Consider Jay Mariotti: he’s long been the blithe spirit of the local press box, yet when he competes for the Golden BAT a curse is upon him. You’ll recall that Mariotti’s 2000 pennant picks earned him first place in this column’s assessment of horsehide foresight. But in 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that there was not only no shame but a presidency to be had for finishing second, and in deference to that shift in the zeitgeist, when the time came to declare a winner the next spring I renamed the coveted honor the Dimpled Chad BAT and gifted it to Teddy Greenstein, who’d trailed Mariotti by so little that what the hell.
Stripped of its subtleties, the BAT simply requires that I review the list of the previous year’s division winners and wild card teams and calculate which local scribe predicted the most of them. Tie-breakers take into account pennant winners and World Series champions and, every so often, a presidential election victor.
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Anyway, none of this matters—thanks to the new sheriff in town. Let me begin the introduction by quoting something van Dyck wrote in an end-of-2007 retrospective. “Most reader response I got—In spring training fans were irate about a story from Baseball Prospectus that projected the White Sox to finish 72-90. ‘That’s a good sign for us because usually they’re wrong about everything regarding our dealings,’ GM Ken Williams said. The White Sox final record: 72-90.”
Silver describes himself as a former underemployed consultant who “worked with a lot of spreadsheets and statistical models.” He continues, “So I started working on PECOTA—which looked just like one of the models we might put together for our clients, meaning my bosses wouldn’t give me any trouble when they walked by.” After months of tinkering, Silver went public with PECOTA in 2003.
No, Silver said.
Because St. Clair was unreachable when word of this outburst got to the newsroom, Carlson sent over a second reporter, Erika Slife. When I read the Monday morning story the Tribune carried under their double byline, I assumed they’d re-covered it by phone until I realized that even a Heifetz would have had trouble accumulating so much precise detail and intimate comment that way. So the Tribune was at the scene! Why? Had it been tipped off?
