I could have predicted that

Every spring I get a press release from the New Jersey Institute of Technology announcing the latest predictions about the upcoming baseball season, the work of Bruce Bukiet, associate professor of mathematical sciences.

From the 2014 release:

Bukiet, who developed a mathematical model for calculating expected MLB win totals that was published in Operations Research, forecasts a mere 68 wins and a last-place finish for the Metropolitans.

Bukiet’s model can be used to project the number of games a team should be expected to win, the optimal batting order for a set of 9 batters, and how trading players will likely influence a team’s number of wins. “This all began when I, because I am not very big or powerful, set out to prove that a singles hitter who gets on base frequently would contribute more to winning than a slugger who strikes out a lot,” Bukiet recalls. “What I found was the opposite—the slugger will generate more wins.”

Unlike sports pundits who ostensibly use, you know, knowledge about the game to pull their win expectations out of the air, Bukiet relies on math! Let’s see how he did.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

East

Central

West

AMERICAN LEAGUE

East

Central

West

* Wild Card

With a handful of exceptions, Bukiet was wrong on most of the win totals, but how can you predict exact outcomes, so we’ll give a pass on that? On the other hand, he was correct with the order of finish for just one division.

“There are some unknowns that the model can’t incorporate in projecting team win totals before the season, such as rookie performance and trades that have not yet occurred, but, sadly for my Mets, the forecasts have been very accurate,” Bukiet noted. In fact, Bukiet’s preseason expectations for the Mets have been within 3 games of the win total attained by the team in 9 of the last 10 seasons.

As Bukeit said, there are things for which you cannot account,including injuries, off-seasons by those players who had traditionally been solid, etc. But how do you explain the Boston Red Sox, predicted not just by Bukiet but many others, to be a powerful presence? The AL East was one topsy-turvy division.

(And sorry to disappoint yo0u with the Mets winning 11 games more than predicted, Bruce.)

Of his annual projections, Bukiet said, “I publish these to promote the power and relevance of math. Applying mathematical models to things that people care about or enjoy, like baseball, shows that math can be fun as well as very useful.”

Bukiet also puts out a press release once the playoff-bound teams are set, but, really, if he couldn’t predict some of them to even be in the post-season, how can he be trusted to call it now? For me, I often find math the opposite fun fun and quite frustrating.

ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian is the only media person I’ve ever heard to admit with great self-deprecation how wrong he had been in season predictions. Otherwise the hubris wafts through the air like fertilizer.