ESPN.com: MLB – Baldelli flourishing despite poor plate discipline

ESPN.com: MLB – Baldelli flourishing despite poor plate discipline

“The system is too involved to explain in full here, but it’s proven amazingly prescient in projecting the 2003 season so far — predicting a breakout for Jose Cruz Jr., a collapse for Jeremy Giambi, and continued health woes for Ken Griffey Jr. among other things — so let’s give it a spin.”

That quote is from Nate Silver, talking about Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA system (I’m not sure why they spell it with all caps, since acronyms 5 letters or longer are usually spelled with upper and lower case letters). The story is interesting, and demonstrates why PECOTA can be an interesting tool. But the quote drives me crazy, the way BP often does.

So, PECOTA is amazingly prescient, is it? By predicting that Cruz would have a good year, Giambi a bad year and Griffey a hurt one?

Weren’t those the obvious choices for each of those guys this year? And isn’t it a bit early to be crowing? If the vaunted but new PECOTA had gotten everything wrong so far, don’t you think the BP staff would be talking about how it takes the whole season and then some to judge things?

I really love lots of what various BP writers have revealed about the game over the years, but the frequently smug self promotion has often turned me off. It’s as if they forget that the reason we like reading them is because they’re smart, and so are we. That’s too bad.