Two things you’re sure to find this time of year are unpredictable baseball outcomes and women and men who failed to predict those results. While I’ve managed to accidentally correctly predict the 2015 postseason so far, one need not look further than the present author’s own preseason predictions to find evidence of very incorrect baseball prognostication.  They’re everywhere because predicting baseball is inherently challenging. In order to do it well, you have to accurately predict the quality of the players and then the order in which events unfold in games involving those players.

Due to the nature of baseball, it’s relatively common for teams that are objectively worse than their opponent to win playoff series. If you put this year’s Tigers into a five game series against the Royals and let them play over and over, the Tigers would win a decent number of those series even though it’s pretty clear the Royals are the better team. Unfortunately, because the world is not yet an interactive computer simulation, we only get to observe one series between each set of opponents per year. Even if we knew for sure which team was better, that still wouldn’t ensure that we could predict the outcome. A .500 true talent team can outplay a .550 true talent team for a week. That’s just the nature of the game.

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The St. Louis Cardinals won 100 regular season games this year and there’s no way to keep that from sounding impressive. They had a fantastic season. No matter how much their record benefited from good timing, the underlying performance was still great. Looking at their runs scored and allowed, they played like a team that would typically win 96 games. Looking at their expected runs scored and allowed, they played like an 89-win team. Depending on your preferred method for evaluating baseball teams, they were somewhere between very good and incredible.

It’s worth remembering that their best starting pitcher, and one of their best two or three players, didn’t making a single start for them after April 25. Adam Wainwright tore his Achilles and missed virtually the entire regular season and the team still won 100 games.

The Cardinals have depth, it’s one of their strengths. Wainwright went down and they were able to rely on Carlos Martinez, John Lackey, Michael Wacha, Lance Lynn, and Jaime Garcia for most of the 158 starts Wainwright was unable to provide. Those are interesting names. Martinez and Wacha were good prospects with high ceilings and Lynn has slowly caught on as an under-the-radar workhorse. The oft-injured Garcia has always been a quality arm during stretches in which he was able to use it. And of course, Lackey was the stalwart who’s been reliable since recovering from Tommy John three years ago.

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For whatever reason, people enjoy ranking things. A perfectly rational species would be okay with measures of quality, but humans are really into ordering things and arguing about the ordering of things. It explains why we often find ourselves arguing about which pitchers qualify as aces. Definitions vary, but lots of us get caught up in determining the best 10, 15, or 30 pitchers, implicitly suggesting that pitchers 11, 16, and 31 are demonstrably differently than the pitchers above them on the list.

Of course, that’s after you get over the fact that we lack an agreed upon definition of “acehood.” We can all appreciate that it’s some blend of quality and durability, but the exact nature of the definition is fluid. In a basic sense, we want to know how good a pitcher is and of we can count on him to be that good for a significant number of innings. In other words, something like a pitcher’s WAR over the previous three seasons might a good place to start the ace conversation.

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Astros shortstop Carlos Correa turned 21 years old just three days ago. That would have been a much more dramatic opening line if we weren’t living through the Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Manny Machado Era, but it’s a relatively dramatic opening nonetheless. Correa has looked like one of MLB’s premier players over his first 90 games and 390 plate appearances all while being younger than Bryce Harper. And Bryce Harper is very young.

It’s not much of a surprise that Carlos Correa is a great baseball player. In fact, Correa was supposed to be a great player. He was taken first overall by the Astros in 2012, and while some people saw it as a way to free up money for later picks, no one disputed him as a top-level draft target. Correa’s been an elite prospect his entire career, occupying the fifth spot on Kiley’s Top 200 entering the season, and the third spot on the Baseball Prospectus and ESPN (Insider) lists.

The particularly remarkable aspect of Correa’s 2015 season is not that he’s hitting 32% better than league average or that he’s gathered 3.1 WAR in under 400 plate appearances; the remarkable part is that he’s doing so in 2015. While Correa’s potential was widely acknowledged, no one really seemed to expect it to arrive so soon. Kiley filed a report on him in October of 2014, giving him present Hit and Game Power grades of 20 to go along with a “2017 ETA.”

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If I were writing this piece five years ago, the entire premise of the article would seem contrived. Only two pitchers won MVP awards between 1986 and 2010, and no pitcher had won since 1992. Pedro Martinez led the AL by four wins in 1999 (although only 2.5 using RA9-WAR) and didn’t win the MVP. But thanks to Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw, voters have begun to acknowledge that pitchers are baseball players who are eligible for baseball player awards, so they’re worth considering in our MVP discussions.

Attempt, if you can, to remember April 2014. Entering last season, Dallas Keuchel had thrown just 239 major league innings over two years. He was entering his age-26 season, so he had youth on his side, but he had pitched to a 130 ERA- and 120 FIP-. He gave up home runs, didn’t strike batters out at an impressive rate, and allowed an average-ish number of free passes. Perhaps you may have seen some potential in the lefty who managed a 90 xFIP- in 2013, but the odds of him turning the corner and becoming an ace were long.

Yet here we are. The emergence of Keuchel as an ace isn’t a new story. He spun a 3.8 WAR season in 2014 (4.9 RA9-WAR) and while most people expected him to be respectable but not great in 2015, he responded by elevating his strikeout rate and leading the Astros into their real first pennant race in a decade.

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Less than two months ago, some of the game’s best players gathered in Cincinnati to participate in the Midsummer Classic. The game featured Mike Trout being Mike Trout and Jacob deGrom looking like he was ready to graduate to a better league. The night before, Major League Baseball rolled out a new Home Run Derby format that was met with near universal approval. It certainly helped that hometown favorite, Todd Frazier, captured the title.

The derby was something of an emergence for Frazier. While he was coming off a 4.7 WAR season in 2014 and accumulated  11.1 WAR in 1,846 plate appearances between 2011 and 2014, the 29-year-old still carried one of those “underrated because he plays in a small market” weights around his neck. Frazier was a very good player before 2015; our ZiPS/Steamer blend gave him a 3 WAR projection based on average defense at third base, and a 112 projected wRC+.

In your head, you’re probably thinking that projection feels light. Frazier was riding in after a season just short of 5 WAR and was still on the right side of 30. But entering the year, Frazier had a 112 career wRC+ and had never topped 121. Essentially, every facet of his game profiled as average — with the exception of his power. His power looked be above average, but short of great. Then the first half of 2015 happened.

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From 1990 to 1992, the Pittsburgh Pirates averaged just over 96 wins per season. They were led by Jim Leyland and what we thought at the time were the peak seasons of Barry Bonds. The early ’90s Pirates were great, but they lost in the NLCS three times and then became the Pirates. From 1993 to 2012, their best finish was 79-83 and there were a lot of finishes worse than that.

So when the Pirates became good in 2013 and continued it into 2014, people began piecing together the puzzle that was the Steel City Renaissance. Maybe you’ve even read Travis Sawchik’s Big Data Baseball. The book is very much a spiritual successor to Moneyball in that it tells the story of a smaller market team trying to find ways to succeed in an environment in which they can’t spend on par with their rivals. In the modern game, data is everywhere. The story of the Pirates’ success was their ability to interpret the data and to get the field staff and players to believe in it.

One of the focuses of the book was the Pirates’ acquisition of Russell Martin. As a FanGraphs reader, you’re likely familiar with Martin’s excellent framing and defensive numbers. A league-average-hitting catcher with elite defensive ability is an extremely valuable piece, and the Pirates were the team that had the vision to sign him. The BABIP Gods rewarded them in spades in 2014 when he posted a BABIP roughly 50 points above his career average and produced a 141 wRC+. Martin was a valuable asset and wound up having an incredible offensive season in his walk year with the Pirates. His success proved the Pirates right, but it also put Martin out of their price range for 2015. He signed a five year, $82 million deal with the Blue Jays this offseason.

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Chasing records is fun. Sometimes it’s meaningless and fun, like the famed Ryan Webb, Matt Albers games-finished-without-a-save streak. Some chases have limited meaning, but they’re fun, like Zack Greinke‘s pursuit of Orel Hershiser’s consecutive scoreless innings streak. Other are meaningful, like the 2015 Cardinals pursuit of the best park-adjusted ERA since before World War I.

Record chases exist on a spectrum of notoriety — from “Mark Simon would tweet about this,” to “my mother-in-law has heard of it and wants to discuss it.” That’s a big range. Some records are fun quirks that could happen to anyone. Some are the product of a truly great player performing at a high level. The record up for discussion these days falls into the latter category, but it’s also closer to Mark Simon tweet status than mother-in-law conversation fodder. Clayton Kershaw is trying to post the best single-season, park-adjusted xFIP ever.

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Advanced stats have had a huge influence on baseball over the last generation. Every front office makes use of statistics, metrics, and methods that would fall under the umbrella of sabermetrics. Websites and blogs like this one, meanwhile, have created a niche for interested fans to absorb the game through a sabermetric prism. While the clubs have embraced sabermetrics in the name of remaining competitive, and online media have formed around a collection of die-hards, getting modern statistics onto broadcasts has been a more challenging endeavor.

We’ve seen many broadcasts make an effort to adapt to the changing climate, but there remains a delicate balance between providing sabermetric information and appealing to the widest possible audience. Given that there is only a single radio and television broadcast experience for each club, networks have been cautious about radical changes to the way they present games given that a large portion of their audience does not a regularly visit sites like FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Beyond the Box Score.

On Wednesday afternoon (3:30pm Eastern), MLB Network will roll out a new format for calling live games that diverges from standard broadcast paradigm. Brian Kenny will be joined by Kevin Millar, Jim Duquette, and Rob Neyer to provide play-by-play and analysis for the Astros-Giants game based around the network’s sabermetric-friendly talk show, MLB Now.

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Twenty one games into the 2015 season, the Houston Astros were 14-7. It was a delightful story because at the time even the Astros seemed to think they were a year or two away from real contention, and there they were seven games above .500 before the end of the first month of the season. At the time, I noted that their early season success put them in a situation where they were legitimately within a few moves of the postseason. After those strong opening weeks, their full season projection was around 83 wins, and getting to 90 was now doable with a few aggressive alterations to their roster.

As part of the exercise, I forbade myself from forecasting any breakouts. It would have been boring if I had just predicted MVP seasons from George Springer and Colby Rasmus in order to pad the win total. Instead, I opted for various call ups and trades that they could reasonably make in order to become real contenders. This included calling up Carlos Correa, trading for Andre Ethier, Gerardo Parra, Cole Hamels, Matt Garza, and Aroldis Chapman (or similar players).

A lot of people said it was an unrealistic move for the team, and fans who read the article said they preferred to ride out the good luck with an eye on the future which made total sense given the state of things in April. As I’m sure you know, however, the Astros kept playing well. So well, that over the last two weeks they traded for Scott Kazmir, Mike Fiers, and Carlos Gomez, and there were some rumors that they were after one of the un-traded relief aces until the deadline, as well.

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