By Chris Cue
January 29, 2009

     JOKE OF THE DAY:
     Q: What does a Monkey and a Baseball “Expert” have in common?
     A: They both have the same chances of correctly predicting the outcome of the 2009 MLB season.

     For what it’s worth, that’s not really a joke. It’s been proven before. So much for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution huh? You’d think that by now we would have evolved to a point that would give us a “hands down” advantage over a chimp wouldn’t you? Guess not. At least it doesn’t seem so when predicting the future. Oh well, don’t worry about it too much because there will soon be plenty of “experts” telling us what will happen. None of them will be correct mind you, but hey, what does that matter right? Predicting the outcome of a Major League season is fun. It’s a futile exercise, but it’s fun never the less.

     There are a ton of Baseball statistic web site out there. Take your pick on which one you think may come the closest as they all will offer up a prediction sooner or later. Not to pick on anyone specifically here, but the Hardball Times had their staff make predictions on the 2008 season prior to it starting. Here’s a link to what their “experts” came up with. (Hardball Times Staff Predictions 2008)
Pay close attention to the AL East. How many of their staff members called the outcome correctly? Yup, you guessed it….NONE of them. You’ll notice that the end result in the predictions had the Red Sox winning the East, followed by the Yankees, Blue Jays, Rays and Orioles. Pretty whacked huh? Of course hindsight allows us to make that observation, but considering that these are the “experts”, it kind of puts the worth of these predictions out there for everyone to see doesn’t it?

     Morale to the story: Take any prediction regarding the outcome of a MLB season with a HUGE grain of salt.  

     You may as well make a few predictions of your own. They have the same odds of being correct as that monkey mentioned earlier. Just to see what would happen, I recently used my dog to predict the outcome of the AL East for the 2009 season. Here’s how the test was done. Using 5 pieces of notebook paper, each labeled with a single team name, they were placed face down on the floor (just in case the dog can read). Under each sheet was a dog treat. Standing roughly 10 feet back from the papers on the floor, the dog was released. Each time he went to one paper to fetch a treat. The first one he went to was the predicted winner, the second one he went to was the team predicted to come in second place and so on untill all the teams were picked and there were no dog treats left for our beloved pooch.

     Here’s the predictions of “Fido the Wonder Dog”:

     1st place: Tampa Bay

     2nd place: Boston

     3rd place: Toronto

     4th place: New York

     5th place: Baltimore

     Can he be any further off then what the predictions were for last season? Time will tell, but we should assume that it is a good thing that “Fido” doesn’t write for the NY Times. A prediction like that in a New York paper might just bump Joe Torre’s book to the back page.

     If you want to make some safe baseball predictions of your own, you may want to latch onto one of these. They are all fairly certain which will reduce your risk of being wrong. Feel free to pick one or add one of your own in the comments section. It’s just for fun….right??