100 (More) Years of Solitude, or Why I Botched That Cubs Pick So Badly

Making predictions is both one of the best and one of the worst parts of my job.

Preseason predictions are tons of fun. It’s a chance to crack open the numbers, weigh all the paths a season might take, and make an informed call on the likely winners and losers, over a 162-game stretch.

Do these preseason picks always come through? Of course not. Maybe I can hang my hat on picking the Brewers to win the NL Wild Card and claim their first postseason berth in 26 years. But then again, I picked the Mets to win the NL East and the Indians to win the AL Central. If I could see exactly how the season would unfold, every year, I’d have ransacked Vegas by now, bought my own island, and funneled the remaining funds into buying an MLB team, moved the team back to Montreal, built a downtown stadium, and named myself GM emeritus.

But at least those season-long guesses would be educated guesses. If you miss, it’s not because of small sample size issues. It’s because you failed to account for something important, such as injury issues, unexpected gains and losses in performance, and shifting dynamics between teams.

No, the problem here is making playoff picks.

My editors at ESPN.com ask me to make playoff picks every year. I also make picks in other venues–on radio/podcasts with people like Elliott Price and Dave Dameshek, on TV when ESPNews calls, anywhere that the host can get a quick sound bite. Every time I make these picks, I always (ALWAYS) issue the following caveat: Anyone can win the post-season…the best team rarely wins it all. The 83-win Cardinals of 2006, the Wild Card Marlins of 2003, the good but not great Dbacks of 2001…many teams have backed up that theory in recent years.

When a playoff series lasts seven games, or even worse, when we get these toss-up, five-game series in the LDS round, the best teams become especially vulnerable. You do your best to use logic in picking them. In “Baseball Between the Numbers”, Nate Silver and Dayn Perry tried to solve the mystery “Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s Shit Work in the Playoffs?” by developing a playoff-specific formula called “Secret Sauce”. Confirming what conventional wisdom has to say on the subject, the Sauce finds that teams with strikeout-inducing starting pitchers, an airtight defense and a lights-out closer fare better, as a whole, than their competition. Offense isn’t all that relevant, says the Sauce.

OK, sounds good. So you try to make picks based on that formula. The Tampa Bay Rays trot out Scott Kazmir and James Shields as their top starters (check), owned the best Defensive Efficiency in MLB this season (check) and…well their set-up men Grant Balfour and J.P. Howell are lights-out anyway, so maybe that’s enough to hand two- and three-run leads to Dan Wheeler and/or Troy Percival and get them through the playoffs. So, I picked the Rays to win the LDS and LCS round and advance to the World Series.

OK now the NL. The Chicago Cubs trot out no fewer than THREE elite, high-strikeout pitchers at the top of their rotation: Ryan Dempster, Carlos Zambrano and Rich Harden. Their defense isn’t quite on the Rays’ level, but it does the job. And their closer, Kerry Wood, has done a great job all year, bolstered by the utterly unhittable Carlos Marmol in the set-up role. Plus if offense matters even a little in the playoffs, the Cubs scored more runs than any team in the NL during the regular season. Conclusion: Cubs Win, right?

So, Cubs over Dodgers in 3, then over the Phillies, then beating the Rays to win the World Series.

I’d like to say that was the world’s worst typo, but it was not. In fact, the Dodgers just swept the Cubs out of the playoffs in 3 games. While I praised the underrated SP pair of Derek Lowe and Chad Billingsley as being up to the task against the Cubs, I didn’t go far enough. I didn’t give the Dodgers enough credit for their bullpen tandem of Takashi Saito and Jonathan Broxton. I didn’t acknowledge the defensive improvement they made when they subbed in Rafael Furcal and Blake DeWitt in the middle infield in lieu of Angel Berroa and Jeff Kent.

But above all, I just completely whiffed on whatever it is that makes a team steamroll the rest of the league and win 95-plus games in the regular season, only to roll over and die in a three-game playoff sweep. Now, the Dodgers are moving on, and for the second straight post-season, the one three-game sweep I picked for the first round turned out to have the exact OPPOSITE result (hello, Rockies over Phillies ’07).

It may just be me. Maybe I’m missing the hidden flaws that plague the elite regular-season teams while underestimating the strengths of the supposed underdogs. Maybe I need to go back to the lab, investigate a dozen other variants of Secret Sauce, and come back with a recipe that will predict playoff results with 100% accuracy, and make a mean glaze for grilled salmon too. I will certainly redouble my efforts next season and try to do better.

But maybe, just maybe, this is all completely random. True statheads hate the word “luck”, so maybe we just call this rampant, out-of-control variance.

I’m willing to believe it’s both.

I have a long, long way to go before I can call myself a top-level analyst.

At the same time, the baseball playoffs are so random that predictions become nearly meaningless. Best to sit back, enjoy, and let variance happen.