I have been dying to know how well we did this season with our predictions. Will I be able to defend my title against Ryan & Offord? I hope so!
When it comes to the places, we did a little better than last year. Not by much though.
National League
Josh: 7/15
Ryan: 6/15
Offord: 5/15
American League
Josh: 4/15
Ryan: 4/15
Offord: 6/15
When it comes to the divisional winners, Offord was the best. He predicted four of the six winners. I was second with three and Ryan only guessed two.
Okay, so the standings after divisions? I will give a point for each correct place and two points if they were the division winner.
Offord: 15
Josh: 14
Ryan: 12
The next part is the playoffs and awards. I decided to come up with a convoluted scoring system. In the Wild Card and Division Series, you get 1 point for each team in it. In the Championship Series, you receive 2 points each. Five points for each team in the World Series and 10 for the correct World Series Champion. Each award right is worth 5 points and whoever is closest on the Pirates record receives a ten point bonus. Is that confusing enough?
Offord nailed one of the teams in the AL Wildcard (come on, no one was getting the A’s) and two of the AL Division winners. Ryan got one of the AL Divisional winners, whereas I got one of the NL Divisional winners. I had my great moment by predicting both Rookie of the Year awards! Also, if you read my commentary I said to not count out Walker Buehler, and guess what? He ended up second.
The cool thing is that Ryan almost perfectly guessed the Pirates record. He said 82-80. They ended up at 82-79 because of the cancelled game. I think if he would have nailed it exactly, I would have given him an extra five points. Instead, he receives the normal ten points. The final tally looks like this…
Josh: 25
Ryan: 23
Offord: 18
It pays to get those awards! I mean, it does not literally pay.
How did we do with our overall season predictions?
Ryan talked about injuries. He said that team health would be a major issue this season. There were notable injuries throughout the year and the teams that kept those injuries to a minimum seemed to do well. I found a site that has a DL impact factor rating and guess which teams were the best? The Astros, Rockies, Phillies, Mariners, and Reds. Minus the Reds (my guess is that their team was so awful that injuries did not impact them, haha), all of those teams contended for large portions of the year. I think Ryan is correct, you will continue to see training staffs take a more prominent role on teams from here on out.
Offord predicted that limiting the number of mound visits would have almost no effect on game length. I would have to say he was right on with that one. Game average dropped to 3:04 from 2017, which was 3:08. However, this was still the same as 2016 and higher than 2015. In all honesty, did anyone even notice the mound visit rule?
I predicted that baseballs would continue flying out and players would continue to strike out. I was partially right. The strikeouts did go up from 2017, but the home runs went down. There was some more stuff about juiced baseballs, or at least a change in baseballs, but no one is screaming about Congressional oversight or anything like that. I still believe the home run/strikeout thing is an issue, but I was wrong that it would be such a focal point.
Those were our predictions. I think we did pretty good. Thanks Offord and Ryan for helping out!
