Postseason predictions are a staple of sports pages. Everyone loves them, it seems. Sportswriters like them because, after all, they are in the business of giving out their analysis of upcoming events. Sports media like them because fans gobble them up. Fans like predictions because they provide can't-miss reading enjoyment.
Think of it: have you ever known any sports fan to read a postseason prediction in a newspaper and give up hope in their team's fortunes? If the writer picks the fan's team, he or she gets validation of their hopes. If the writer does not pick the fan's team, then it creates an "us against the world" feeling. There's nothing that makes a fan feel more part of the team than feeling like "everyone" lacks respect for their team.
In a sense, therefore, postseason predictions don't have to be right or wrong. That said, how often do the sports experts get these predictions right? The recent Divisional Series in baseball offer a good opportunity to examine this. The web sites of The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated each provided the predictions of eleven of their baseball writers for the four American League and National League Divisional Series. With 22 writers giving four predictions each, enough of a sample is available to form some conclusions about the accuracy of expert postseason predictions.
Out of these 88 predictions, 41 times a writer predicted the winner of the series. This is a success rate of 46.59%, or slightly worse than you'd get if you flipped a coin for each series. The experts did better when predicting the Red Sox-Angels series, where 15 writers (68%) picked the winner. The Yankees-Indians series was predicted correctly by only 10 (45%), and the Diamondbacks and Rockies were both underappreciated, only 8 writers (36%) went for each of them. Take away the relative success the writers had in predicting the Red Sox victory, and the experts selected the right team only 40% of the time.
If we consider predicting not only the winner of the series, but the number of games, the results are even worse. Almost every writer tried predicting how many games each series would last, e.g., "Yankees in 4". Only one writer, Sean Devaney of The Sporting News, correctly predicted this result for any series. This may be because these divisional series were unusually short, with 3 sweeps and one series going to four games. Writers are probably hesitant to predict sweeps, and in fact only five writers predicted a sweep in any series. Unfortunately for them, they picked the exact opposite of the actual results. Again, a random selection would have predicted the correct result more often than the experts.
So, what does this tell us? Don't put much faith in postseason predictions is one answer. That's no great revelation, of course, but it is somewhat startling to see just how badly wrong expert analysis can be. Sportswriters and analysts are also readers and viewers, and a bit of groupthink might set in. They all looked at the Yankees line-up and late-season resurgence, and only 10 were willing to buck the consensus. Even fewer gave the Rockies and Diamondbacks their due, again over-thinking the ways in which the Cubs and Phillies were bound to win.
Many sports fans believe the sports media is biased towards the East Coast, and these predictions may also bear that out. The only series where the number of correct predictions exceeded random chance was the Red Sox-Angels series, won by an East Coast team. In every other series, the majority of writers picked the team located further to the east, and the club located farther west won.
Regardless of the reasons, and there are probably several including ones not mentioned here, the lesson is clear: sports experts have no better idea than the rest of us as to who will win in the postseason.
Matthew Craver is a freelance writer and Red Sox fan stunned at their recent, and un-historical, success.
Source: www.ezinearticles.com
