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Thursday, November 17, 2011
A single person can’t set a good line
To me, the story here is that having a single person setting a line is not a good thing.
Now that the season is over and we are into awards season, it’s time to announce a winner. By a landslide, the most prescient prognosticator this year was Matthew Kenerly, who ran down Rex Babiera in the home stretch by choosing the correct side of the line on 39 of 50 players. No one else had more than 37 correct, so Matthew showed himself to be head-and-shoulders above the crowd and has our permission to proclaim himself the wisest of all BP readers, a title I’m sure will earn him due deference during comments section discussions throughout the coming year. Less importantly, Matthew has won himself a free copy of Baseball Prospectus 2012 with as many author signatures as I can manage to round up this spring. Well done, Matthew.
As is often the case, the Wisdom of Crowds also performed admirably, with the majority of entries making the correct choice 36 times. Pitchers and hitters were equally difficult to predict, with the groupthink entry finding the right answer on 60 percent of both groups.
If Ken set the perfect line, we should have had 50 percent getting the right answer. What Ken has proven here is that the group can set the better line than Ken. And, I’m going to extend that to say that the group can set the better line than an individual.
This has always been the case for as long as I’ve done these kinds of studies, and seen these kinds of studies, so big thanks to Ken for showing how difficult it truly is for any one person to set a good line.
For example, I did this a decade ago. Focus on the individual black lines, and the green line. The green line is the average of all the black lines. This is why the group is always better than the individual, unless the individual is really really good (all the red lines below), in which case, the individual will be as good as the group (the green is in the middle of the reds).
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