My predictions vs. Reality

Posted by Chris Jaffe
Yesterday, I published an article predicting what would happen in today's Cooperstown election. How'd I do? Well . . .

I said Gossage would be the only one to go in, with Rice narrowly missing. Check and check.

I should note, I originally had Rice getting 76%, but figured I'm going to root for my predictions to be true, and I don't want to root for Rice to get in. Since I figured he was on the borderline, I changed my prediction. Not at all scientific, then again I never threw in with those who thought sabermetrics was a science.

I pegged this year's vote to have the fewest names per ballot in BBWAA's Cooperstown voting history. Yup, it did.

Looking at the 15 specific players I guesstimated on:
Exactly right: 1 (Parker)
Off by 1%: 3 (Concepcion, Trammell, Morris)
Off by 2%: 3 (Rice, Murphy, Baines)
Off by 3%: 3 (Gossage, John, Mattingley)
Off by 4%: 1 (Dawson)

Off by 6%: 1 (Blyleven)
Off by 8%: 2 (Smith, McGwire)

Commically off: 1 (Raines)

I did an absolutely horrible, inept, and ludicrously bad job on it. I used some tallies to guide me. But, I based it on what those tallies were saying 2 weeks before the vote came out. Repoz and Keith Law kept tallying, and their estimates dropped down, thus I screwed up. This isn't an excuse, because I should've handled it better, but merely an explanation.

On the backloggers, I was of by an average of 3.1%. Altogether, I had two-thirds within 3%. I feel pretty good about it.

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 pre-order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.

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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

My predictions vs. Reality

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