I'm bracing for a suck season, too. But the folks at FiveThirtyEight, the sometimes dubious prediction org, have things looking pretty good for the Yanks. Of course, we don't know how many of their staffers are eating mushrooms, drinking heavily around the clock, or smoking that really good weed you can now buy at retail "private club" storefronts in New York City (not that I would know...cough).
Can we doomsayers be wrong about this? Are we missing some variety of boat? Do they have a statistic-mashing computer program with algorithms that go far beyond the powers of normal men--or even us?
Guess we'll find out. I did pick 95 wins, if I remember correctly (always an even-odds proposition, at best), but only because my middle name is Pollyanner and the low-90s numbers seemed to already be taken. Reflexively, I couldn't bring myself to dip into the 80s. (Which is also a Yankees decade better left forgotten.)
Posts
4 comments:
All due respect, JM, but I no longer follow 538. Then again, I have a long history of barely-rational one-way vendettas.
Might not happen exactly like they predict but seems reasonable.
Yankees should finish ahead of the Re Sox.
I'm sticking with my 77 prediction.
BUT...there is a wild card here, in that so many teams now are so badly put together, and in particular, short of starting pitching. Makes it hard to say for sure which way things will break.
Put this Yankees team in, say, the AL East of 1978—they would finish 5th. In today's game? Who knows?
JM -
Thanks for posting the chart. It's always interesting to see the difference between what (a fan) perceives and what the numbers say.
They're wrong about Toronto BTW (see my rant in the post above) It's their division and you can take 1-3 wins away from the other teams in the division because of it.
Post a Comment