I found this exercise fun, yet difficult.  I think I was overly optimistic in some areas and quite unsure about the state of the pitching.

After I looked over my ballot (or survey, or whatever it is) I noticed that I predicted almost the entire offense to either replicate the numbers from last season (Wells, Rios, Glaus, Thomas, Overbay), improve on last year (Hill), or just slightly regress (Sparky and Zaun).  On top of that, almost not major injuries with Wells, Glaus, Hill, Overbay getting over 150 games and Sparky and Rios obe level down from there.  Overall, too optimistic I think...oh well.  I more than made up for that looking at MacDonald and Clayton, ugh.

With pitchers I marked down Roy for a 2.90 ERA (don't think anyone will argue that that was overly optimistic) and AJ at a 3.32 ERA (which is very optimistic, so sue me...).  Over than that Thomson was +5 ERA, Ohka 4.85 ERA and Chacin at 4.35 ERA - if Chacin hits that mark, I'll be esctatic, but not surprised.

With the younger, inexperienced pitchers, I think only Marcum will shine this year, somewhere in a 3.70 - 4.20 ERA range in 130 IP of relief and starting.

Fun times...

I'm absolutely in love with the book "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki of the New Yorker.  I'd never seen this website before, but i filled out the ballot with some major problems.  First, i realized that i didn't think too many Toronto pitchers were going to get into mop up duty.  I figured they were either solid pen guys, or spot starters.  This was way tougher than i figured, and i didn't put nearly enough time into it.  But i guess this is the whole point of it.  Assuming that certain people will over think, and others will underthink, thus giving you the closest estimate to the real thing.  Unfortunately, i think you need at least 100ish results to have an accurate wisdom of crowds.

Anyways, i filled out my NCAA bracket this past weekend by using the wisdom of crowds based on ESPNs national bracket.  Its been pretty solid so far, surprisingly enough.

Although it would be fun to see Frank Thomas in the outfield, I don't expect it to happen. You could throw Matt Stairs and Victor Zambrano into the mix.

wow, 23 pitchers listed and none of them are Josh Towers...

Josh Towers:  As you can imagine, I generated the rosters for all 30 teams trying to maximize the number of players, by using an official source:

http://toronto.bluejays.mlb.com/team/roster_40man.jsp?c_id=tor

That's the Jays 40-man roster.  Other than the Royals, this seemed to work out for the other 28 teams.  Josh Towers is a non-roster invitee, and therefore was not picked up by my program.  I've had 4 people ask for a write-in.  Just send me an email with his ERA/role, and I'll add him in.  Same applies for Zambrano and Stairs, if you like.

tangotiger at yahoo dot com

Sample size: all I need is 15 people per team.  As hard as it may seem to believe, when I do this for Fielding, if I take 15 Jays fans and then another random 15 Jays fans, I get an r=.9x.  That is numbers that any researcher would love to get.

 

Here you go:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/community_forecasts1/#12

Thank you, Tango.  The compilation is indeed interesting.