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Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Is Paul DePodesta delusional, or did he think his readers might be?
He said:
As I’ve written before, this year has been frustrating on two fronts: 1) we’ve played well below our expectations, and 2) we were a timely hit away yesterday from being just seven games out of an underachieving division. Given the state of our current team, our organization as a whole, and the entire division, what would you do?
According to Cool Standings, their chances of making the playoffs first dipped below 5% on Apr 25. It first dipped below 1% on May 19. They are currently sitting at 0.7%. In-between, they reached as high as 6.3% on June 14.
According to Baseball Prospectus, the below 5% happened on May 4, below 1% on June 29, and they are currently sitting at 0.2%.
Baseball Prospectus has 6 teams with a worse chance of making the playoffs as of today, and Cool Standings has 5 teams with a worse chance.
He asked his readers what the Padres should do, and 87% said to sell while 7% are delusional enough to want to buy.
He framed his question with the timely hit thing, and the 7 games out thing… but they still have to climb over all the teams in his division. Those teams will have to play each other, and therefore, that makes it much much harder for the Padres to climb out of it. That’s why BP and CS show the odds they do. You are behind the 8-ball, and you’ve got four teams to climb over. That’s a tough tough situation to overcome.
Obviously “you never know”, as recent Astros and Twins teams have shown. But, if you’ve got 100$ in your pocket, do you spend that on a rollercoaster ride that may work only 1% of the time, or do you buy some high-flying stocks that may pan out 25%+ of the time?
Since Paul framed the issue as a question, without stating his position as to what they should do, I will do the same here and simply ask the question whether Paul is delusional, or if he is simply being a good soldier in asking the question to guage the landscape to see how delusional his readers may be?
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