One of baseball’s enduring charms is its ability to defy prediction. Each time we think we’re absolutely sure of something—say, that the 2008 Tigers will score a bajillion runs, or Juan Pierre will be a disaster filling in for Manny Ramirez—our forecasts are confounded by baseball’s eternally fickle nature. Sophisticated projection tools, such as Nate Silver’s PECOTA, are designed to help take some of the guesswork out of predicting how teams and players will perform during a given season, and often produce surprisingly accurate forecasts on the whole. But even PECOTA is prone to big misses, especially in individual player projections, which help to preserve the game’s air of mystery.
Baseball Prospectus
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