Realignment

[zedsdeadbaby]

Earlier today in Lit Foundations, I was thinking about how it's not really fair that most teams have to contend with four teams for a division title, while NL Central teams must compete with five and AL West teams only need compete with three. The Wild Card evens things out in a bit in terms of "deserving" a playoff spot, but it's inherently

Comments

[zedsdeadbaby]

I'd like to systematically evaluate how often PECOTA and other projections actually predict how players will do. Baseball is a game of streaks, and if you're usually insanely good for one week out of six, what if one year you're insanely good for one week out of five; you'll look like you were that much better. Of course this is very simplified, but you get the point.

About there being no opposites, no outliers... keep in mind that you're looking at the highest level of play. So there really might be an opposite, which is better players playing at consistently lower levels. This is why the best high schools players hit like .525, .700, 1.500, gaudy numbers like that. If he played in the Majors, it'd be more like .010, .020, .010. Conversely, if Barry Bonds played high school ball now, he'd probably hit a home run nine ABs out of ten... literally. There's a very tight balance in MLB, because there's only 800 players, as opposed to thousands minor leaguers, thousands of college, high school, Little League players (millions, even?). So you have to figure that they're going to be pretty close in ability. I don't know if you remember Stephen Jay Gould arguing that nobody hits .400 because players are getting better; this kind of relates. As baseball goes global, more people are playing, but the number of Major Leaguers does not get bigger; rather, it becomes more and more exclusive. It's interesting, Maris hit 61 and Mac hit 70 in expansion years (1961 and 1998). Basically, the number of Major Leaguers increased by 60, but the actual talent pool did not increase, meaning that there was a diffusion of minor league talent all across the Majors, as many teams lost Major Leaguers in the expansion draft.