The Projections System Got It All -- Right?!!

Remember this?



And this?

 
They were Baseball Prospectus's projected standings for 2016 last March. At the time, I made sport of the sabermetric community for continuing to expose themselves to ridicule. BP can no more predict next season's results than can any nominally educated fan .

Want proof? Look at that very first line. They have the 68-94 Tampa Bay Rays winning the East, while tabbing the Baltimore Orioles, a Wild Card entry, as the worst team in the AL. With projection systems like this, why not just throw darts, right?

But Wait, There's More...
Well, keep looking. BP pretty much nailed the rest of Baseball. Sure, the Rangers won the West, but there's lots of evidence that their level of play was much more like a lucky .500 team. The rest of the AL is dead on. As projected, the World Champion Royals did stumble. The Indians did indeed run away with the Central. The Angels, with Mike Trout and Albert Pujols, did in fact stink.

Take a gander at their NL projections. Nationals, Mets, Cubs, Dodgers and Giants in the playoffs. Spot on, but for the Nats and Mets switching places. The new and improved Dbacks? Correctly unimpressed. The 98-win Pirates? Stumbled even worse than projected. The Braves' tear down? BP nailed their record.

PECOTA's High BABIP
We could analyze what happened in the game that led to this unlikely result. The big spending teams in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles delivered. The bad teams lived down to expectations. There's no evidence that the projection system, called PECOTA, learned any new tricks.

If you were projecting BP's projections for 2017, you would regress them to the mean and peg them for largely on target but for some big misses. But BP had a high BABIP last year and avoided the injury bug. They outplayed their third-order Pythagorean record.  I project that BP's 2017 projections -- and everyone else's -- will stumble about like Andy Capp, with some home runs and some big whiffs, no better than a semi-educated fan's best guesses. They won't nail all the playoff teams in either league, but they'll get the Cubs and Dodgers right, maybe the Astros too.

Next year this time, we can review my projection of BP's projection and determine who the bigger dope is. I'm betting that baseball's unpredictability vindicates me.