Sabermetric almanac

[logan82]

I ran across this today while reading an article over at THT. It is a compilation of links to articles about sabermetrics. The first link in particular I thought was very interesting. Probability vs. Certainty. I think these exerts were pretty good.

 

No, things are never going

to be as simple as a coin toss - these are athletes playing a sport,

not random numbers dancing around a spreadsheet - but that's not a

prohibitive barrier with all the research that goes on these days.

PECOTA? It's not giving a number, it's giving a curve. That's where

things like 10%, 50%, and 75% levels come from. You've got a team's

Pythag predicted accurately? Great, then you can generate a PDF and say

that they have something like a 70% chance to be within 4 games of

that.

We work in probabalistic terms. This means that when you tease a single number out of us, it's going to be our best guess and will probably be wrong. This does not mean that the prediction curve itself is complete bollocks (although sometimes this is in fact the case)