Me vs. reality
by Chris JaffeJanuary 06, 2010
For the third straight year, I made my fearless (or is it brainless?) predictions for how the BBWAA vote would go. Now that the vote is in, let's see how I did:
Name BBWAA Me Dif. Andre Dawson 78 84 6 Bert Byleven 74 73 1 Robeto Alomar 74 82 8 Jack Morris 52 51 1 Barry Larkin 52 60 8 Lee Smith 47 52 5 Edgar Martinez 36 35 1 Tim Raines 30 36 6 Mark McGwire 24 30 6 Alan Trammell 22 17 5 Fred McGriff 22 24 2 Don Mattingly 16 15 1 Dave Parker 15 18 3 Dale Murphy 12 15 3 Harold Baines 6 6 0
Good news and bad news here.
Good news: I was close on almost everyone. I'm especially proud of my guesses on Blyleven and Martinez. My margin of error was only 3.7% on average, and I was within eight percent on everyone.
Bad news: for the first time ever, I missed an induction call. I said Alomar would and the BBWAA disagreed. That said, I wasn't off by much - eight more votes and he walks in. Still, it was a miss. Also, a lot of these guys were out of order.
Final note: Repoz at BTF made a tally of HoF ballots that totaled almost one-fourth of the electorate. His margin of error was 4.96% per ballot, so I was a little closer. That's good for me because that helps justify my annual column. (I'd still do it anyway, but it would just be an exercise done for fun). Repoz was more likely to really nail a person's vote total than me, but he was also more likely to be widely off the mark, as was the case with Alomar, Raines, and Mattingly.
We both had Alomar go in, and he also had Blyleven go in. Man, it was a tough year to call the vote!
History instructor by day, statnerd by night, Chris Jaffe leads one of the most exciting double lives imaginable; with the exception of every other double life possible to imagine. Despite his lack of comic-book-hero-worthiness, Chris enjoys farting around with this stuff. His new book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers is available for order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
Dag…I’m still pulling in stragglers and Alomar’s % is still going up!
Good work as usual and thanks for the help.