Not one of ESPN's 18 baseball experts picked you to make it to the Fall Classic.
Mazel Tov, Greg Dobbs and co.!
Labels: phillies, predictions
Neal points us to
this article, wherein Wojo revisits his pre-season NFL predictions and determines their accuracy.
Here's one:
If one NFC team is going to shock the world, it's going to be ... the New York Giants. Workable schedule. Desperate team. Quarterback with something to prove. Better-than-you-think replacements for Tiki Barber (remember what Tiki says in those Caddy ads about opportunity?). Understanding, patient fan base. It all adds up to a possible mini-miracle.
Pretty cool, right? Nice work, Wojo! Heres another one:
NFC East finish: 1. Philly, 2. Dallas, 3. Redskins, 4. Giants.
What is the point -- I say,
what is the point -- of making two equal and opposite predictions. You have no chance of getting credit for either of them. At least be the person who gets to write, "What a bonehead I am!" recaps. This way, you just look like a hedger.
(Pitchers and catchers soon, people. Then we can stop writing about football, and start getting real.)
Labels: football, gene wojciechowski, predictions
Matt points us to this NFL second-half prediction
article by ESPN's Jeffri Chadiha. If you total up his final records for each NFL team, you will find that he has predicted that the NFL will go 262-250, against itself.
I think that's unlikely.
This has happened before, over at ESPN. How hard is it, I have to ask, to go game by game for each team and actually make predictions, and then total up what you have predicted? You can't just wildly guess what each team's record will be without figuring out whether it's actually possible.
Or, I guess, you can, and they do. Because they just don't work that hard.
Labels: football, jeffri chadiha, predictions
Title is totally inaccurate.
Let's instead look at
Bill Simmons' Super Bowl pick from last week, with the obvious caveat that picks are meaningless and no one that I know of guesses the future with any sort of impressive accuracy.
Bill?
As for the big game, I'm picking the Bears and taking the seven points. Here's why:
1. As I mentioned Thursday, everyone in Miami seems to be handing the trophy to the Colts already. ... Um, didn't we learn this lesson already from the Saints-Bears game? You never want to be on the same side as the gambling majority. Ever.Not a football reason.
2. The Bears are staying near the airport (not near anything), while the Colts are staying closer to the beach (and closer to all the trouble). That makes it about 20 times as likely that an Indianapolis Colt will be this year's winner of the Stanley Wilson/Eugene Robinson Award and distract his team in the process. I can't take the chance.Not football-related.
3. It's been said a kajillion times, but how can anyone be sold on this Colts defense? Against the Chiefs, the Colts stacked the line against LJ and just made Herm Edwards and Trent Green try to beat them. Against the Ravens, they didn't even have to stack the line because Jamal Lewis is so freaking slow, so they concentrated on forcing Steve McNair to make mistakes (and he obliged). Against the Patriots, they gave up 34 points and it would have been more if Troy Brown didn't get flagged for that illegal pick and the fourth-quarter interference against Reche Caldwell had been called. Now you have a Bears team that can pound the ball with two running backs AND has the receivers to throw deep. I know the Colts will stack the line and force Grossman to beat them, but teams have been doing that against the Bears all season -- they always seem to make two or three big plays.Kudos. Football. Ended up being wrong, but still: football.
4. Peyton Manning's record in big games: Not so good. A little better recently, but still ... not so good. I'd like to see him win one title at the college or pro level before I'm laying seven points with him in a Super Bowl game.Not really football.
5. Remember when the 2003 Yankees outlasted the Red Sox in that seven-game bloodbath and had nothing left for the Marlins series because it was like they had already played their World Series? I'm not saying the same thing will definitely happen here, but it's worth mentioning the Letdown Potential here. The Colts and their fans just spent the past two weeks breaking out the popsicles and doing the "we finally made it" routine. Meanwhile ...Baseball. Bullshit Capitalized Theory Reference (Letdown Potential).
6. The Bears just went 15-3, made the Super Bowl and then had to spend the next two weeks hearing everyone take shots at their QB and give them little to no chance of winning the game. They have all the makings of being one of those teams that pulls off a mild upset in a championship game and spends the next few days telling everyone stuff like "Nobody believed in us!" and "The only people who believed we could do it were the people in this locker room," followed by everyone getting annoyed that they won't shut up that nobody believed in them. But it's kind of true. Nobody believes in the Bears. That's the best motivating force in sports. It really is.
Psychology. Come to think of it, 5 was also psychology.
Well, I believe in the Bears from Chicago. I see this being one of those Super Bowls that's crappy and disjointed for most of the first half, followed by a point explosion right near halftime and one of those second halves when the teams just trade scores (like the Pats-Panthers Super Bowl). And in those games, either team can win, right? So here are my predictions.
A. Chicago 33, Indianapolis 30.
B. Thomas Jones for MVP.
C. The greatest Manning Face of all-time.
D. A new record for "nobody believed in us" quotes.
E. A dead heat with the Sports Gal (she's one game ahead of me and picking the Colts) that can only be decided with the one sporting event that best determines whether you have a gambling problem: The 2007 Pro Bowl. I'm already giddy.Of course A. was going to be wrong. No one gets those right. They're a semi-fun (ok, not really fun) waste of time. B. through E. also wrong. Congrats, Sports Guy!
** MEALY-MOUTHED ADDITION **
Just wanted to add that we all understand that hey, Bill Simmons isn't really even a sports analyst, per se. It's almost gotten to the point where criticizing him for his sports-related opinions is like criticizing Andy Rooney's political stances. It's beside the point. He's going for "light," "fun," "entertaining," "pop-culture-y," "fizzy" -- understood. That's why we don't write about him that much.
My question is: how long until he turns into Rick Reilly?
Labels: bill simmons, football, predictions, super bowl
I'm not a huge fan of making predictions about who's going to win a given series, or the whole postseason, or what have you. I very much enjoy talking about who has a better chance of winning, and for what reasons, et cetera. But I see little reason in saying anything like "I'm picking Twins in 6." I guess maybe it's fun? (Not a big fan of fun things.)So generally speaking, I don't really care what people's predictions are.But then...once in a while...19 baseball experts from the nation's leading sports network try to predict which team will win the World Series, and not one of them even picks a team that makes it to the World Series, let alone wins it.And that, I kind of feel like, is worth pointing out.I know what you're thinking: what are the chances that this could happen, assuming even that the ESPN analysts have monkey-throwing-raisins-at-a-dartboard level of guessing ability? And by "this," I mean 19 picks for World Series champs not even making the World Series.Well, the chances that any given ("random") playoff team makes the World Series is 1 out of 4. In this case, 19 people missed what would have been a 1 out of 4 chance, if they had just simply "guessed" (at random). To measure the probability of this, we have to think in these terms: 19 people in a row "hit" a 3 out of 4 chance. What are the chances of that? .75^19 = .00423, or .42%In other words, the anlaysts could have thrown all of their baseball knowledge out the third floor window of the Bristol megaplex, picked a random team to win the World Series...and there would have been less than a 1 in 200 chance that zero of their picks would get to the World Series. (Which, just to remind everyone, is exactly what happened.)But wait! It gets better.Looking further at these picks -- and I'm sure someone pointed this out before -- not one single person picked the Tigers to even get out of the ALDS. And only one person picked the Cards to beat the Padres in the NLDS.Which means (stay with me) in the combined series of: Yanks / Tigers ALDS, Padres / Cards NLDS, ALCS, NLCS, and WS, the 19 ESPN experts went a total of 1 for 95. ONE FOR NINETY-FUCKING-FIVE.If you let 10,000 teams of 19 monkeys randomly pick winners in those series, those monkey-picking-teams would average 30.9 out of 95. (.5 for 38 DS picks + .25 for 38 CS picks + .125 for 19 WS picks)Congratulations to Enrique Rojas, the only person who picked either the World Series bound Tigers or Cardinals to win even one series. He also picked El Duque as the WS MVP in a victory over the Twins.EDIT: I'd like to take a second to address two categories of e-mails I'm getting from a lot of readers.Category 1 is best summed up by e-mailer CJ:"You're giving them too much credit. Each of nineteen guys failed to connect on TWO one in four chances. If everyone picked at random, the probability that any one guy would fail to pick either wold series team is (.75 * .75) = .5625. Raise that to the 19th power and you get 0.0000178, or 1 in 55933."
On its own, this is true. And "more" impressive. As for accusations that I was wrong, however (which were often made), I stand by my original numbers. I was looking at the chances of a different phenomenon. ("And by 'this,' I mean 19 picks for World Series champs not even making the World Series.")So, dudes who wrote -- excellent point. The chances of going 0-38 in CS Champs picks are even more astronomically difficult than going 0-19 in WS Champs picks not even making the WS. But I was right also. Sweet.On to Category 2 now, as written by the beautifully named Alessio, who is probably a dude but in my imagination is a gorgeous 23-year-old woman from like Monaco who loves baseball and statistical analysis. I quote him (her? please?) at length because it's easier than writing this all out myself:I'm no statistician, but I think you made an analytical error in your post on "picks". The chances of what happened are not nearly as distant as you calculate. In fact, you're far more likely to get such results from intelligent decision makers than from random chance.
The fact that human beings are picking will tend to "bunch" the picks a lot more than random chance. For example, let's say the Yankees are better than the Tigers, and everybody recognizes that. Everybody will pick the Yankees, so the picks could rationally be 19-0 even though their actual chances of winning might be something like 55%. When the Tigers beat those odds, all of a sudden you have 19 wrong picks, although there's only one upset in the series.
Now, when you have three or four series upsets (nothing unusual there), all of a sudden you have a whole lot more than 19 wrong picks.
When you have a consensus on the various team strengths, combined with just a few upsets, you get the seemingly anomolous result of a bunch of prognosticators going 1-for-95. A random picking system would almost never be that bad; but on the other hand, it would almost always be around 50%. The humans could just as easily have been around 90% if those series had gone the other way.
Alessio. My sweet, innocent Alessio. Alesssssio, my princess of Monaco... [daydreaming now: playing with Alessio's hair; engaging in conversation about VORP vs. WARP3 over mussels and wine...now realizing instead that Alessio is almost certainly a 45-year-old dude from Canton, Ohio or something, and on top of that, feeling the obligation to publicly apoligize to girlfriend about the whole Alessio-fantasy situation]...sorry, what now?
Oh, the numbers thing.
Yeah. Well, Alessio, you fat fucking ugly monster of a man, you make what I guess is a good point. I guess my response is: yes, of course. Of course humans will, over the long haul, be better than random-team generators at predicting who wins certain games / series / whatever. I realize why, especially in this case, the experts were especially bad at picking winners. Your point is spot on: a rational human being will pick the 55%-likely-to-win team, and, likewise, so will 19 rational humans. I'm just trying to put a scenario together that sort of points out the whole ridiculousness of "predictions" in general.
Listen: It's a cheat. I cheated. And that's the kind of thing you do when you run a blog devoted to making analysts look silly.
You take advantage of a combination of hindsight, upsets, and odd numbers, and use them in a way to make people silly. And you sort of hope, I guess, that people make their own conclusions about just how much these numbers actually mean.
To me, the overall point is not that we should let monkeys throw raisins at a dartboard instead of letting experts make their predictions. But rather, isn't it kind of silly / interesting / amusing that in this particular case, a team of monkeys would have been almost a sure bet against these so-called experts?
That's all. Interpret at your own risk.
Sorry / Thanks to Alessio, whose appearance and gender remain an absolute, delicious mystery to me.
Labels: espn, predictions, world series
