A Silly Thought Experiment and Concomitantly Modest Proposal

As we've noted elsewhere, the "official" GRBG league predictions as generated by Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA data were less than razor sharp crossbow accurate. But, as noted in the prediction post, there were three problems with our use of PECOTA. One of those problems--PECOTA's inability to factor in the performance of owners--clearly contributed to the predictions' shortcomings.

We here at the GRBG wondered whether there was a way to separate out managerial performance and see how PECOTA would have done based on the rosters as drafted. As we wondered this, our eyes wandered to our Yahoo! notification stream, which informed us for the 200th consecutive day that Troy Percival was on the injured list, yet in our starting lineup. And then we remembered:

The Death Ship.

Because of various wacky mishaps with the draft system (and a certain owner's apparent inability to read a watch), on draft day the league created an alternate reality. That reality contained slightly warped copies of all our teams, with rosters as they stood after the completion of most of the draft. The bizarro league was then sealed up and left to play itself out without material interference from us. It became, essentially, a control group. So did PECOTA do any better predicting the bizarro world? Here are the predictions vs the actual standings:

PECOTA	Bizarro Standings	Reality
It's Enrico Palazzo	Wu Tang Financial	Le Dupont Torkies
Wu Tang Financial	Aroids Anonymous	Aroids Anonymous
Unenviable Position	Recalcitrant Cobbler	Mission Accomplished
Evil League of Evil	fakeleague (Ang)	Recalcitrant Cobbler
Mission Accomplished	Le Dupont Torkies	Flaccid Funiculi
Recalcitrant Cobbler	The Loose Bowels	Wu Tang Financial
The Loose Bowels	The Spam Avengers	wormcheese etc.
wormcheese etc.	wormcheese etc.	Unenviable Position
The Spam Avengers	Jake!Wrong League (Scot)	Evil League of Evil
Flaccid Funiculi	Unenviable Position	The Spam Avengers
Le Dupont Torkies	Draft? (Will)	It’s Enrico Palazzo
Aroids Anonymous	It’s Enrico Palazzo	The Loose Bowels

Well, PECOTA did seem to come closer to the control group than it did to manager-affected reality, so maybe there's some value there after all. More interestingly, the gaps between the projections, control group, and reality give some interesting insights into who has done the best job as an owner this year (hint: not me). We'll cover that in a later post. But I'll tell you what: we should definitely make the Death Ship league an annual tradition so we can track this stuff.