10 Predictions for 2017 That Can't Go Wrong

Anything can happen in baseball. The season is as long as a butterfly's entire life and then they start all over again to determine the champs. Balls take funny bounces, key ligaments incur the wrath of sliders and strokes get lost or discovered.

The game defies prediction.

And yet, there are events that can be foreseen by dropouts with bad depth perception. Here are a few that jump to mind:

1. Someone with an unimpressive resume will bash out of the gate, Adam Duvall style. Hosannas will be sung; articles will be written. And before the electrons are dry, pitchers will figure him out and he'll fade back to well-compensated oblivion.

2. Some September cellar occupant will rattle off early season wins. Try not to have an orgasm. The blooms of May are long forgotten by Labor Day.

3. Some dope with a microphone in his face and diminishing brain cells will rant against analytics, unaware that the debate is over, every team employs a gaggle of numbers crunchers, and MLB itself puts a tape measure and radar gun on every ball thrown, hit and chased. Just because a guy could snap off a curve -- or hit one -- in the 70s doesn't make him smarter than a Pet Rock. (That's White Sox resident Bozo Ken Harrelson proudly posing as avatar of this prediction.)

4, We will continue to hear about momentum, as if it's a thing in sports. Most speakers will mean that a team is playing well and has confidence, but they will invoke momentum as if it's a magic potion created with crystals and feng shui.

5. We'll see fewer infield shifts. You know why? Because those pesky advanced analytics tell us they don't generally work. (Damn those facts! Don't they know America doesn't do facts anymore?) They only make sense for a handful of players who pull everything and won't/can't adjust.

6. Mike Trout will continue his reign as best baseball player on Planet Earth, but he won't win the MVP. Voters get tired of voting for the same guys repeatedly, especially when they're as personally exciting as toast.

7. At least one MVP or Cy Young winner will rise up from the floorboards. Think R.A. Dickey, Brandon Webb, Terry Pendelton, George Bell. 

8. The trend towards using relievers in more optimal ways will continue to grow. Several long relievers will pitch key innings, not mop up, and their teams will benefit from it, particularly as starter throw fewer and fewer innings.

9. People will be surprised when Stephen Strasburg goes on the DL, Pablo Sandoval earns a starting job and the weather turns hot during the summer. Either we have short memories or we're distracted by our phones.

10. Some throwaway name like Tampa Bay shortstop Brad Miller will slug 30 home runs out of nowhere this year. Oh wait, Miller did that last year. Who knew?

About That Whole "Cubs Fans Can Dream On" Thing...

You may recall this post back in April. I made a bit of a to-do about the folly of predicting a Cubs playoff appearance. At the risk of quoting that brilliant philosopher, my own personal self, here's what I said at the time:

"...not since 2008, coming off a roaring 97-win season, has hope taken residence so distant from reality."

Right. Well, about that.

See, here's the thing about predictions in baseball: you can be flat wrong about everything and still call the winner. Or you can nail the logic but get foiled by the vagaries of the game. If you placed those two ideas on opposite ends of the street, I'd be standing on the corner of Well-reasoned and Wrong.

The point of that article was that the Cubs were coming off an 89-loss season even while many of their young players; think Jake Arrieta, Anthony Rizzo, Kyle Hendrick and Starlin Castro; had already blossomed. Despite the addition of Jon Lester and Dexter Fowler; not to mention manager Joe Maddon; and the imminent arrival of Kris Bryant, Jorge Soler and that group; it seemed wise to counsel patience. Rookies not named Vida, Fernando, or The Bird don't generally rocket to success immediately. Some veteran acquisitions don't pan out. Sophomores often stumble following promising freshman seasons. And empty rosters don't unempty themselves just because a couple of newbies join the ranks.

So what happened? All the touted met their tout line, plus 235 pounds of Kyle Schwarber arrived mashing. Jake Arrieta got in touch with his inner Superman. None of the top four starters missed a start. Lester and Fowler played as advertised. The squad served as windshield to the injury bug. New manager Joe Maddon thrilled everyone and the team emerged victorious 97 times plus change in the playoffs.

The point is, that post was right. It was unreasonable to expect the Cubs to blossom all at once, maintain the gains of the previous season and enjoy the fruits of veteran labor without some setbacks. That can happen, it does, and it did. But that's not the way to bet.

The stories were similar in Flushing, Houston and Minnesota, which is why I wasn't too sanguine on any of those teams' chances. The Nationals and Angels are more talented than all of those teams, but sometimes, it's more important how much lightning is in the bottle than how much talent. And nowhere was that more obvious than with the Cubs.

The Projector Was Broken: Pre-Season Projections Got Everything Wrong

History will little note, nor long remember, what we say here." -- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address. Voted worst prediction in history.

In February, we examined the PECOTA projections for MLB 2015. Based on everything the computers could crunch prior to the start of the season, this is how Baseball Prospectus stacked up all the teams for the 2015 season. Remember that the projections can't predict trades and injuries. They can't predict much else, as you'll see.

The projections had Washington, St. Louis and the Dodgers winning the NL divisions with the Mets, Giants, Marlins and Padres competing for the Wild Cards. That's two of three division winners and two of four Wild Card contestants.

PECOTA saw the Cubs, Pirates and Braves as .500 teams. To that we say: ha!

On the other hand, it correctly tabbed Philly, Cincinnati and Colorado as bottom feeders.

In other words, the fancy computers with their gigagoogles knew about as much as you did with your biases and half-baked opinions. Not exactly an endorsement for SABR membership. About the only thing we can say about the projection is that it recognized improvement in Flushing.

It gets worse. In the junior circuit, PECOTA struck out looking on a fastball down the middle. It identified last place Boston and Detroit as division kings and named the Of Anaheims as the best team in the league. Its Wild Card competitors were the woeful Mariners and A's, along with Tampa. In other words, oh-for-six.

PECOTA projected the top teams in the Central -- Kansas City and Minnesota, who finished a combined 32 games over .500 -- as the AL's two worst teams, with a combined 141-183 record. It did the same for Texas and Houston in the West.

That's as stinkin' wrong as you can get.

In the East, PECOTA projected the Blue Jays a couple of games over .500 and the Yankees a couple of games under. About the only thing the projection system nailed was that all the machinations in Chicago still left the White Sox as poseurs.

In other words, all the fancy algorithms don't know squat. A blind squirrel could have picked one of the division winners. This is the very point I made in this post  eight months ago.

It's not that the seamheads are stupid, or have nothing to add to the conversation, or to our understanding of the game, quite the opposite. It's that baseball is a crazy game that no one can predict, project, prognosticate, portend, prophesize, augur, foretell, forecast or in any way anticipate. That's what we love about it.

So let's all, all of us including the great scientific analysts of the horsehide, just take a chill pill and dial down the...um...what's the word...?

Predicting the Future Is Easy. Getting It Right Is Hard.

The hip new toys in baseball analysis can magnify and sharpen our understanding of the game to levels of resolution we didn't know enough to dream about in the past. But they can't foretell changes in players' hearts, minds, eyes or habits. They can describe how unlikely an event is, but not whether unlikely event X is the unlikely event that will actually occur this year.

That's how the most advanced statistical models of the Predictolator, which ran 50,000 seasonal simulations, projected before the 2013 season got underway that the Angels, Blue Jays and Nationals would make the playoffs, that Washington would play in the World Series, that the Reds would win the NL Central, that the Red Sox and Pirates would lose more games than they won, that the Giants and White Sox would contend for playoff spots and that the Phils would have a better record than the Orioles. Back then, who could have argued?

Everything anyone could reasonably know in advance about the teams was factored in. The sharpest fielding independent pitching analysis, the most cutting-edge defensive efficiency metrics, the most newfangled catcher framing valuations, and the most atomized BABIP-affected hitting trends  -- all ingredients in this statistical bouillabaisse. And yet, the Boston projection was off by 17 wins.

How could anyone predict that Josh Hamilton would suddenly hit like Alexander Hamilton?  Or that Jeff Locke, who had pitched all of 51 innings with a 5.82 ERA in his career, would throw 166 innings of 10-7, 3.52 for Pittsburgh. Or that four-fifths of San Fransisco's vaunted rotation would blow up like a middle-school science project (ERA 30% worse than average). Or that the Yankees would go on the disabled list and stay there.

They couldn't project that four rookie hurlers would catapult St. Louis to 12 extra wins, or that everything going right in Pittsburgh would reduce the Pirates' losses by 19 and propel them into the playoffs. They were off by 15 games in their Cleveland projection because Indian catchers (31 home runs) and second basemen (33 home runs) hit like right fielders and their first four pen jockeys (2.77 ERA in 271 innings) turned out the lights.

Individuals eluded the grasp of the best minds too. Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system pegged Roy Halladay for 12 wins in 183 innings with a 2.82 ERA. Ineffectiveness and injury led to a 4-5, 6.82 campaign and retirement. BP had known-commodity Max Scherzer at 12 wins, 184 strikeouts and a 3.84 ERA, a far cry from his Cy Young performance of 21 wins, 240 strikeouts and a 2.90 ERA.

In short, the best systems in the world are still just a little bit better than mere mortals at predicting the fickle movements of humans who throw and catch a round, white ball and smack it with a sitck. If you know a handful of broad rules -- for example, hitters gain power and lose speed as they age; lefty batters boost their homer totals in Yankee Stadium; a pitcher with a very low BABIP-against in year X is likely to regress in year X+1; -- you can predict player performance approximately as badly as the Predictolar. 

Or, you can just enjoy the surprises that the game doles out annually.

Another Spin in the Wayback Machine

In honor of the upcoming movie Mr. Peabody, based on the old-time cartoon in which an erudite dog schools a bespectacled youth on history via his time machine, we put our own thrusters in reverse and examine recent Braindrizzlings to see how the future turned out. Spoiler alert: objective analysis doesn't lie.

This January post unveiled a drizzle on Kyle Lohse's parade, casting his breakout 2012 (2.76 ERA in 211 innings, 3.76 K/BB, best year of his 12-year career) as a flash in the pan. Well. He experienced a second flash (3.35 in 199 innings, 3.42 K/BB, second best year of his 13-year career) in 2013. He's now produced 40% of his value in his past two seasons.

In this brief foray into March Madness, Oregon's indefensibly-low seeding in the NCAA tournament was paradoxically described as a boon to the Ducks and a travesty for their first-round opponent, Oklahoma State. Oregon blitzed the Cowboys en route to a Sweet 16 berth.

What must Adam Dunn have to bat to earn his roster spot? The answer from this early season post was .230. Sure enough, Dunn belted 34 homers and got aboard 32% of the time, but slotted in below replacement level because of a .219 batting average. A handful more hits would have raised the on base to 34% and the replacement value to black ink.

It was the same formula for Mark Reynolds, another Three True Outcomes star who walks less than Dunn but plays better defense. Reynolds hit .236 and delivered less than a win above replacement.

If the suggestion in this May post that the return of injured stars would catapult the Yankees into contention was slightly off-base it's because the premise was flawed. The stars didn't return as expected and the regression gerbils began nibbling at their replacements. 

There was no more regressing left for righty Joe Blanton, whom we pronounced cooked and served after an 0-6, 5.66 start. He actually improved over the rest of the season, which is all the sadder given his 2-14, 6.04 final record. Absorbing 180 hits and 29 home runs in 133 frames is the first step towards bar ownership back in Bowling Green.

The same post provided the rough draft on the obituary for Toronto's playoff hopes. The rationale, even that early in the season, rested on a lack of injury, bad luck, or other reversible factors for their slow demise. Small sample size be damned, the Jays captured the AL East cellar with 88 losses.

Here's one sure to elicit a chuckle: May 12 brought the assertion that the scrubs and stars Dodgers would not ascend to dominance unless someone not yet currently producing emerged as a star. Five regulars and Clayton Kershaw were booming but the rest of the team had less value than lunch at Sonic. It's doubtful this was the plan: three weeks later, a young Cuban named Puig and a former child star named Hanley joined the roster and lit rocket boosters under the team, driving them to the NLCS.

A week later, the first of several Shin-soo Choo homage sitings in this space proclaimed the Red Korean from non-Red Korea a beneficiary of the sabermetric movement. His modest lifetime averages (.293 BA, 18 HR and 73 RBI) would not have warranted much esteem from the baseball community 20 years ago, but today teams recognize his.389 OBP, base running proficiency and defensive flexibility. Sure enough, one Hot Stove League later, the Rangers bestowed their appreciation on Choo in the form of 130 million of their Texas-sized dollars.

So, with apologies to Kyle Lohse, calling 'em like we see 'em worked out pretty well, at least through the first third of the 2013 season. A peek back at June and beyond in a future post, when your attention span is rejuvenated.

See, I Told You So

Here in Charleston, SC, we attend to hurricane forecasts as if our lives depend on them -- because they do. About every three years a big gust rattles our cages and about every 50 years a Biblical-style storm levels everything in its path along the coast, much like Albert Pujols' contract.

So when the National Hurricane Center in Boulder, CO pronounces an active hurricane season upcoming, non-perishables fly out of supermarkets and plywood sales spike. What folks in these parts don't seem to notice is how utterly, thoroughly, completely and consistently their forecasts are wildly off the mark. Even mid-season, when the Hurricane Center updates its prediction, it nonetheless manages to swing and miss like Adam Dunn facing R.A. Dickey. People here would be well-advised to act upon the opposite of the forecast.

So much for experts. The same could be said about the people who cover, follow and even sometimes work in baseball: they're so often misinformed that any third-rate blogger from a minor league city can feast on the carcass of their predictions. As Father Time rolls out the tarp on 2013 it's a good time to look back and see how often a little Braindrizzling out-guessed the experts.

Let's start with last December, when the Mariners signed Jason Bay and Philadelphia inked Michael Young to contracts. We offered a big raspberry to both teams for aging without grace. Here's the Bay post, which suggested his signing was redundant on a team that already couldn't hit. Sure enough, in a platoon designed to hide his deficiencies, Bay batted .204.

Young hit much better, as was expected, but he was still 36. His third base defense was so putrid he graded out below replacement. The post suggested the creaky Phils would finish fourth in the East. They obliged.

The same month, Braindrizzling exploited its last opportunity to pile on Jeff Francoeur, scratching the metaphorical head about the Royals' continued employment of potential that never was. Francoeur posted a .238 on base percentage en route to employment in another field.

A week before Christmas, a bewildering trade between Tampa and Kansas City sent #2 starter James Shields and swingman Wade Davis to the Royals for a grab bag of Minor Leaguers including phenom Wil Myers.  We called it the "Gift of the Magi" trade because the developing team sacrificed the future for a present that didn't exist while the contenders relinquished a current asset for a future star right when the division seemed theirs for the taking. That's not quite how it worked out.

Shields was his usual brilliant self (13-9, 3.15 and leading the league in innings pitched) and helped KC come closer than ever to contention. (Davis, not so much.) Still, KC finished third in the division, six games out of the Wild Card. And now Shields gets expensive in '14 in his last season before free agency.

The trade did work out for the Rays though. Myers was all that and a box of Oreos, earning Rookie of the Year honors with his .293/.354/.478 body of work. His mid-season promotion coincided with Tampa Bay's lurch into the Wild Card. Myers helped solidify a lower-middle tier offense while he pitching starts were divided nearly equally among six quality hurlers even without Big Game James. The lesson: if Rays GM Andrew Friedman does something mystifying, assume he's up to something.

Seattle GM Jack Zdurencik gets no such benefits of the doubt. He signed 41-year-old Raul Ibanez to complement Jason Bay in an inconceivable outfield platoon and lit up this blog post, which called the combination a punch line. Ibanez defied the hourglass for awhile, hitting .267 with 24 home runs in the first half while butchering left field. With Seattle hopelessly out of contention, Zdurencik failed to cash in his new asset for some farm help and watched Ibanez turn into a pumpkin (.203, five homers) in the second half.

On New Year's Eve, Braindrizzling picked a fight with the venerable Bill James, godfather of Sabermetrics. Bill had it coming for projecting Josh Hamilton would play 147 games and hit .289/.356/.540 with 35 home runs. We called that "exceedingly generous" which was an exceedingly generous description. Hamilton managed to stay upright for 151 games, but that wasn't necessarily good news as he slumped to .250/.307/.432 and 21 homers.

Outfoxing Bill James is just dumb luck; outsmarting the Royals, Mariners and Phillies, well, that's like shooting fish in a barrel. We'll examine the success rate of in-season prognostications in a subsequent post.

Predictions Guaranteed or Your Money Back

On a major sports radio show today the hosts filled two of the short segments that interrupt the endless flow of commercials, promotions and public service announcements with a discussion of the 2013 MLB season.

Specifically, they offered their predictions about division winners and Wild Card participants, earnestly and authoritatively, with scant acknowledgment that they might as well have been predicting the weather in Wilkes-Barre six Tuesdays from now.

The programming break concluded and the network returned to its regularly-scheduled ads before eventually meandering back through another reading of yesterday's scores to the hosts, who would have had time to shower, shave, compete in a bocce tournament and call home in the interim. They then preceded to predict playoff winners right up to the World Series.

Listeners realize intuitively that this is all just for fun, that the hosts have to talk about something to fill literally 24 hours of each day with sports, and that no one is taking these predictions seriously. On the other hand, playoff results in baseball are a coin-flip the day before they start, even if you know who's squaring off and under what conditions. Discussing playoff outcomes in March has every bit the validity of guessing the number of stars in the universe.

Moreover, people with a mere glancing knowledge of baseball, which describes most all sports talk hosts, tend to predict last year's results. Their bold prognostications included the Nationals, Braves, Reds, Giants and Dodgers in the NL. Hey, what a coincidence: four of those five made last year's post-season and the other emptied its piggy bank on imported talent.

Let's instead recognize that part of baseball's beauty is its rampant unpredictability, a function of tomorrow's starting pitcher and winning percentages that rarely top 62% or fall below 38%, not withstanding this year's Astros.

In that vein, here are some real predictions, real in the sense that they will actually come to pass.

1. A team currently lost in the weeds will shock us slowly over 162 games and bust your playoff prediction bubble.
2. The credit for their advance will be spread wide, mostly in the cracks and crevices that are hard to discern, like relief pitching, bench play and luck. The sports media, unable to see how small improvements add up to a better team, will pronounce teamwork, a great clubhouse and a motivating manager responsible, primarily because there's no way to dispute empty claims.
3. One of the big-name teams will crash and burn. Probably your team.
4. Reports of the Yankees' demise are greatly exaggerated. They will make the playoffs and the universe will remain in stasis.
5. Another hotshot young Royals phenom will fail to fulfill his potential and the universe will remain in stasis.
6. Some team will finish exactly where everyone thinks they will, except their three best players will scuffle while three guys you never heard of will carry the team. In other words, we'll get everything wrong about them except their place in the standings.
7. By roughly game 40, some batter will have already socked more homers than he's ever produced in a single season en route to a break-out performance.
8. By roughly game 40, some pitcher will have already scored more wins and quality starts than he's ever produced in a single season en route to a break-out performance.
9. A pitcher like Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, Dan Haren or Ervin Santana will struggle to get outs again in '13 and we'll realize he didn't have an off-year in 2012; his career is in decline.
10. An everyday player will suddenly improve his on-base skills, power, base-stealing and defense, and we'll all assume he's juicing. Because that never happened before there were steroids.
11. Vin Scully will announce Dodger games for the 73rd consecutive year and the universe will remain in stasis. The Dodgers are a contender this year, so there's a chance that Scully will raise his voice at some point.
12. A third-rate outfit like the Indians or Padres will burst from the gate and electrify their fans before folding like origami and losing 89 games.
13. Attendance in Miami will drop below the Mendoza line for a rainy Wednesday night game against the Brewers. Or Rockies.
14. One of the teams that signed Justin Verlander, Buster Posey, Adam Wainwright, Rafael Soriano or Allen Craig to a rich, long-term deal will regret their decision and you'll shake your head at the team's stupidity even though all five contracts made sense at the time.
15. By April 3 at the very latest, John Sterling will grate on your nerves with his contrived braying at Yankee home runs.
16. On May 17, NBC News will declare Houston the loser in the AL West race.
17. On the last day of the season, the sudden-death game pitting two teams tied for the final Wild Card spot will draw lower ratings than an exhibition NFL re-run from 2004. 
18. A giant sinkhole could open up beneath Busch Stadium but the St. Louis Cardinals will still compete this year because that's what they do every year. With Albert Pujols bolted and Chris Carpenter's cooked and Tony LaRussa retired and Stan Musial gone the Cards will still be in the mix.
19. And the Cubs won't be. Again.
20. Bold prediction: Miguel Cabrera will bat .300+ with 30+ home runs. There, I said it.
21. Baseball and I will renew our vows. We have never stopped loving each other.

Predicting Alex Gonzalez and Mark Teixeira Switch Stat Lines

I never make predictions about who will win this, that or the other in baseball because the beauty of baseball is its unpredictability. (The corollary: I hate the financial structure that makes the Yankees a lock each year.)

To wit: look at all the players who have already eclipsed their 2009 accomplishments just a quarter of the way into the season. The best examples:

(Note: WARP is "wins against replacement player." This measures how much better a player performed compared to someone who could be picked up off the waiver wire. It includes baserunning, defense, etc. and takes into account position, ballpark, strength of opponents, etc. It's designed to be a catch-all measure of a player's value, stripping out the effect on him of his teammates and other external conditions. It's not a panacea, but a fine guide to a player's value. It's cumulative, so a player should have accumulated roughly one-quarter of last year's WARP.)

Carlos Silva
Last year:   33.7 IP    44H    11BB    9K    1-3 W-L    8.29 ERA    -1 WARP
This year:   65 IP      56 H   10BB   42K     7-0 W-L   3.31 ERA    1.3 WARP

Ty Wigginton

Last year:  11 HR   41 RBI   .277/.314/.400   -1.7 WARP
This year:  13 HR   32 RBI   .288/.369/.577   3.2 WARP

Kelly Johnson
Last year:   8 HR    29 RBI   .224/.303/.389   1.1 WARP
This year:  12HR    25 RBI   .253/.359/.554   2.4 WARP

Austin Kearns
Last year:   3 HR   17 RBI   21 R   6 2B   .195/.336/.305   0.2 WARP
This year:   3 HR   20 RBI   20 R   12 2B   .298/.372/.458   2.9 WARP

Jose Bautista
Last year:   13 HR   40 RBI   .235/.349/.408   2.3 WARP
This year:   15 HR   40 RBI   .247/.364/.586   2.7 WARP

Livan Hernandez
Last year:   184 IP    220 H    67 BB   102 K    9-12 W-L    5.43 ERA    0.2 WARP
This year:   61 IP      47 H     19 BB    27 K     4-3 W-L     2.08 ERA    2.8 WARP

Mike Pelfrey
Last year:   184 IP    213 H    66 BB    107 K    10-12 W-L    5.03 ERA    -0.6 WARP
This year:   64 IP      57 H     24 BB     41K       7-1 W-L       2.54 ERA    2.4 WARP

These players seem to fall into three distinct categories:

1. Guys who have figured something out or overcome an injury. Mike Pelfrey, for example is throwing a new pitch. Carlos Silva emerged from his two-year chrysalis. Austin Kearns has become more aggressive at the plate.

2. They're the same player, but they added a dimension. Kelly Johnson and Jose Bautista are hitting the same way, but more of their flies are clearing the fences.

3. Guys who have been visited by the good luck fairy and haven't a prayer of keeping it up. I'm looking at you, Livan Hernandez. You still don't get out the fan enough and you still play for the Nationals. The hits will keep on coming.

Raise your hand if, before the season started, you had Ubaldo Jimenez, Jaime Garcia and Jeff Nieman on your Cy Young Watch List. Stand up if you foresaw Vlad Guerrero bouncing back into MVP-style status. Dance the jig if you thought Jose Bautista and Ty Wigginton would out-homer ARod and Albert Pujols.

Predictions...hunh!...what are they good for?....Absolutely nothing! (Good God, y'all!) Say it again...

It's a great game...and they play it again tonight.

b

Predict-O-King's Idiot Baseball Ga-RUN-Tees

The Mighty and Marvelous Predict-O-King knows all and sees all. His predictions never fail. That's because the sports media always does.

Without further ado, his Idiot Baseball Ga-RUN-Tees:

1. Baseball "analysts" will predict series outcomes based on which team was hotter in September. Research by Baseball Analysts found that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between a team's September record and its playoff performance. Hey, who needs facts when you have opinions to publish!
2. A team that loses game 1 of a five-game series with its ace on the mound will be written off by the baseball media. It helps increase the excitement when they come back to win.
3. A team down 1-0 and facing the other team's ace will be written off, as if the ace is a guaranteed win, even though he went 17-11 on the year.
4. The underdog in a series will take game 1 on the road and the baseball media will pronounce that it has the "momentum." When it loses game 2, the baseball media will announce that the momentum has "shifted," as if it were a paradigm, or a continental shelf.
6. One team's ace will get lit up. Another team's slugger will take the collar twice. The baseball media, now practicing psychiatry, will determine that they "choked" or "felt the pressure" or weren't "clutch."The media will be unable to process the notion that even great players have bad days.
7. Baseball "analysts" will "analyze" an upcoming series by assigning wins and losses according to pitcher and home field, because as we all know, the team at home with the better starting pitcher wins in the playoffs 85% or 90% of the time. Or maybe its 52%, I forget.
8. Once again, some knucklehead will run out the statistic that the winner of game 1 in a five-game series wins the series 75% of the time. Of course, since the average series goes four games, the winner of any game you choose wins the series 75%.

The Mighty and Marvelous Predict-O-King has spoken!