We have reached the middle of January, and you know what that means.
It’s time for baseball’s annual predictions to appear. Preseason magazines should be popping up on newsstands. Sports websites should be unveiling their picks for the year ahead. Columnists should be gassing off about 2022’s best and worst clubs.
Just one problem. A lockout, which was instituted on December 2, has frozen off-field activity for the past month and a half. We have no real idea what the 30 major-league rosters are going to look like.
And, for that matter, we don’t even know when (or if) the 2022 season will begin.
It makes little sense to issue predictions in such an environment, but I’m going to do it anyway. The next six weeks will feature my division-by-division rundowns. Each Tuesday will review the best (and worst) performances within a specified division in 2021, and the following Friday will offer my 2022 forecast for the same clubs.
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Here’s the schedule:
January 18, 21: American League East
January 25, 28: American League Central
February 1, 4: American League West
February 8, 11: National League East
February 15, 18: National League Central
February 22, 25: National League West
The dream, of course, is that spring training will be well underway by the time this series runs its course. We can hope, can’t we?
I’ll be using the same prediction system that I employed a year ago. It’s based on a program that compares each team’s record during the past three seasons (2019-2021) against the corresponding marks for every club that played during the era of free agency, which began in 1976.
The idea is to find parallels from the past that might offer hints about the future.
Ah, you say, but such a system can’t account for the massive changes wrought by free agency. An example: What about the Mets, who expect to be massively improved in 2022?
New York had already acquired Max Scherzer, Starling Marte, Mark Canha, and Eduardo Escobar on the open market before the lockout was imposed. Wouldn’t such an infusion of high-priced talent throw a wrench into my history-based system?
Not necessarily. My program, after all, is confined to the years since free agency was instituted, a span in which such upheavals have become common.
And don’t forget that expensive acquisitions often have surprisingly little impact on the bottom line. The Mets, for instance, picked up the costly Francisco Lindor and Javier Baez last year, yet they still finished with an anemic 77-85 record. Who’s to say that Scherzer & Co. will do any better?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming omniscience. Last year’s results cured me of any such arrogance.
My crystal ball was hazy at best in 2021. I predicted five of the 10 playoff qualifiers, and I nailed the precise position for 10 of the 30 clubs in the seasonal standings. Not great, not terrible, though my forecast of a White Sox-Dodgers World Series was admittedly 100% wrong.
But the time has come for a second chance. Relying on history may be the safest option in such a strange time, in a year when we don’t know what anybody’s lineup will look like.
Let’s get started next week.