, Mary Beth Melchior — that J.T. Realmuto would break the single-season record of home runs hit by a catcher. In his first season with the Phillies, Realmuto set a career-high with 25 home runs, but only 23 were hit with him in the lineup as a catcher. That total fell 19 home runs short of tying Javy Lopez’s record. Sánchez came a little closer, hitting 27 of his 34 home runs as a catcher. Despite some likely assistance from the rabbit ball, Sánchez probably would not have broken the record, even if he managed to stay healthy all season.
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If only my fantasy teams performed half as well as my bold predictions this year.

Not that I had an entirely awful season in 2019. I entered my first two National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) Online Championship leagues (12 teams, 30 rounds, standard 5-by-5 rotisserie categories) and won one of them. (I came last in the other.) I won a second league (a 12-team auction) and had good but futile runs in several others. Still, 2019 felt like a bit of a letdown.

So, again: at least I have my bold predictions to fall back on. Over the years, I find I’ve become increasingly adept at late-round draft strategy (while becoming increasingly inept at early-round strategy, or something like that). My bold predictions are honest assessments of guys I love. Moreover, I intend for them to be actionable; that is, Ronald Acuña Jr. goes 40/40 would have been an extremely impressive prediction, but he was already a 1st rounder. How much does that move the needle?

As in past years, I have forgotten half my predictions, so I’ll be just as curious to find out what they were as I will be to find out if they’ve succeeded. Let’s dig in.

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I knew the final prediction result tally was going to be rough but it was worse than expected.

Note: I used the default league setting in our auction calculator to determine the final ranks.

1. Jung Ho Kang will be a top-10 starting third baseman by season’s end.

Whoa, not a good start. I’m not even sure if he was a top-10 third baseman on his own team.

0 for 1
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It’s time to review the bold.  Here’s the full list from March.  Let’s see how it played out.

1 – Dan Vogelbach will finish with a wOBA higher than Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.

Vogelbach: .333 wOBA in 558 PA, 111 wRC+

Vlad, Jr.: .329 wOBA in 514 PA, 105 wRC+

Considering the level of hype that surrounded Vlad, Jr. this past spring, this prediction was equivalent to baseball heresy.  And yet here we are, a win (just barely) right out of the gate.  Vogelbach didn’t make it easy…he hit .310/.462/.732 in 25 April games and then just .189/.316/.386 (.304 wOBA) over his last 465 PA.  There’s an argument Vogelbach isn’t a major league caliber bat based on that downward cycle, but in total he still somehow managed to outhit the most impressive rookie resume since Bryce Harper.

1 for 1

2 – Adam Frazier will win the National League batting title.

And the NL batting title goes to…Christian Yelich and Ketel Marte at .329 AVG.

Despite a .285 batting average against right hand pitching and a .301 mark at home, Frazier couldn’t carry forward his 2018 second half breakout (.375 wOBA), finishing with a lackluster .278 batting average.

1 for 2

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With the 2019 season in the books, it’s time to go back and look at my bold predictions and see how they fared. I had to get a little liberal with the scoring last year for my 2.5 out of 10, but let’s see if we can best that without playing fast and loose with the rules.

Ramón Laureano goes 25 HR/40 SB

I’d like to blame injury for missing this one, but even if he played more than the 123 games we saw, he wasn’t chasing down 40 SB. I even vowed to stop making SB predictions after last year and yet my very first one of 2019 included the notoriously fickle stat. Laureano went 24 HR/13 SB in his 481 PA and might’ve gone 30/20 with a full season. The point of bold predictions is to highlight players who could far exceed their draft value (and won’t come close to it if it’s a negative one) and Laureano did that so I feel like it’s a win, but it’s not worth a point here.

0-for-1

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