The full one hundred and sixty-two major league season has now concluded. After two whole tumultuous years, it is with great joy, that I am able to utter this sentence once again. After just a 60-game short season in 2021, completing the full schedule docket is a sparkling achievement.
It is now time to check back on how we fared during the past season. Here at RotoGraphs, that tradition starts with reviewing our pre-season bold predictions.
As always, I will remind my readers that we will never succeed in perfectly mining all of our bold predictions, nor should we. If this was simply a contest to obtain high precision, then we would have filled our lots with easy guesses. “Gerrit Cole will strike out 180 batters” – is an amazing baseball accomplishment, but it is far from bold. In fact, ATC was the low projection system on Gerrit Cole, and predicted an expected 257 Ks. Forget bold – the statistics may have suggested a probability of circumstance close to 60-75%.
Bold predictions are meant to be a far more remote event. They are meant to be unlikely.
At the other end of the spectrum, bold predictions are also not meant to be impossible. “Albert Pujols will steal 25 bases,” is not within the realm of any reasonable possibility. That is a prediction into the weird or absurd – which is NOT the purpose of these columns.
This author perennially suggests that bold predictions should lie in the 70th to 90th percentiles. In other terms, we should be boldly calling events that are 10-30% likely to occur. In return period speak – an occurrence that should unfold every 1 in 3.3 to 1 in 10 years. It should be a prediction that would happen once, twice or thrice a decade.
The point of the exercise is to highlight certain undervalued (or overvalued) players by choosing a few unlikely, but achievable outcomes. By doing so, the goal is for the reader to pay the player(s) in question a bit more (or less) attention than the market would suggest.
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