And updated projections - grounded by a computer’s blindness to narrative thrust, recency bias or wishful thinking - are generally more accurate in predicting the rest of the season than the results that have come before. Major public systems available at FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus echo the ways that teams size up their own chances, and they regularly set the bar in a complicated sport with a lot of moving pieces.Īs former FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan (now a front-office analyst with the Tampa Bay Rays) documented in the 2010s, preseason projections remain more telling than the actual standings far deeper into the season than you might think. Peripherals include run differentials and the expected win-loss mark derived from them, called Pythagorean records.Īt this point, projections - the mathematical formulas derived from past performance and reams of data on player tendencies - are a bedrock feature of following baseball, even if your main use for them is to hate what they say about your team. There’s a whole diverse world within these two realms, but largely, analysts rely on a blend of peripheral numbers from the games that have been played and projections that chart likely outcomes for the future. Teams need more dynamic understandings of the state of play. But you need to understand that the standings are just that: standstill snapshots that don’t necessarily capture trajectories or even the whole picture of what has already happened. Dissonance between the emotional direction of a team and a front office’s plotted trajectories and probabilistic forecasts can create bewildered fan bases, confusing decisions and rifts between players and leadership.Įven with more advanced methods at work, there is plenty of room for questioning decision-makers who often display more cynicism and less urgency than we’d like in the entertainment industry that is professional sports. However, it doesn’t work that way, not functionally, in the calculating sphere of 2020s MLB front offices. The evaluation seems simple: Look at the standings, see how your team is doing, behave accordingly. With about 110 games’ worth of evidence, MLB teams have to stop gazing at the horizon and instead assess the ground on which they’re standing. If hope springs eternal in spring training, then the waves of reality crash down around baseball’s summer trade deadline.
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