Sky's back!!!!

I was planning on writing a post about how great the WWE's lead up to Wrestlemania is going, but then I found an article written by my boy Sky Andrecheck...and well...it's too good to pass up. Here's the first one I did by Sky. And as you'll see in this article, he's still as unsure as a freshman asking out the hottest senior in school:


Spring training games aren't as meaningless as they may seem

Alright, way to take a stand Sky. Spring training games are kinda meaningless, but not totally meaningless. There's some meaning. Not a lot. But some. You're like that monk that burned himself alive, except you just lit a shoe box on fire and said "Well you get the idea."

One of the most hopeful sights of the year takes place this week: Pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

At this point I started humming "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Then I remembered there's still over a month before opening day. Damn it.

...in a couple weeks they'll even begin playing games. But pretty soon the novelty will wear off. Exhibition games are boring, and of course the results don't have any impact on the regular season.

He does have a point about the novelty wearing off. About 3 innings into the first spring training game I watch I slowly realize, "Why am I watching the Brewers B team facing the Royals B team?" I've found the cure is to throw 'Major League' into the DVD player. All are invited to come over and watch. And feel free to act out your favorite scene.

Count me as one who has never paid much heed to the results of spring training games. If my team gets beat up in a spring training game, I'm not going to get down.

Keep that in mind.

While of course that's technically true, is there a possibility that spring training games really do have some predictive power?

(Slams fists on keyboard) NO!!! The whole point of the article is that they don't matter. Don't go back on your word.

Last year the Los Angeles Angels and New York Yankees were the respective champions of the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues. And which two teams played for the AL pennant in October? The Angels and Yankees. But don't tell that to the Milwaukee Brewers, who went 22-10 in spring training but struggled during a disappointing regular season, finishing under .500.

Come on Sky. You really want to contradict yourself within the same paragraph? Usually you wait one or two before you do that.

The history books are littered with teams that tore it up in spring training, only to fall to earth during the regular season. The 2006 Marlins come to mind, as do the 2008 Oakland A's. What's that? You don't remember those teams? Of course not, because no one pays attention to spring training records.

Alright, a little more back on track there...wait a second...

But should they? The examples above are just anecdotal.

No!! Don't beat you own argument up.

To get a better idea we need to go back and look at several years of hard data.

Hehehe, he said hard...

As one might expect, there is some association between a team's spring training record and its regular-season record.

Why would we expect that when you just gave a bunch of examples dispelling that notion?

Going back to 2003, there is a small but noticeable correlation (r-squared of .21) between the two.

Can you break that down for those of us who studied cosmetology at Triton Community College?


That's not a very strong correlation, but it certainly is more informative than nothing.

Yes, nothing holds up like facts that don't have a strong correlation. That's why Isaac Newton was so well known. It wasn't that he was right, it's just that he was "informative" and that's better than nothing. It's the Fox News style of science.

But of course we know a lot more about the teams than just their spring training records. We didn't need spring training to tell us that the 2009 Yankees were going to be pretty good and the 2009 Orioles were in for a rough year.

So we're back to spring training doesn't matter?

Sure, the spring training records bore out with those assessments, but the question is whether spring training records can tell us something that we don't already know.

Well you're almost to the end of the article so you better figure out which it is.

To describe what we do already know, there are a slew of expert projections, the most famous of which is the Baseball Prospectus' self-described "deadly accurate" PECOTA projection system, which has been produced since 2003. If spring training records can tell us something beyond what we already know from PECOTA, then they might be worth looking at after all.

Again, he uses "they might". Sky, you just refuse to let anyone pin your opinion down don't you?

Some initial evidence is striking: Of the 20 best spring training teams since 2003, 16 outperformed their PECOTA projections, indicating that there might be reason to give spring records a second look.

Yes!!! You did it. A real argument with facts to back it up!

Putting both a team's PECOTA projection and its spring training record into a statistical model, we can test this theory out more rigorously. Does a team's spring training record really tell us anything? Surprisingly, it does. A team's spring training record is a statistically significant predictor of its regular-season record, even when taking into account its pre-season projection.

Sky, my man, you're on a roll. What else you got for us?

The predictive power of spring training is small, but it's there. Prior to the 2009 season, PECOTA wasn't too high on the chances of the 2009 Angels, expecting them to go 84-78 on the season. However, the Halos had a fantastic spring training winning percentage of .779. Because of their great spring, the new statistical model added about three wins to their projection, predicting them to win 87 games instead of 84. Meanwhile, the Arizona Diamondbacks had a horrible spring training, in which they posted a .324 winning percentage -- vastly below their optimistic 87-75 PECOTA projection. Because their spring was so bad, however, the new model knocked more than three games off of their projected win totals. In this case their poor spring did indeed foreshadow a miserable 70-92 campaign.

What does it all mean? In a nutshell, if your team is having an extremely surprising spring training (for good or for bad), you would do well to adjust your expectations accordingly by about three games.

Check, instead of expecting the Pirates to win 67 games, I'll bump them up to 70. Wohoo!

The Diamondbacks and Angels are extreme examples, so the effect is generally not huge.

Don't go back on it now Sky!

Still, in a sport where every minute detail counts, spring training results can add some insight.

About as much as this article.

Case Closed!