The Year that Will Be: Strat-o-Matic Predicts the 2008 MLB Season, Part I (April-June)

Strat-o-matic Baseball is a wonderful game.  It is the most accurate baseball replay game on the planet.  The essential principle of the game is that after every season, every player has a set of statistics.  Therefore, they have a percentage chance of doing something (for example, once out of every twenty at-bats, the player hits a home run).  These percentages are then assigned on cards with corresponding dice rolls.  Given rolling dice to a certain number has a certain percent chance, these chances are matched up with the real stats on the cards to provide a card and dice game capable of deadly accuracy when replaying a season (error is well under 1 standard deviation).  For example, if in 600 at-bats, Joe Carter will hit .260, with 30 home runs and 100 RBI’s, if you give him 600 at-bats in Strat-o-matic, his final stats will be very close to the real ones.

What was done with this simulation was that the teams were put together with the proper 2008 roster, in a season with the 2008 schedule to be used during the regular season.  The players’ cards that were used were chosen based on their “average” year over the last 5 years.  This way, the likely production of each team could be gauged.  Teams with serious injuries already known were affected, and those players were held out.  The teams were programmed to use players a realistic amount (what they will likely get this season), and then the games were played.

Below are the results of Strat-o-matic Baseball’s prediction for the 2008 season.  This is a very accurate way of gauging how teams will do during the season, given the amazing accuracy of Strat-o-matic to reproduce statistics.

As a note, this is just another method of predicting what will happen in the season.  These are not necessarily right, and I don’t presume that this is anything more than a fun little prediction. Nonetheless, it takes opinion and personal bias mostly out of the equation, and in a sense, the teams just play the games!

STRAT-O-MATIC BASEBALL 2008 PREVIEW

APRIL

The Mets, Tigers and Dodgers all came out flying in April.  The Tigers (18-10) were tops in the Majors in pitching, and number 5 in hitting.  The trade for Johan Santana looked to be the work of a genius, as his 5 wins and 1.50 ERA in the month helped pace the Mets (19-9) to a 2.5 game division lead over the Braves (17-12).  The Joe Torre era in L.A. began with a bang as the Dodgers (20-6) stormed out to a 5.5 game division lead over the NL Champion Colorado Rockies (15-14).  The Dodgers surprised many despite ace Brad Penny going 3-3 with an 8.05 ERA.  The defending World Champion Red Sox (17-12) played solid baseball, and were trailed hotly by the upstart Tampa Bay Rays (16-12) and the Toronto Blue Jays (16-12).  The NL Central seemed to try to break away from its reputation as the weakest division in baseball as Milwaukee and the Cubs each put forth very solid April’s to tie for the division lead at 17-10.

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