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At his day job, Silver works for Baseball Prospectus, a loosely organized think tank that, in the last ten years, has revolutionized the interpretation of baseball stats. Furthermore, Silver himself invented a system called PECOTA, an algorithm for predicting future performance by baseball players and teams. (It stands for “player empirical comparison and optimization test algorithm,†but is named, with a wink, after the mediocre Kansas City Royals infielder Bill Pecota.) Baseball Prospectus has a reputation in sports-media circles for being unfailingly rigorous, occasionally arrogant, and almost always correct.
This season, for example, the PECOTA system predicted that the Tampa Bay Rays would win 90 games. This seemed bold, even amusing, given that the Rays were arguably the worst team in baseball. In 2007, they’d lost 96 games. They’d finished last in all but one season of their ten-year existence. (In 2004, they finished fourth.) They had some young talent, sure, but most people, even those in the Rays’ front office, thought that if the team simply managed to win more games than it lost, that would represent a quantum leap.
PECOTA, however, saw it differently. PECOTA recognized that the past Rays weren’t a hopelessly bad team so much as a good team hampered by a few fixable problems—which, thanks to some key off-season changes, had been largely remedied. Silver argued on the Baseball Prospectus Website that the long-suffering team had finally “decided to transform themselves from a sort of hedge fund for undervalued assets into a real, functional baseball club.â€
PECOTA, as it turns out, wasn’t exactly right. The Rays didn’t win 90 games this year. They won 97 games and are currently playing the Red Sox for the American League championship.
This season, for example, the PECOTA system predicted that the Tampa Bay Rays would win 90 games. This seemed bold, even amusing, given that the Rays were arguably the worst team in baseball. In 2007, they’d lost 96 games. They’d finished last in all but one season of their ten-year existence. (In 2004, they finished fourth.) They had some young talent, sure, but most people, even those in the Rays’ front office, thought that if the team simply managed to win more games than it lost, that would represent a quantum leap.
PECOTA, however, saw it differently. PECOTA recognized that the past Rays weren’t a hopelessly bad team so much as a good team hampered by a few fixable problems—which, thanks to some key off-season changes, had been largely remedied. Silver argued on the Baseball Prospectus Website that the long-suffering team had finally “decided to transform themselves from a sort of hedge fund for undervalued assets into a real, functional baseball club.â€
PECOTA, as it turns out, wasn’t exactly right. The Rays didn’t win 90 games this year. They won 97 games and are currently playing the Red Sox for the American League championship.