by Cody Kay
Busy
living the American Dream of searching for a job in this awesome economy, I
have neglected my baseball blogging but my main man Bryce Harper and his two opening day home runs have inspired me to get back to
work. It makes sense to start with season predictions so here we go. I am going
to split this up into an introduction to how I am making my predictions this
year, my AL predictions, and then my NL predictions. So if Bryce has hit 5
homeruns by the time the NL predictions come out and the Nationals are undefeated,
I promise that--regardless of the date of publication of my posts--the
predictions were not affected by the early season results.
I
recently mused before the start of March Madness that I have consistently
placed in the top 5-10 in bracket pools (11 out of 13 years) and, lo and behold,
the tournament is down to the Final Four and I again leading the pool I am in
with my bracket titled “The Fightin’ Blue Waffles” (99th
percentile). I have a basic formula that usually works and can be broken into 4
basic steps.
1)
I
identify the 2-3 strongest #1 seeds and put them into the Final Four and likely
title game
·
These were Louisville
and Indiana for me this year
2)
I
identify at least one team seeded #2-6
that if everything went right, they could easily beat any team in the
tournament and subsequently put them in the final four
·
Michigan
on multiple occasions looked like the best offensive team I watched all year;
Ohio State had a bruising defense and a sure offensive scorer
·
These
two categories comprise my Final Four picks. I typically choose a national
champion from the first category but every now and then a team from this
category is worth choosing. My most successful use of this is the Carmelo
Anthony-led Syracuse team and then the Kemba Walker-led Connecticut team is a
great recent example.
3)
Assuming
that the matchup isn’t expected to be a near coin flip, I always pick the
favorite unless there is at least one clear, strong rational reason to pick the
upset
·
The
two best examples from this year…
i.
UCLA
v Minnesota – I picked Minnesota because they were known to be strong
rebounders while UCLA was a poor rebounding team who also had terrible
chemistry issues
ii.
UNLV
v Cal – the game was taking place near Cal’s campus and home court is a big advantage
in college basketball
4)
Finally,
I always allow myself to use some quality unabashed bias as long as I can make
a logical justification for it
·
I
hate Duke and never pick them to upset a better ranked team. In the last 14
years, they have rarely made any upsets so this really hasn’t hurt me.
·
Additionally,
I am biased toward the teams that finished near the top of the Big Ten and
whatever I considered to be top conference that year. Again, this rarely hurts
because these are going to be top seeds and upsets of top seeds rarely happen
At
this point, I am left to pick between close matchups where I used what I call
“gut check” picks that are a matter of luck and skill. This formula isn’t
overly clever and the overriding and overlapping theme in all four steps is use
logic/rational thinking. It is extremely
easy to follow as the first category requires picking 2-3 of the four #1 seeds
and putting them into the Final Four which takes care of 50-75% of the picks
where all the points are made. However, it does greatly hinge on being able to
properly identify the teams in the first two categories. This year, my method
got me two Final Four picks which, while not as useful as other years, still
made me one of only two people in my 18 team bracket to do so.
Now
there are a lot more things that go into picking a successful bracket than just
this but this blog is about baseball and now is the time to use those same
methods to make predictions for the MLB season. The plan is therefore to make
sure at least 50-75% of my division winners are the favorite, similar to my
first category of finding and picking the couple most dominant teams to do well.
The rest of my playoff spots are filled with teams ranked near the top that
flash upside that says they are worth the risk.
A
quick preview of my future picks has me picking 4 out of the 6 favorites to win
their division. The wildcard picks add one of the other favorites and three
other teams that are preseason top 6 to win their respective pennant.
Additionally, I am taking 50% of the favorites to win the MVP and Cy Young
races but as I will discuss tomorrow in my AL preview, I can’t believe that one
of my picks isn’t the favorite and I am fairly surprised that my other pick for
AL award winner is the favorite.
For
references to pre-season favorites, I am using:
Since
the time of the Fangraphs article, some of the lines have changed due to things
such as injuries (the under on 86.5 wins for the Yankees looks quite tasty in
retrospect) but most have stayed more or less the same and should serve as a
good baseline. For the very interested reader, you can scroll down that article
and see that an insightful (and likely awesome/handsome) commenter named “cody
k” made the comment “in order of confidence my 3 would be: Cubs over, Pirates
under, D-backs over” so you can take that as a bonus prediction made back on
February 15th.
To
close my introduction, I will explain how my love of sabermetrics causes an
overlapping combination of where my third category preference for logical rationales
meets my fourth category preference for allowing for bias. To put it simply, I
am biased toward statistical analysis.
Like
I said, I am a big believer in the sabermetric analysis of baseball and
whenever I am not going with a favorite, it will be because of the logical
rationale that comes with sabermetric analysis. Too often the media tries to
frame sabermetric analysis as contrarian but oftentimes a statistical analysis
just confirms the common thought. This year is no different with Fangraphs
pre-season WAR projections telling us that Detroit is expected to run away with
the AL Central while Marlins and Astros fans are in for a long season, just
like the betting odds given by Bovada tell us.
Since
the betting lines are fairly in-line with most sabermetric projections and I am
biased toward said projections, my baseball predictions for the 2013 season are
going to look a lot like the guy that picks all “chalk” when it comes to filling
out a bracket. Nevertheless, beyond simple WAR expectations, I will identify
some sabermetric thoughts that I am willing to be more biased for than most:
1)
Teams
that have players that are consistent
2)
Teams
that don’t have a high degree of injury concerns
3)
Teams
that have a strong mix of talent across all positions with decent depth, and
4) Teams that have a majority of players in peak or
pre-peak aged seasons, especially the players that have the highest
expectations (My strongest bias); A typical player’s talent grows steadily from
20-25, peaks in MLB is 26-28, holds on for a light decline for a year or two,
and then drops pretty steeply. An excellent introduction to this concept was
written by the Hardball Times.
So
there you have it; my attempt to explain/justify in a cool way that basically
all of my predictions are going to be for the boring favorites to succeed with
the exception of making the bold prediction for a certain 20 year-old baseball
player from the Nationals winning NL MVP (which given the current betting odds,
isn’t as bold as it should be).
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