Has solid start changed your expectations for 2023 Cubs?

[stitchface]

3 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

16 games should statistically have a small impact on your assessment of team quality.  Not zero, especially with the run differential, but not a ton.

But if you thought this was ~75-win team before the season, they've now banked 3 extra wins, so you would project them to 78 wins without changing your opinion on their talent.

Fwiw, fangraphs now has them projected to finish 80-82 with a 27% chance of making the playoffs 

That seems a bit simplistic . . . you would need to consider the opposition to say they banked three wins. This seems especially true in the current competitive (or not) landscape. In other words, wins against the A's tell you less than wins against the Brewers. Gets even more complicated when you consider starting pitchers and how really bad teams can be really tough when they have a good starter.

 

The schedule so far doesn't seem that soft though including the Rangers, Brewers, and Dodgers. The Cubs still seem to me to be caught in the mediocre middle.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

2 minutes ago, stitchface said:

That seems a bit simplistic . . . you would need to consider the opposition to say they banked three wins. This seems especially true in the current competitive (or not) landscape. In other words, wins against the A's tell you less than wins against the Brewers. Gets even more complicated when you consider starting pitchers and how really bad teams can be really tough when they have a good starter.

 

The schedule so far doesn't seem that soft though including the Rangers, Brewers, and Dodgers. The Cubs still seem to me to be caught in the mediocre middle.

It's extremely simplistic. But the differences in baseball teams are small enough that making it more complicated would give you pretty limited gains in accuracy. 

[stitchface]

4 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

It's extremely simplistic. But the differences in baseball teams are small enough that making it more complicated would give you pretty limited gains in accuracy. 

well, you don't have any accuracy to begin with, which was kind of my point.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Still feel pretty good about the 84 I went with originally.  They'll have some more struggles and injuries will play a greater role at some point(especially in the rotation), but they're playing well against solid opposition and sets them up to be competitive through the season.

[Andy]

I've upgraded from '2005-ish pretty boring season that fizzles out in midsummer' to 'reasonably hopeful to be buyers at the deadline', so I guess that's a bit of a change.

[stitchface]

5 minutes ago, Andy said:

I've upgraded from '2005-ish pretty boring season that fizzles out in midsummer' to 'reasonably hopeful to be buyers at the deadline', so I guess that's a bit of a change.

the engineer part of my brain wants to quantify and plot this . . . we could then assign posters ratings based on their emotional over-reaction to winning and losing streaks, injuries, trades etc. Could also be interesting in game threads . . . 

[pccubfan]

I think the start forces Jed to try to win where I don't know that the motivation was there to do that before. That alone should increase the number of likely wins. It may not be enough to qualify for the playoffs, but it certainly should place them above .500 for the year.

[Bote McBoteface]

I always thought we had a sneaky-good team especially if Bellinger got back to being at least above average. We do not have the pitching to compete for a division title as things stand. Add a bullpen arm or two and a mid-rotation piece and maybe we can. I expect 85 or so wins.

[mul21]

6 minutes ago, Bote McBoteface said:

I always thought we had a sneaky-good team especially if Bellinger got back to being at least above average. We do not have the pitching to compete for a division title as things stand. Add a bullpen arm or two and a mid-rotation piece and maybe we can. I expect 85 or so wins.

Does Cody Heuer and a fixed Hendricks satisfy those "adds" for you or are you talking about additions beyond that?

[Hairyducked Idiot]

42 minutes ago, stitchface said:

well, you don't have any accuracy to begin with, which was kind of my point.

Well then you're just incorrect.  It's perfectly fine for back of the napkin message board posting and acknowledging that refusing to include early results in your final exoectation is gambler's fallacy.

[Bote McBoteface]

16 minutes ago, mul21 said:

Does Cody Heuer and a fixed Hendricks satisfy those "adds" for you or are you talking about additions beyond that?

I think we’ll need more beyond Heuer but he will be a good add for sure. I honestly do not expect anything good from Kyle Hendricks but maybe i’m being unfair. If he’s good it might satisfy the need for a rotation addition. I just dont see it. Yeah, I think we will need additions beyond that. 

[stitchface]

7 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

Well then you're just incorrect.  It's perfectly fine for back of the napkin message board posting and acknowledging that refusing to include early results in your final exoectation is gambler's fallacy.

care to make it interesting? lol

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Just now, stitchface said:

care to make it interesting? lol

Implying a bet?

How on earth would you even try to measure that?   

Do we have access to unlimited alternate universes where we can identify thousands of teams with 75-win projections that start 10-6 and see if their final win total ends up closer to 78 or whatever we calculate with a more complicated formula?

[sneakypower]

oh yeah i honestly thought they'd be pretty dog horsefeathers and i'm coming around on that some

some significant positive developments in my mind

1. the bullpen has been the best in the league by many descriptive, & (more importantly) predictive metrics like k-bb%, siera etc; in stark contrast to my personal expectations for largely a heap of journeymen & castoffs
2. lol Cardinals - i didn't expect their SP to be such a trainwreck, and their need to play pretty awkward defensive alignments (and gulp, likely major defensive downgrade at C) might mean this is more trend than blip; probably worth mentioning they were an elite shifting team and that effect has been somewhat diminished.. Liberatore might eventually help a little tbf
3. Bellinger outperforming any reasonable expectations offensively, at levels basically not seen for any stretch since '20
4. the C position being mediocre instead of the black hole it looked to be is nice but i still don't have full faith it'll continue

but starting pitching depth is still pretty worryingly thin until 1-2 Iowa guys gets on track, thankfully there are many potentially qualified candidates there but nobody save Thompson has done much in the early going to give much hope

[stitchface]

2 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

Implying a bet?

How on earth would you even try to measure that?   

Do we have access to unlimited alternate universes where we can identify thousands of teams with 75-win projections that start 10-6 and see if their final win total ends up closer to 78 or whatever we calculate with a more complicated formula?

I'm joking about the bet - I think one approach would be to see where the predictive value of rd stabilizes. 

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Just now, stitchface said:

I'm joking about the bet - I think one approach would be to see where the predictive value of rd stabilizes. 

But ... my idea didn't include run differential, so why would we do that?

[Bobson Dugnutt]

37 minutes ago, Bote McBoteface said:

I always thought we had a sneaky-good team especially if Bellinger got back to being at least above average. We do not have the pitching to compete for a division title as things stand. Add a bullpen arm or two and a mid-rotation piece and maybe we can. I expect 85 or so wins.

It feels like the rotation is already entirely made up of mid-rotation pieces. That’s not to say it can’t afford to be upgraded, of course. I’d love a true TOR guy, though I don’t know where that’ll come from in-season.

[stitchface]

1 minute ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

But ... my idea didn't include run differential, so why would we do that?

well, which has more predictive value after 16 games - won-loss record or run differential? if you want to know the answer, the updated projection above probably answers it for us.

[mul21]

1 minute ago, Bobson Dugnutt said:

It feels like the rotation is already entirely made up of mid-rotation pieces. That’s not to say it can’t afford to be upgraded, of course. I’d love a true TOR guy, though I don’t know where that’ll come from in-season.

I think there's some reasonable expectation that Smyly will implode or get hurt at some point and there's nota lot to lean on right now as backup until Hendricks proves he's healthy/fixed and that's a dubious proposition.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

3 minutes ago, stitchface said:

well, which has more predictive value after 16 games - won-loss record or run differential? if you want to know the answer, the updated projection above probably answers it for us.

I feel like this must be one of those situations where I've accidentally implied something very different than the literal meaning of my words, because this makes absolutely no sense to me as a response to my proposal, which was that banked wins can be added to original projections for the rest of the season rather than committing gambler's fallacy and assuming the team would lose extra games to reach the original expectation.

 

You're talking about stabilizing results for future predictions when my idea specifically avoids trying to make updated future predictions.

Edited April 19, 2023 by Hairyducked Idiot

[stitchface]

13 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

I feel like this must be one of those situations where I've accidentally implied something very different than the literal meaning of my words, because this makes absolutely no sense to me as a response to my proposal, which was that banked wins can be added to original projections for the rest of the season rather than committing gambler's fallacy and assuming the team would lose extra games to reach the original expectation.

 

You're talking about stabilizing results for future predictions when my idea specifically avoids trying to make updated future predictions.

what is your premise then? That they will play at the predicted win rate for the rest of the season but bank the extra wins from exceeding that projection so far? I don't think there is any value to that because the original projected win rate was just a guess to begin with. 

[Hairyducked Idiot]

1 minute ago, stitchface said:

what is your premise then? That they will play at the predicted win rate for the rest of the season but bank the extra wins from exceeding that projection so far? I don't think there is any value to that because the original projected win rate was just a guess to begin with. 

Yes.  

If you flip a coin 100 times, you expect 50 heads and 50 tails.  

If you start out with 8 heads and 2 tails, your new expectation for the 100 flips is 53-47.  You still expect to go 45-45 the rest of the way, but the banked results have to be accounted for.

16 games isn't much sample size to start changing your prior expectations for a baseball team.  You could probably tease out something meaningful if you really worked at getting down to fast-stabilizing metrics, but that's a lot of work for minimal gains on something so trivial 

For message board posters, saying "16 games isn't enough to change my opinion of the team, but the fact that we have a few extra wins already puts us on pace to be a little better than expected" is perfectly reasonable.

[stitchface]

52 minutes ago, Hairyducked Idiot said:

Yes.  

If you flip a coin 100 times, you expect 50 heads and 50 tails.  

If you start out with 8 heads and 2 tails, your new expectation for the 100 flips is 53-47.  You still expect to go 45-45 the rest of the way, but the banked results have to be accounted for.

16 games isn't much sample size to start changing your prior expectations for a baseball team.  You could probably tease out something meaningful if you really worked at getting down to fast-stabilizing metrics, but that's a lot of work for minimal gains on something so trivial 

For message board posters, saying "16 games isn't enough to change my opinion of the team, but the fact that we have a few extra wins already puts us on pace to be a little better than expected" is perfectly reasonable.

but in your coin flip example, you know it's 50-50. In this case, you don't. so, if you thought this was a 78 win team to change and say this is still a 78 win team that's going to win 82, is probably not sound thinking. if the new information says this is an 82 win team, ok. 

 

[Hairyducked Idiot]

4 minutes ago, stitchface said:

but in your coin flip example, you know it's 50-50. In this case, you don't. so, if you thought this was a 78 win team to change and say this is still a 78 win team that's going to win 82, is probably not sound thinking. if the new information says this is an 82 win team, ok. 

 

How many games should a 78-win true talent team win, in average, if you know they started 10-6?

If you say 78, then that's gambler's fallacy.

[stitchface]

disagree. 78 wins is based on their opponents and the odds of winning each game - it's not a coin flip in every game. if the first 16 games are all against the 5 worst teams in baseball or the 5 best teams in baseball makes a big difference. being a .500 team does not mean you have a 50/50 chance in every game. the probability of winning is not fixed as it is in a coin flip