I am finishing a first edition of the Free Agent list this evening. I found a slightly more efficient way to work, so I got it done faster than usual, but still a month later than usual. Both speed and delay were abetted by the lockdown: far fewer players have signed their contracts for next year than usually do, so I felt less urgency to start, and I had less data to record. If I give Dave the data in a format he can work with, the FA list should come out soon, with lots of blanks where the contracts should (and eventually will) be.
I did have to do some digging for possible contract information, to make a reasonable effort not to miss anything. And in the process of that digging I came across an article by Steven Goldman in Baseball Prospectus. I highly recommend that each of you subscribe to BP – it isn’t expensive, and it will be the source of our stats this year. Their team tracker is a good way to keep daily tabs on your team, and monitor its BP-projected prospects for the rest of the season.
My recommendation for Steve Goldman’s writing is usually less than enthusiastic. He tends to be wordy. Yes, I know this is an ironic critique coming from me. But this time I recommend the article, The Tomb of PECOTA Week. The subtitle is what caught my attention: The Secret Column on the Card. I am going to, umm, test the bounds of fair use by quoting extensively.
“PECOTA has always been misunderstood as a mere predictor of performances. It’s also a vehicle for exploring alternate dimensions in an infinite universe. A player’s 30th percentile performance takes place on Earth-23, his 80th percentile performance on Earth-149…”
PECOTA stands for something, I forget what, but what THAT stands for is BP’s methods of doing projections which involve running tens of thousands of simulated seasons in which each player’s performance varies around a mean. In some of those seasons, random factors lead to 30th’ percentile performance (significantly worse than expected) while in other seasons other random outcomes lead to an 80th percentile performance (a lot better than expected).
If we think of each of those ten thousand simulations as alternate realities, then PECOTA is giving us a glimpse into parallel universes, transforming us into nerdy Paul Atriedeses. (That’s a Dune reference, in case someone is still working on their “must read” list.)
Goldman imagines a secret column on each player’s BP projection card, for scenarios in which the player’s outcomes do not take the form of OBP, ERA, or WAR.
“(PECOTA) tells us only about those things in its purview, baseball statistics. It cannot know that there are worlds in which, for many reasons, the statistics don’t happen; the player stops. This possibility is always implicit in the percentiles even if it’s never listed among the predictions; it would be cruel to do so. We know it’s there, but we don’t like to admit it. Sometimes a player who has too little luck or too much of the hubris that comes with being young, rich, and male will find his prediction on the black part of the card, the sinister column.”
Goldman assembles an “All-Star Team Sinister” of players whose outcomes in a particular season fell completely outside of PECOTA. Bill Delancy; Tony Horton Ken Hubbs, Ed Delahanty, Roberto Clemente, Darryl Kile, Steve Olin, Thurman Munson, Roy Campanella, Ray Chapman, J.R. Richard, Oscar Taveras, and Jose Fernandez all make his team.
I thought of two Angels, former Wolverine Tyler Skaggs, and fellow pitcher Nick Adenhart who, very early in his second big-league season tossed six innings of shutout ball at Angels Stadium, the best outing of his career to that point. He died later that same night in an auto accident when someone else ran a red light. He left a hole in so many places… including, as I recall, an EFL roster.
I also thought of my nephew Micah, who one lonely night over a year ago was doing something with his gun when it went off, shattered his hip, and severed his femoral artery. No one was there to help him avoid bleeding to death.
“(Catastrophes) are out there waiting for us just beyond the trees. We know they are. We even know we could make a PECOTA card for it, one for each of us, and that on a given Earth the season happens, the players play, the home runs are hit according to the projection but we don’t get to watch it unfold for it is no longer an Earth of which we are part.
“We know that we could make such a PECOTA card, but if we did we couldn’t bear to look at it.”
I’m 65. I think I’m in about average shape. According to the sinister column on my PECOTA card, In 10,000 simulated seasons, I disappear from the roster before the end of about 100 of them.
I am still the median person in our league in terms of age.
Please take care. Play smart. Don’t get yourself thrown out on the bases like a nincompoop.
Wow, Ron, what a sobering post. I’m not sure we could function if we ponder our own PECOTA cards too extensively, yet doing so was also a staple of much of the evangelistic preaching I heard in my younger years. And I confess I mention it from time to time in my own sermons trying to encourage people to tend to their spiritual needs. I’m hitting the big 70 this week, so I imagine my own sinister cards number a few more than the 100 you estimate for yourself. I think I’m the second in the league to hit this landmark, though I need to check with Dave, my chief rival for those second-place honors.
The list of players on the list of those who drew the sinister card of course includes my childhood favorite player Roberto Clemente, who at least had 18 seasons before his untimely death. The first player story to confront me with this reality was Ken Hubbs, NL Rookie of the Year in 1962 at age 20. His offense was not strong in his two seasons, but who knows what he might have developed into. He died in a plane crash of a small plane he was piloting when he was just 22 and I was 11. He had only 3 Topps baseball cards, including his last in 1964. This site won’t let me stick it in here, but it had black borders, headed by the words “In Memoriam.”