Rich Lederer: The Angels & PECOTA
"My short post on Friday seemed to create quite a stir in the comments section so I promised to deliver a follow-up piece that would expand upon my initial take on Baseball Prospectus' prediction whereby the Los Angeles Angels would go 76-86 and finish last in the AL West in 2010."
almost 2 years ago
G Abbes
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I expect the Angels to win 95 games every year.
Regardless of what PECOTA or any other formula says. How’s that for science?
RIP NA
by NoDakHalo on Feb 21, 2010 10:28 AM PST reply actions 2 recs
I like Rich Lederer, I commented in his previous comment that riled other posters
Yeah its a great article by a good analyst and Angel fan. He brings up points that as Angel fans we seem to understand, yet induce a mental block and consternation by fans of rival teams.
I guess its the price you pay by being an extremely successful team over the past decade. Anything that indicates the Angels are on the decline (PECOTA ‘projections’ in this case) is jumped upon and repeated ad nauseam. Even if arguments are presented to suggest otherwise.
by TheQuestforMerlin on Feb 21, 2010 10:36 AM PST reply actions
Wow, the dickness factor in the comments of Rich's original post is amazing
How DARE he make fun of PECOTA! Jesus H.
by mattwelch on Feb 21, 2010 10:44 AM PST reply actions 1 recs
There was a Vegas site that tracked the predictors
I wish I had bookmarked it. BP also has some really bad writing.
Church of Sabremetrics
It all started out with Bill James being open to questioning anything. In doing this a LOT of discoveries were made.
Somehow it has evolved into a humorless culture that has no self-awareness about how rigid its orthodoxy has become and cannot EVER acknowledge flaws and inaccuracies in their predictive methods.
They just circle the wagons and chant “LUCK.”
by Rev Halofan on Feb 21, 2010 11:22 AM PST reply actions 2 recs
While throwing darts at Bill James for acknowledging there is such a thing as doubt
And Lederer is, of course, James’ number-one fan & interpreter.
Hats off to Rich Lederer for putting up on a major analytical blog what we've been saying
for 3 years. :)
#34 Forever
Plugging the upside since 2006.
Never give up, never surrender!
Pecota does not account for
the most significant event of this upcoming season: several A’s will contract swine flu and infect the Mariners during a home stand in mid-May leaving both teams decimated. The Angels will set a record and go 130-31 with one rain out.
There will also be another million random events this year that will screw up these predictions. Sorry “Sabremetricians,” we will actually have to play the games AGAIN this year.
Captain, there are doubt's...
by Match Day 5 on Feb 21, 2010 12:10 PM PST reply actions 2 recs
PECOTA and BP
What I really don’t get is why they don’t look at what the Angels are doing and adjust and tweak their model?
It’s just preposterous to have the idiocy and audacity to throw out the Angels there for another .500 season – it’s been shown here statistically at HH their model is broken.
Either fix it, or cease to publish a prediction for the Scioscia-era Angels. Wrapping themselves in the blanket of SABR, their mathematical model would be laughed out of the room by any professional statistician because of this weak link. There is enough evidence by now to say its a piece of garbage, and kudos to Welch, Lederer and all the others who have taken the time to document it is mathematically broken.
by Rex Fregosi on Feb 21, 2010 12:35 PM PST reply actions 1 recs
In fairness, if the Angels are the only outlier, the model can still be good
Formulas are hard to tweak, and bending them to produce a certain result is not necessarily a recipe for success. They might just say — “here’s our PECOTA picks; note that every year they undershoot the Angels by 8-13 wins.” And in fact they run columns like that about once a year.
But it’s the people who confuse projection systems with science, and say stuff like “that’s not anti-Angel bias, that’s just where the facts lead!” … those are the people who bug me more than Baseball Prospectus ever will. Ditto for those who confidently state that replacing Player X with Player Y “will be good for 1.5 wins” or whatever.
One of many areas in which all projection systems (even our beloved CHONE, I assume) are flawed is that they rarely reflect organizations’ comparative depth. As it happens, depth is one area that the Angels have been phenomenally good at over the past three years. Sometimes the shite hits the fan, wiping out a half-dozen guys you projected to be key performers. Last year, that shite really did hit the fan with our rotation—Adenhart’s death, injuries to every starter except Weaver, 14 different dudes taking at least one turn—and still we won 97 games. If Seattle has to go through anything like that this year, they’re toast.
by mattwelch on Feb 21, 2010 12:54 PM PST up reply actions 1 recs
The funniest thing about the thin-skinned stat set...
…is that they are convinced they are rigorous practitioners of science.
The self image of each of these is wrapped up in the certainty that his numbers crunching makes him a peer of Isaac Newton.
Quite interesting that you use this metaphor.
This is veeeery close to the same metaphor that I use consistently around here to dismiss the current level of faith of the sabremetric set. Close, but incorrect in a very important sense.
My metaphor is that modern sabremetrecians are more akin to Ptolemy, and theirs is Ptolemaic math. For the uninitiated, Ptolemy was a dude that created a model to explain the apparent motion of the planets and the sun in the sky, to support the insistance that the Earth was the center of the universe. As curious minds gathered more and more information about these apparent motions, the Ptolemy studs were forced into more and more complicated gyrations with their model until the weight of their approach neared collapse due to its very complications.
So a guy like Copernicus comes along and parks the sun at the center of the solar system, and suddenly things make a whole lot more sense and suddenly things are a whole lot more simple. But damn! It sure upsets the human vanity of religion at the time!
Now, yes, there were still some problems with the Copernicus model that popped up as we got even better with our observations. And THIS is what Newton did for us. He created an entirely new math (calculus) and used it to explain the ACTUAL motions of the planets.
Modern day sabremetricians are like Ptolemy. Lots of fancy calculations and formulas, but not quite right in their predictions of the real world. Sometimes they attempt to resolve these flaws with even more complicated iterations of their flawed math. And they raise the flags of their religion and mount the bastions when challenged, and insist that any and all objections be made in the language of their flawed math.
Someday somebody WILL come along and get this right. And that person WILL be the modern statistical equivalent of Newton. Until then, I’ll just pull up a chair, grab a beer, watch the damned games.
"God watches over drunks and third baseman." - the Immortal Leo Durocher, predicting the coming of Brandon Wood...
Another deposition in advance of the (baseball) Inquisition?
So I think I get it…an invisible phenomenon sits at the middle of the baseball universe and applies unusual forces to the basic elements of the game. The effects of the phenomena and its forces are largely but not fully understood by high priests from the Church of PECOTA.
One great mind emerges, not as interested in studying the phenomena as in taking the fullest advantage of its properties.
Beware and behold the mind of the Soth, unwittingly laying waste to the Bible of Baseball forecasting. Long live the Soth!
Depends on how much lasagna he ate that day.
Angels baseball. We do what we must, because we can -- HaloDutch
Good point about depth
Somehow hadn’t considered that point before.
yes on depth
and to be precise, we should really be talking about the Scioscia-led Angels. It’s his teams the model fails on.
I’m sure PECOTA would have done well with the teams from the earlier decades.
A case on point – when looking at your ‘Best 5 year Run’ post, i was intrigued by the 1988 Angels in particular which had Rojas and Stubing as managers (as who would thunk they’d make it there?) as saw the halos record that year (75-87) matched exactly with the Pythagorean prediction on RS/RA.
I'll never get why people care about projections/rankings...
…other than it’s good for water cooler talk/trash talking.
…or you pay for a service that provides them blink
…or if you are in the BCS.
…or you happen to read sports forums a lot.
Errr nevermind.
Nice
You are dead on with your analysis, and the numbers back you up. What I don’t get is why Bill James just keeps saying “we don’t know why the Angels beat our projections but we have our theories” and doesn’t go about trying to fit those theories into their projections. If they’re wrong year after year, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’d reassess their formula?
but to Bill James' credit
He alone stated with certainty that it was not LUCK that assisted the Angels in doing what they do.
Well, he alone among the thick and ordinary followers. We here knew it all along.
Indeed, credit to James (and he apparently took hits for this among the SABR folks)
for stepping up to say that the Angels consistently beating projections is not a matter of luck but rather things that can’t be accounted for yet…unlike certain other, less well-known sabermetrics writers. (cough)BillBaer!(cough)
#34 Forever
Plugging the upside since 2006.
Never give up, never surrender!
Nate Silver did acknowledge the Angels ability to defy PECOTA
in this article. It’s interesting to note that since then the Braves and White Sox have fallen off significantly, while the Angels stand alone with 60+ wins above PECOTA over it’s 7 year life-span. It would be interesting if Nate did an update, put as matt points out, he’s moved on since then.
~Till the Halo burns out...
Bill James
is an employee of the hated Red Sox. So if he knew why the Angels beat the projections, he wouldn’t tell anyone but Theo Epstein so they could do the same in Boston. So I sincerely hope that James just recognized that the something is going on, but has no idea what it is.
My guess is Mike Scioscia’s managing is a big factor. Just got a book by Chris Jaffe, Evaluating Baseball’s managers. Some of the tables indicate that pitchers in particular beat their projections by a lot when Scioscia gets them.
The HK-47 hitting droid is the finest line drive machine ever built
by RallyMonkey5 on Feb 22, 2010 9:13 AM PST up reply actions
I'm swear to God
I’m gonna pistol-whip the next guy who says shenanigans.
Captain, there are doubt's...
Hey Farva, whats that place you like with all the shit on the walls?
I brought sexy back, but they only gave me store credit....
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
hands Match a pistol
I brought sexy back, but they only gave me store credit....
His follow up story will include exactly how high he was when he originaly wrote the story
And also what others drugs he was on. He will then go on to say he is now seeking help from a therapist. This is the only way I can see how he came up with the Angels finishing last. GO HALOS
We all live Napoli ever after.
My not-so-bold prediction
this will be the year that PECOTA’s projection for the Angels is the furthest off it’s ever been.
by Caseys Kiss of Death on Feb 21, 2010 7:37 PM PST reply actions
PECOTA doesn't factor in Baby Jesus' favorite team.
Angels take the West, via divine intervention.
Take that, nerds.
What do you need a fancy suit for, Charlie, you ain't got no job to wear it to.
I talked to Rex Hudler about why
the Angels always do way better than predicted. He said that the Angels know they need to score more runs than the other team if they want to to win the game.
Slow down. You are going too fast.
Somewhere in there is a brilliant idea.
"God watches over drunks and third baseman." - the Immortal Leo Durocher, predicting the coming of Brandon Wood...
I'm sorry I just can't calm down right now
I seem to have lost my baseball and I’m going bonkers trying to find it. I need that baseball, it soothes my soul.
Have you seen my baseball?
Rex ...
you gave it to a little girl last night during the game while you were supposed to be broadcasting. Short term memory issues? Hey, who ate my mini-donuts?
I love this team.
by Downing Rules on Feb 22, 2010 9:50 PM PST up reply actions
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