Look into the crystal ball

March 3, 2014

https://i1.wp.com/www.johnpcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/future-crystal-ball1.jpg?resize=288%2C259Between now and opening day, every baseball writer/pundit and his or her uncle will be offering their predictions for the baseball season. Some outlets go so far as to predict individual award winners. Some enterprising IT person can probably discern the percentage of those who get everything right. It has to be miniscule, right? A twist of an ankle, a touch of digestive distress, and a team’s hopes go out the window.

As the saying goes, “Man plans; God laughs.”

With that in mind, here are a couple of items I came across today (since you can put a laptop/iPad, etc. on your bookshelf).

Some go through all sorts of computer models and analytics to (try and) prove their point. SB Nation’s always-entertaining Beyond the Box Scores crunched the numbers from various sources and publications for this consensus on how prospects might do this year. Because you can’t start planning your 2017 fantasy team too soon.

Not everyone takes it so seriously, as evidenced in this piece from The On Deck Circle blog. A couple examples:

* The Mets will, once again, win between 70 and 80 games.  Manager Terry Collins will do his best to make you believe no finer 74-win team has ever existed on the face of the Earth, and millionaire team owner Jeff Wilpon will somehow continue to enjoy the support of some Mets fans who, for some strange reason, see it as their duty to try to find ways to help him save money.

* A-Rod, noticing he has been off the front pages for a while, will make a statement that is at once offensive, guileless, self-serving and naive.  Baseball’s self-designated, self-righteous Twitterati  will explode in predictably offensive, guileless, self-serving and naive commentary.

* Somewhere on that same continent, a late middle-aged man will consider the odds of enjoying a successful sexual encounter with his wife or girlfriend, will realize that his chances are remote without a supplement such as Cialis, and will, therefore, ingest this drug to supplement his natural body chemistry to enable him to perform at all.  Odds are, this man will rip the baseball “cheaters” who he believes to be steroid users, the very next day.

On the flip side, Matthew Kory designed this piece for Sports on Earth using various statistics to determine which was each team’s “Golden Age,” or more specifically, golden year(s). Ah, those were the days.

 

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