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April too early to predict MLB
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Also by Jonah Braun:
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- Top seeds hope to finish strong (March 13, 2008)
- Last chance for teams on bubble (March 6, 2008)
- UW, UI square off in 1st round (March 6, 2008)
- Freshmen pick up slack (March 3, 2008)
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- Alomar sent to Mets, Brewers sign Casanova (December 11, 2001)
by Jonah Braun
Friday, April 4, 2008
My friend and I think the Los Angeles Dodgers will accumulate 214 home runs, 948 runs batted in, .294 team batting average and 976 runs. Yeah, I know — if we were responsible for keeping statistics in Major League Baseball, the Dodgers would be pretty good. But they wouldn’t just be good; they would be in the playoffs and be a better offensive team than the 2007 Red Sox, who won the World Series in four games.
I, like many sports fans across the country, love to predict the future, and we tend to believe what we want to happen, will happen. In fact, it is rare that you hear someone say their team is going to do poorly. In baseball, especially, these predictions are so pointless and farfetched that when I see John Kruk make his annual predictions on ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight,” I can’t help but laugh.
This year, for example, Kruk picked the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians to make the World Series. I don’t know if Kruk knows this, but the Cubs have not won a World Series in 100 years, and though they have improved from last season, it is quite a bold prediction to think that a team will win the National League this early in the year.
Baseball is not a game played on paper. Sure, statistics and trends can give people an idea of how a team will do, but if the game were purely based on numbers, then the New York Yankees would have been to the World Series more often than they have in recent years.
The biggest problem with making predictions in baseball is that you have to assume that a team can remain healthy for an entire season — that never happens. In baseball, like every sport, something goes wrong during the season with almost every team, and someone gets hurt.
Using the Dodgers as an example, before the season even started, they had three third basemen go down with different injuries. Now, rookie Blake DeWitt has to stand at the hot corner with no professional experience above class AA. Based on his play, Los Angeles’ third-base situation can either be solved or get way out of hand.
It is one thing to analyze teams’ strengths and weaknesses but another to predict whether or not they will succeed over the course of the entire season. At 162 games, Major League Baseball’s season is far longer than any other sports organization, and bad things are bound to happen — but it’s not always the bad things that destroy preseason predictions. Look at the Colorado Rockies — for one month the Rockies got hot and didn’t lose. Their pitching and hitting were better than every team they faced, and that was the difference between the Rockies’ and every other NL team’s September.
Going back to John Kruk’s predictions, he and people like him love to believe what they’re saying — and who doesn’t? I know fans of the Reds, Pirates, Brewers and Cubs who all believe that their team has a legitimate shot at winning the NL Central division. When I hear predictions like these, I always think to myself, “Yeah, we’ll see in October.”
When people tell me they heard an “expert” say their team will be a contender, I always think back to 2004, when the ESPN “expert” Harold Reynolds picked the Arizona Diamondbacks to win the NL West. That season was Arizona’s worst ever, finishing with an abysmal 51-111 record. So when people tell me that Tim Kurkjian, another ESPN analyst, said that the Blue Jays will win the AL East, I think back to Reynolds and his “expert” opinion.
In 2006, the Detroit Tigers were 150-1 odds to win the AL pennant at the beginning of the season, and everyone knows what happened that year — the Tigers shocked the baseball world and went to the World Series. On paper, the Tigers were three years removed from their worst season ever, but when everything falls into place, any team can play far better than what is expected.
So while I do often take part in these faulty predictions, I know that at the same time, they are nothing more than an opinion based on what people hope and think will happen based on their limited knowledge of the sport. In baseball, more than any other sport, it is easier to hope for the best and harder to anticipate what will actually happen.
Jonah is a freshman with no declared major. Got predictions of your own? He can be reached at jbraun@badgerherald.com.
Anonymous (April 4, 2008 @ 9:56am):
Wow! Now that's an article about sports that is enjoyable to read. Interesting, Truthful and well written.
Keep them coming!
Anonymous (April 4, 2008 @ 11:12am):
Why do always write about how the "experts" are wrong? Why don't you be bold and make your own picks instead of sitting back and pointing out how everyone else was wrong? That's the easy thing to do ...
Anonymous (September 8, 2008 @ 3:20pm):
jonah ryan BRAUN...give him a raise NOW
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