Friday Forum: Our Postseason Picks

I (this is Bill, hi!) used to really hate postseason predictions. They're pretty pointless, really. Even the "worst" playoff team has a pretty decent chance of beating the best, especially in a five-game series, and that people spend so much time analyzing these things and declaring what the key factors are and all that just seems silly to me. They're always wrong; the Yankees could be playing the Tigers and everyone could agree that the key factor for New York is Robinson Cano, and you can pretty much count on Cano going 2-for-15 and the Yankees winning in three. My little statement in this regard, for the past couple years, has been to flip a coin to determine the playoff results, and then sort of reverse-engineer a phony justification for the picks.

Well, a few things happened: (1) we have this whole staff now; (2) it occurred to me that pointless and fun/interesting aren't necessarily mutually exclusive; and (3) the coin flip results worked out terribly twice in a row (2009, 2010). So, I polled the staff and got everybody's predictions, and you can see them below. I also flipped a coin, because I just can't stop. So here they are, with explanations below the table:

The Folly of 10 Year Forecasts

By The Common Man

Yesterday, in his new digs over at SB Nation, Rob Neyer pointed back to his 1999-2000 predictions for who would be the best players in baseball from 2000-2009. As Rob himself points out, he went oh-for-10.

“Overall, though, I did a thoroughly lousy job.

Is there a lesson here? Well, it's really hard to know who's going to get hurt, and nearly as hard to know who's going to get fat. I think I've also got a general tendency to overrate young players. I still don't understand what happened to Ben Grieve, but at the time he was 23 and hadn't yet enjoyed a big season in the majors. Fernando Tatis was 25, and had just one great season on his ledger.

The real lesson, though, is that this stuff is hard. If it was easy, there wouldn't be so many lousy long-term contracts out there.”

So where did Rob go wrong? And, at the time, what, if anything, did he miss?