Bloops: CAIRO Early Projected 2011 Standings
Posted by Neil Paine on February 11, 2011
In an annual tradition for the Replacement-Level Yankees Weblog, they plugged their CAIRO projections into depth charts from the terrific MLBDepthCharts.com, and came up with some early expectations for the upcoming season:
Replacement Level Yankees Weblog - CAIRO v0.6 and Still Too Early 2011 MLB Projected Standings
February 11th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
How appropriate for something called "Cairo" to come out today!
February 11th, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Haha, very true, in light of the events in Egypt. I think this is a reference to Miguel Cairo, though.
February 11th, 2011 at 9:38 pm
I don't know about this CAIRO thing...maybe I should ask my mummy, before I make a real asp of myself.
February 12th, 2011 at 9:59 am
It isn't that I object to him picking my Tigers to go 81-81 (rat bastard!), I just think it unreasonable that the AL East winner will only have 84 wins.
February 12th, 2011 at 10:11 am
oops AL Central
February 12th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
The 84 wins is not the average win total for the team that wins the AL Central. The average projected win total for the AL West winner was 90. If 84 wins won the Central, the White Sox wouldn't only have a 36.1% chance of winning the division.
All it's saying is if they played the season 10,000 times this would be the average win total for each team. Since they only play the season once, the final standings won't look like this.
Anyway, the Tigers projection was off because Jose Valverde's projection was wrong. Fixing that adds a win or two I think, but I'll have to re-run to make sure.
February 12th, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Right, it's like Tangotiger wrote about projecting HR leaders here:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/forecasting-2006/
You know somebody is going to hit 40-50 HR, because the league leader does it every year. But it's impossible to say with a great deal of certainty which player that will be -- it could be any of a dozen guys, depending on who stays healthy, has the best luck, etc. So instead of marking any of them down for 50, a projection designed to minimize errors will hedge its bets, and just project all of the dozen candidates to have 30 HR. Sure, it will be wrong on the one guy who ultimately hits 50... but since we have no way of knowing who that will be, it will be more right on average than if it assigned 50 to any of them.
It's the same with projecting team wins. We know some team is probably going to get near 100. We know 90-95 is almost always a requisite to win any division. But because of uncertainty, we can never have the confidence before the season to say which teams those will be. So again, you have to hedge your bets and regress to the mean.
February 13th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
I also wondered if this was someone's idea to post names of players with Egypt-connected names or nicknames or more specifically about Miguel Cairo.
When I typed "sphynx" into the box, nothing came up, not even Scipio Spinks.
Typing in "egypt" brought up a 19th century player nicknamed Egyptian Healy.
"Nile" brought up one player with the first name of Niles, one with that middle name, and two with that last name.
Nothing for "pyramid".
"Mummy" turns out to have been a nickname for Jim Coates, a pitcher with the Yankees in the late 1950s and early 1960s.