Some Notes on the OLIVER Batting Projections
Maybe for Jon Kabat-Zinn and his cadre of ubercalm friends, living in the present moment represents the greatest of goods. Indeed, speaking as someone who’s legitimately jealous of his own life, I can see the merits which lie therein.
However, I also know that, literally, one of life’s greatest joys — and, listen, people, I’m not effing around for even one second when I say this — is the joy derived from poring over pre-season baseball projections.
The whys and wherefores of this joy are a matter I’ve discussed in these pages with noted projectacators Sean Smith and Beloved Pole Dan Szymborski, so I’ll refrain from offering any poorly formed theories here.
Still, it makes sense to note that recent developments in the field add to the sense that projections are headed somewhere. Here I’m thinking specifically of the aforementioned Smith’s entrance into to the Mysterious Innards of Major League Baseball; of Tango’s continued attempts to assess the accuracy of projections via the annual Forecasters Challenge; of the Fan Projection project here at the site and its relative (if not rousing) success in Tango’s competition.
While I possess nothing like Tango’s facility with measuring the quality of projections, it’s totally within my skill set to provide idle commentary on some surprising individual cases.
In this post, I’d like to do that exact thing — with OLIVER’s batting projections, specifically.