from Amazon
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Pitching Forecasts 2009: Head-to-Head
Results:
0.517 ZIPS
0.511 CHONE
0.507 CAIRO
0.504 STEAMER
0.502 FANTASTICS
0.501 PECOTA
0.500 MARCEL
0.495 OLIVER
0.486 SPORTING NEWS
Here’s what I did:
Marcel forecast Felix Hernandez with a 3.87 ERA. Given his 238.2 innings, that would mean he’d allow 103 earned runs. He actually allowed 66, making Marcel +37 too high. Chone was +29 too high. Steamer was +40 too high. Oliver was +48 too high. So, Marcel gets a W against Oliver, and L against Chone and a tie against Steamer. I counted as a tie any difference that was within 4.
(Also note that I calibrated all the ER to match the actual 19531. FWIW, Marcel forecasted 19390, which was one of the closest.)
I went through all 512 pitchers in the dataset provided to me by J Cross, and tallied up the wins, losses, and ties. The winner was ZiPS: 73 wins, 56 losses, 383 ties. 52% of the time, it was better than Marcel. (With a nod to Homer, this does mean that 48% of the time Marcel is better. D’oh.) Marcel really is in a group with the majority at .500.
Chone continued its strong showing, and given that it led the way for hitting, Chone is the best forecasting system of the year, among those in Jared’s collection.