After watching five minutes of the NCAA championship game two days ago, my mind turned away from the professional North Carolina team beating up on a collegiate Michigan State squad. Instead, I started to think about the arrival of Major League Baseball’s opening day.

Like many fans, I have consumed more spring training notes, scouting reports and expert predictions over the past month than pre-med students preparing for the MCAT have read about biology. If I studied for school like I read about baseball, I would be writing this column from Harvard instead of Wisconsin.

But even as I spent hours trying to figure out if Brewers prospect Mat Gamel was major league ready yet (he’s not), I knew what a waste all the time spent reading was — and not just because I have a journalism research paper I should be focusing on.

Here is the worst-kept secret about preseason baseball analysis: It is completely worthless.

Every year experts, bloggers and beat writers left at dying newspapers give us daily updates for what we can expect during the season, but any success they have with their predictions is purely accidental.

Because in April, no one knows anything.

Whether it is evaluating prospects, projecting how the division will play out or even going so far as to predict the World Series Champions, “experts” strike out more than the Arizona Diamondbacks in September (last year was an especially poor year, with everyone whiffing on the Tampa Bay Rays and many predicting a record-setting offense for the Detroit Tigers).

There are several reasons for this yearly tradition of ineptitude.

The first and easiest reason to explain is injuries. While baseball is usually the most individual team game of any major team sport, the loss of one individual can have a ripple effect on the rest of the team.

This is seen most often with a frontline starter. If a top innings-eater goes down — as violent power pitchers often do — it puts more pressure on either a converted reliever to fill his spot or on some triple-A call up. Then pressure is added on the bullpen when the new starter eventually fails. In the end the season crashes and burns magnificently with the added stress, all because one top player was lost for the year (welcome to the Brewers’ history with ear injuries).

A more compelling reason for awful predictions than the unfortunate loss of a key player, however, is the curious refusal of many baseball writers to embrace modern statistics.

I know that sounds dumb when new statistics are shoved down our throats every day. But somehow in an age with OPS (on base percentage plus slugging, for those of you stuck in the dark age) or even OPS+ (adjusted for park and league averages) we still get to read about how many RBIs someone had last season (probably the most overrated hitting statistic). Even when WHIP (walks and hits per inning) is a much better indicator of a pitchers effectiveness, Cy Young voting is still heavily influenced by the useless wins and losses statistic.

Baseball writers like to talk about how they love sabermetrics, but few of them actually have done away with the old stats — unless they support an opinion they have already formed.

Finally — and perhaps the most frustrating reason for useless baseball predictions — is we never know what is going on in a player’s head. How can Cliff Lee transform from a fifth starter to a Cy Young winner in one year? How does Justin Verlander fall off the face of the earth after shining his rookie year? And my personal favorite, how does a can’t miss prospect like Rickie Weeks own a career .758 OPS?

For all the advanced statistics I love, there is still no stat to explain why Tim Lincecum is dominating hitters, but the Cincinnati Reds’ Homer Bailey can’t make major league hitters miss.

The sad part is I know all this reading is worthless, and only in six months will we have an actual evaluation of the league, but like the rest of America, I can’t stop analyzing our nation’s pastime.

So I hear all the predictions (Red Sox for the World Series being mine), and I know the media machine that covers sports will never stop.

Just remember that if someone manages to get a prediction right, even David Eckstein hit a home run last season.

Michael is a junior majoring in journalism. Think baseball writers deserve more credit? Are you hopelessly addicted to preseason baseball analysis? Let him know at [email protected].