Batter's Box Record Prediction Contest Results

Sunday, December 13 2009 @ 08:35 PM EST

Well, the regular season ended over 2 months ago, but it's never too late to re-visit the crazy predictions we made way back in March. These are the results of the Batter's Box Record Prediction Contest. Click through to find out who will be taking home the inaugural title of Da Box Resident Seer (and can someone come up with a better title?).

A reminder of how the contest worked. Contestants were asked to predict the regular-season record of every team, and their score is calculated by the average deviation in terms of wins. For example, if you predicted the Jays to win 98 games, that's a deviation of 23 since they only won 75 (sorry to rub it in). The total score is the average of the deviation for all teams. First, some data (sorry about the ugly chart):

Team	Actual Wins	Average Box Prediction	Bang-on Guesses
New York Yankees	103	91	none
Boston Red Sox	95	94	AWeb, Ron, seeyou, nathanelias, esteBENloaiza
Tampa Bay Rays	84	89	none
Toronto Blue Jays	75	82	parrot11, Ron
Baltimore Orioles	64	72	electric carrot
Minnesota Twins	87	83	esteBENloaiza
Detroit Tigers	86	81	parrot11, 92-93
Chicago White Sox	79	78	Mudie, 92-93
Cleveland Indians	65	85	none
Kansas City Royals	65	75	none
Los Angeles Angels	97	88	none
Texas Rangers	87	76	none
Seattle Mariners	85	72	none
Oakland Athletics	75	85	none
Philadelphia Phillies	93	88	esteBENloaiza
Florida Marlins	87	78	none
Atlanta Braves	86	84	PECOTA
New York Mets	70	90	none
Washington Nationals	59	66	none
St. Louis Cardinals	91	83	none
Chicago Cubs	83	92	none
Milwaukee Brewers	80	83	Mudie
Cincinnati Reds	78	77	Mike Green, electric carrot
Houston Astros	74	72	none
Pittsburgh Pirates	62	67	Brian
Los Angeles Dodgers	95	90	none
Colorado Rockies	92	76	none
San Francisco Giants	88	77	Ron
San Diego Padres	75	70	John Northey
Arizona Diamondbacks	70	86	none

By the way, if you want to re-visit your predictions, check out the original contest thread.

Some Analysis

AL East - Nothing terribly out of the ordinary happened in the AL East this year. The Yankees were 12 games better than we thought they would be, but at least we all knew they'd be a very good team. PECOTA actually saw this coming, pegging the Yanks for 99 wins, while the most optimistic (or pessimistic) Bauxite said 95. Props to Mudie and esteBENloaiza who predicted the AL East with the most accuracy - an average of 5 wins off.

AL Central - The top three teams were pretty easy to peg, but we all thought the Indians would be right there with the Twins, Tigers and White Sox, and boy were we wrong. The Indians won 65 games, 20 fewer than Da Box' collective prediction of 85. The closest Bauxite was seeyou, who was still 11 games too optimistic. seeyou did well for the whole division, projecting the Central with an accuracy of 6 wins/team, compared to a Box average of 8.4.

AL West - Boy, was this a wild one. On average, Bauxites missed AL West teams by almost 11 games, and there weren't even any individual teams that we came close on. (In fact, not a single Bauxite correctly predicted any single team in this division.) We were off by 9 games on the Angels, 11 on Texas, 7 on Seattle and 10 on Oakland. electric carrot had the best showing, as he was only a game off on his Seattle prediction, and 3 off on Oakland for a division average of 7.5.

NL East - Another division that was tough to predict, though it was mostly because of the Mets. Bauxites thought the Mets would take the division with 90 wins; they won 70, finishing 4th. Other than that we didn't do too badly. Props to esteBENloaiza for nailing the Phillies.

NL Central - the easiest division to predict in 2009; on average, we mis-fired by 5.6 wins. For the Cubs and Cards, the actual results were just about flipped from our predictions, and other than those 2 teams we were very close. Mad props to the roster's own John Northey, who foresaw this division with more precision than any Bauxite foresaw any division. John was wrong by no more than 6 wins for any team for an average deviation of 3.8 in the division.

NL West - we all knew the Dodgers would win the division, and we all knew the Padres would be bad, but other than that the West was a struggle (we weren't even particularly close on the Dodgers and Pads). Props to Ron for pegging the Giants when most Bauxites were 10+ games off.

And now, the results! The explanation of the scoring is at the top - the lower the better.

Name	Score
electric carrot	7.33
nathanelias	7.47
Mudie	7.53
92-93	7.67
seeyou	7.90
parrot11	8.23
ANationalAcrobat	8.27
Mike Green	8.30
brent	8.43
Dave Rutt	8.53
John Northey	8.60
Brian	8.70
AWeb	8.73
Ron	8.73
mathesond	8.80
Nick Holmes	8.90
esteBENloaiza	8.93
PECOTA	9.03
VBF	9.47

Congratulations to electric carrot for taking home the crown! nathanelias takes the silver and Mudie rounds out the top 3. Further congratulations to Ron and esteBENloaiza, who each nailed three separate teams despite finishing in the lower half of the overall standings. Also: congrats to everyone except VBF for besting BP's fancy-schmancy projection system PECOTA! I guess PECOTA just had an off-year. Or Bauxites are just brilliant. Yeah, I like that better.

By the way, in case you were wondering (you weren't, but I was): Predicting 81 wins for all 30 teams would have resulted in a score of 9.53. You just squeaked in there, VBF!

Some more data for your consuming pleasure: each year, Vegaswatch looks back at predictions from projection systems and notable baseball writers. (Here is the write-up for the 2009 edition.) They use a different criteria: RMSE (root mean squared error). I believe RMSE rewards consistency a bit more, so making a wildly inaccurate prediction would have more of a negative impact on one's final score. I'll let the math majors debate the merits of each evaluation method, but for now let's just look at what the standings would like if we combined Da Box' contest with the predictions evaluated by Vegaswatch (which are bolded):

Name	Score
nathanelias	9.04
seeyou	9.06
CAIRO	9.09
electric carrot	9.41
RLYW	9.44
Marcel	9.57
CHONE	9.63
Mike Green	9.64
92-93	9.64
O/U	9.65
Mudie	9.66
MGL	9.66
brent	9.75
THT	9.77
ANationalAcrobat	9.85
Brown	10.03
Dave Rutt	10.08
Sheehan	10.11
SI	10.15
Henson	10.21
ZiPS	10.25
Nick Holmes	10.26
Law	10.26
Brian	10.29
AWeb	10.44
mathesond	10.45
parrot11	10.47
Passan	10.50
Edes	10.83
John Northey	10.88
esteBENloaiza	11.18
PECOTA	11.42
VBF	11.49
Ron	11.91

Man, I gotta say, nice work guys. We did just as well as a bunch of "experts" and "projection systems". I'm sure ESPN will be coming knocking any day. They could use someone to fill the Gammons void, anyway - why not an entire online community of brilliant Jays fans???

If you're wondering why the scores/rank order are different, it's because this is calculated using the aforementioned RMSE.

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