Post-Mortem On ESPN's Pre-Season Predictions

I love doing this stuff. Today I decided to look up ESPN's pre-2008 baseball season predictions to compare them to the actual outcomes, so far. The results are always amusing.

(Click here to see their consensus prediction for the final standings.)

As I write this the final picture is still not clear, since the AL Central might go either to the Twins or White Sox, but for my purposes it doesn't matter. Not a single ESPN expert predicted either team to reach the playoffs

19 different ESPN experts made their predictions for who would reach each playoff position, and also for who would beat whom in the series. As of now, only 2 of the World Series predictions remain possible: Eric Karabell of ESPN Fantasy's Cubs over Red Sox and Pedro Gomez's Angels over Dodgers.

There seems to have been great enthusiasm for the Mets, which is not surprising I guess, but also for the Tigers, Indians and Braves. Only Karabell and Sean McAdam predicted the Phillies to take the East and 4 others picked them for the wild card.

I put all the predictions in a spreadsheet and did a little math: assigning 1 point for a correct prediction and 1/2 point for predicting the wild card as division champs or vice-versa (e.g. predicting the Phillies as wild card or Red Sox to win the division). A perfect pick would be 8 points. I came up with these totals:

Jonah Keri			4
Tim Kurkjian			4
Keith Law			3.5
Sean McAdam			3.5
Jorge Arangure Jr.		3.5
Rob Neyer			3
Bob Klapisch			3
Peter Pascarelli	        3
John Shea			2.5
Peter Gammons			2.5
Pedro Gomez			2.5
Steve Phillips			2.5
Jerry Crasnick			2.5
Eric Karabell			2.5
Buster Olney			2
Enrique Rojas			2
Jayson Stark			1.5
Amy Nelson			1.5
Nate Ravitz			1.5

Ouch! I like Jasyon Stark, but numbers don't lie. And maybe Jonah Keri and Tim Kurkjian deserve some praise, but 4 isn't really all that good. Kurkjian predicted a Red Sox over Mets series, Perhaps there's some Shea nostalgia and wishful thinking going on, and he predicted the Yankees as wild cards. The Mets and Indians are his only conventional mistakes, and lots of others made them.

I'll take my hat off to Keri for predicting both wild cards correctly, something only he and Peter Pascarelli did. But Keri also predicted the Yankees, Mets, Indians and D-Backs to take their divisions. That's a lot of important bad picks.

The most correct predictions were for the Cubbies. 17 of the 19 predictions had them winning the Central, with the other two taking the Brewers, so the Central was the most predictable division this year. 10 of 19 picked the Angels to take the AL West and 7 picked the Dodgers in the NL West.

There are also predictions for MVP, Cy Young and Rookie of the Year. I won't get into them, but these are much harder to predict and it's no surprise that few of them look plausible now.