Also, you spelled it wrong. It’s “chowdahbrains”.

Were suppose to drop 7 spots because we lost Figgins? Most of our line up is suppose to experiance regression? That sounds more like wild hope by east coast fans than any kind of accurate science. I could see possible regression from Aybar, but Hunter, Abreu, Morales, Rivera and Napoli should all do at least as well as they did last year. Mathis certainly won’t manage to do worse and Matsui’s numbers vs Vlads and Kendricks numbers should be large improvements over last year. Izzy puts up constant numbers every year, so that should be about the same. Our Rotation is far better than we actually fielded last year as is the pen…..It seems that they are using VooDoo science in their projections.

…why CHONE sucks, and just got three sentences about why Red Sox fans are lame.

By the way, CHONE was designed by Sean Smith, a card-carrying member of the Halosphere, author of the Anaheim Angels All the Way blog, and registered member of this site.

If you thinskinned types think he’s some mouthbreathing Bostonian juking his stats for a partisan thrill, irony strikes hard.

Duh.

   Mathematical projections like PECOTA and CHONE have grown from a fantasy baseball tool used to predict the stats of individual players into a system that some use to try to accurately predict win loss totals for entire teams. To those who follow them, these systems have taken on a relevance approaching gospel. Disagree about their accuracy to one of the systems acolytes and the offender is likely to get a reaction similar to what one would expect to see from Al Gore if they dared doubt Global Warming in his presence.
    That kind of reaction might be understandable if, indeed the systems proved to be accurate. That, however, is just not the case. Even Bill Baer, Blogger for Baseball Prospectus states that "People expect PECOTA to make grand claims when it’s really not going to do that. If you’re expecting PECOTA to mimic Nostradamus, you are always going to close your Internet browser disappointed" Here is the link to the article written by Mr. Baer.

<a href=“http:// ”http://www.baseballdailydigest.com/2010/01/29/what-pecota-says/" target="_blank">http://www.baseballdailydigest.com/2010/01/29/what-pecota-says/" > http://www.baseballdailydigest.com/2010/01/29/what-pecota-says/

   These systems don’t predict exactly how many games a team will win, rather they give a window of as few as six, and in some cases as many as 36 games. As an example, in 2009 PECOTA predicted that the Yankees would win between 63 and 99 games. Well, hell, anyone can do that, yet they were still wrong. They predicted that the Angels would win between 78-84 and they were way off. Here is a link to the chart of the 2009 predictions.
http://sixfourthreeblog.com/2009/03/31/analyzing-the-2009-pecota-projections/

first—Chone Figgins just doesnt suck-he is still good and was a great Angel—Lackey was way too much money and could get hurt—-Vladdy could have stayed and maybe should have-he will always be a great Angel-I hope he does great in Texas-where he has always hit well—Matsui-Pinero and Brandon Wood are very very good replacements-The Angels will win the west and just might beat the Yankees-they will surly beat the Red Sox

Fart on PECOTA all you want but leave CHONE alone.

That’s likely where my problem with projection systems comes in. They do offer some interesting analysis and good debate, but in the end that’s about all they are guaranteed to give you.

From a coach’s perspective, each of your players’ prior performance tells you what they can do and what you can expect them to do in a given role. It’s a tangible fact. You construct your team on a yearly basis and your lineup on a day-to-day basis based off of this knowledge. Coaches rely a lot on their own observations and analysis, and when they need help, they definitely have books of traditional stats showing everything from how Player X does in RISP situations to how he does against Lefty Reliever Y.

I would be very surprised, however, to find out that the Mike Sciocia’s, Ron Gardenhire’s, and Joe Torre’s of the world had a book full of PECOTA or any similar system’s stats and gave them even a passing consideration when it comes to managing real games.