MLB Demonstrates the Uselessness of Projection Systems

Major League Baseball is touting today the Steamer baseball projections for 2016. Steamer is one of several Sabermetric projection systems -- including Fangraphs' ZIPS, Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA and the Hardball Times' Oliver -- that offer a crystal ball of sorts on future player and team performance.

These systems generally work the same way, projecting the accomplishments of players by comparing their careers to similar players in history, averaging the performances of those similar players in their next season and adjusting that to the player in question.

The MLB.com story is not a particularly interesting read. It projects that Miguel Cabrera will win another batting title, Clayton Kershaw will again top the pitching charts and Giancarlo Stanton will once more outslug the field. 

Shocking.

This is what you get with projection systems, which have no ability to predict the unpredictable. The 2015 accomplishments of Jake Arrieta, Dee Gordon, AJ Pollock, Dallas Keuchel, the Kansas City Royals and New York Mets were no less a mystery to these projection systems than to you.

They also have no ability to predict outlying performances. They will never project any player will slam 58 home runs, bat .360 or accrue 21 pitching wins unless he has done that regularly in the past. 

Moreover, Steamer does not attempt to project playing time, so even though Stanton has missed 40 games a season in his career, the projection assumes he plays 150 games. (Some of these systems do take playing time into account, which means they are wildly wrong slightly less often.)

These systems gave us the Angels, Dodgers and Nationals as baseball's best teams in 2015. They got the AL East and West almost exactly wrong. They offer some mild insights that can be almost completely encapsulated in 13 simple rules.

So don't bother reading the article. (Read this one about Statcast instead.) And let's just enjoy the raging unpredictability of the game that served us so well last year.

Pick: Red Sox over Padres in World Series

Take a trip back to April 1, 2015. If some prankster had that day whispered in your ear that he had bet the house that the Red Sox, Tigers, A's, Nationals and Padres would all win their divisions; that the NL Central would be a stinking cesspool of mediocrity; and that the Yankees, Blue Jays, Royals, Twins, Astros, Mets, Cubs, Pirates and Giants would all be selling off at the trade deadline; you wouldn't have thought it an April Fools gag.

Those results were totally plausible...and exactly wrong. All the presumed division winners other than the Nationals have been eliminated from contention, if not literally than practically, and the Nats' hopes hang on a very fragile thread.

Meanwhile, it appears that five of the seven presumed also-rans are playoff locks, with only the defending champs keeping hope alive for a post-season berth.

As things currently stand, only the Cardinals and Dodgers would repeat their division titles, though L.A. would secure its position mostly by the scuffling of its division rivals. 

Part of the magic of baseball is that even its unpredictability is unpredictable, but this is unusual even for the National Pastime. Houston, which has 71 wins with a quarter of the season to play, hadn't tallied 71 in a full season for six years. The Mets had lost more games than they've won every season since '08, when Johan Santan, Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes led the club. Toronto's last meaningful October skirmishes pre-date email, the nation of Serbia and the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

And the Cubs, well, they've been the Cubs since they got Bartmanned by the Marlins more than a decade hence. Their time seemed anon, but not this anon. Who's Kyle Schwarber again?

It's making for quite a fun campaign, particularly for fans of several woebegone franchises. It'd be fun to see any one of the upstarts win it all.