Playing the odds

Nothing in baseball is certain---that’s what makes the sport so fascinating. However, in the course of my writing and discussing baseball, I tend to make statements which sound a lot like certainties. For example, I’m confident that the Indians are going to be a very good team next year, and could win the Central Division. This is far from a certainty, of course. My purpose in making this statement is twofold: 1) I think the Indians are going to be better than most people expect them to be, and 2) I think they have an excellent chance of winning the division, or winning 90+ games, or whatever other standard you choose to invoke. By no means is this a guarantee; in fact, the odds that they will not win the division are pretty high. I acknowledge this in making the statement, and I make the statement anyway. When I make statements of prediction such as this one, I do so with the understanding that there’s a good chance that I’m wrong, however THERE’S A MUCH BETTER CHANCE THAT I’M RIGHT.

Take, for another example, a list of players that I was very high on entering the 2006 season. By “high on,” I mean I expected these players to improve a lot and/or play produce a lot better than they had in the previous season---from a fantasy baseball perspective, I thought these guys were undervalued:

CC Sabathia

Brandon Webb

Felix Hernandez

Jake Peavy

Grady Sizemore

Jeremy Bonderman

Javier Vazquez

Jake Westbrook

Vernon Wells

Ramon Hernandez

Jonny Gomes

Matt Holliday

Ryan Howard

To be sure, I was wrong on a fair amount of players---namely Hernandez, Peavy, Vazquez, and Gomes from that list. I spoke with the same amount of “certainty” about King Felix dominating the league or Javy Vazquez reverting to his Montreal-form that I did about CC and B-Webb being on the brink of stardom. That’s because in each of my assessments, there’s a good chance that I’ll be wrong---however, with enough assessments of, say, a 70% chance of being right, I’ll have a competitive advantage (for the purposes of fantasy baseball) over others. My being wrong about Peavy does not negate the thought-process behind it, when that thought-process produced many correct results.

Even now I feel I must add another qualification: I do not necessarily believe my way of thinking is the best way to analyze baseball. To my current knowledge, I believe it’s the best way, as well as the most accurate way someone in my position can analyze and predict. The more data you have access to, the more knowledge you accrue, the more you learn about different aspects of the game, the better you will be as an analyst. As such, I have limited baseball experience---no scouting experience with only a modest understanding of scouting----and I have access only to publicly-available statistics and information. Furthermore, I have the constraints of analyzing baseball as a hobby rather than a profession (something I hope will change in the future), meaning I am not able to dedicate as much time to it as I would like. Moreoever, I know I have much to learn about statistical analysis in addition to the vast arrays of knowledge one can acquire simply by working in or playing baseball.

That being said, I am going to continue believing what I believe until someone shows me that I am wrong, or shows me that there’s a better alternative. This does not mean I’m close-minded; just the opposite: I am always on the lookout for new ideas, and I am especially intrigued if these new ideas run contrary to what I currently believe. Does Chien-Ming Wang represent a new way of succeeding as a major league pitcher? What can we learn from examining Wang? I hope to acquire additional information all the time; occasionally, it supplants my old beliefs, but usually it supplements these beliefs and sometimes reinforces them.

What I am humbly trying to say is this: I recognize all that I do not know. I want to learn more, to understand better, and to improve. This is a continual goal for me. In the meantime, I will use the current knowledge I have to the best of my abilities when analyzing the game of baseball. My being wrong could constitute an incorrect method or misunderstood beliefs; however, my being wrong could also simply represent the relative chance of being wrong in any one instance, given the luck and variation involved with the sport. That’s why baseball is my passion: because, as Yogi Berra said, “in baseball, you don’t know nothing.” And there’s so much to learn.