I really don't think they have the pitching for it. Remember, this is domination if everything goes right. That doesn't happen.
The age of the team is always a question mark, making injuries a factor that doesn't go into this guy's math. Also, they play in the AL East, meaning they play 19 games against the Red Sox and Blue Jays, they play the Mets 6 times, and they have always struggled on the road in the west. They are not complete enough for a full season and their schedule is too hard to win 110, IMO. They'll be in the 90-100 range, with another divisional title under their belts.
Anyone who predicts that ANY team will win 110 games has such an obvious lack of understanding about baseball that he should just keep his mouth shut.
I don't know. I do know that no player on the 1998 team hit more than 30 home runs, only two had more than 100 rbis, and they had one 20 game winner.
Yes, and they were one of two teams to win more than 110 games in the past 50 years. Did anybody predict that they would do that before the season started? Of course not. No team can win that many games without being very good, of course, but also without being lucky, and no one can predict luck. Any "system" that predicts before the season that a team will win more games than about 99.8% of all teams ever have is a joke.
Without beating this topic to death, I believe the author factored the results based on computerized statistics which gave "expected" results, ie, the Yankees should win 110 games based on their expected performance versus the expected performance of the opposition. I think he covered himself with the "luck" factor, etc. with "Of course, he cannot account early on for unknowns such as trades, injuries or the unpredictable performance of rookies", ie. luck. Of course, he also cannot factor in the human element. An example is the Mets last year - after they clinched early, they either knowingly or unknowingly "took the foot off the pedal" and coasted home.
Yes, that's what he claims, and I'm saying that it's nonsense. No reasonable model could possibly predict as the expected result a performance that occurs on average once every 15-25 years. If he was right, the Yankees could easily end up winning 115 or more games, if they got lucky, and would win "only" 105 games or so if they got unlucky, which is absurd. I am willing to guarantee that if you looked at every version of Bill James' Baseball Abstract, and all of the various predictive models people from SABR have proposed, not one has EVER predicted before the season that a team would win 110 games. And by the way, "unknowns such as trades, injuries or the unpredictable performance of rookies" are not at all what I mean by luck. Luck is a dribbler making it through the hole, or a hard-hit ball going right at a fielder, or losing a game on a ball lost in the sun. Every team wins or loses plenty of games because of things like that, and over a long season they tend to even out. For a team to win more than 110 games, it has to not even out a bit - that is, they're lucky. Teams don't win that many games only because they're good, since it's not reasonable to think that any team is that much better than all of the others in baseball.
Does the Mathman tell us if A-Rod will do well in clutch spots this year? Or is it more k-ing with 2 outs and 2 on?
