THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, July 07, 2006

Forecasting Fans

I love this stuff:
http://www.pbase.com/smastroyin/image/57989850

I believe in groups of fans, and totally distrust any single fan, no matter how knowledgeable.  It’ll be interesting to see how the Redsox faithful compare to the agnostic Marcel The Monkey.

Many don’t realize that there is a limit to how well a forecasting system can do.  Even if you have a player that never improves or gets hurt, the year-to-year correlation among a large group of players will pretty much max out at .75.  Marcel comes in at around .65.  The “sophisticated” engines get to .70.  So, there’s very little room for improvement.