I’m going to start blogging more often, specifically about baseball. To get in the mood, I’ve been reading through some of my oldest posts on this site. A couple things have become painfully clear:
- I used to be super obnoxious. (I said USED TO!!!)
- I’ve made a lot of over-confident predictions.
On #1, I’m hoping that my maturity will help. But when it comes to #2, I thought it might be cathartic to see how some of my predictions have held up. So let’s jump right in:
- In a post about why teams seemed to get better after A-Rod leaves, I wrote this: “I suspect that by the time the season ends, the Rangers will be back below .500.” I wrote this early in the 2004 season, and considering the early point in the season and the dual facts that the Rangers had finished in last place four straight years AND they had just traded their best player, I felt pretty confident in this prediction. Alas, the Rangers finished the season 89-73. They still finished in third place, and they had four more sub-.500 seasons after that season, but that prediction just didn’t happen.
- In a post where I questioned the wisdom of giving 41-year-old Randy Johnson a two-year contract extension, I didn’t quite predict failure, but I wrote this: “Am I the only one who still remembers that Randy Johnson is 41 years old and has a history of back problems? I totally understand wanting him for 2005, but to give him a 2-year extension with crazy money? My favorite thing about this Johnson deal is playing the odds on how much money the Yankees will pay Johnson to sit on the bench, injured.” Well, Johnson didn’t spend much time on the disabled list for the Yankees — he started 34 and 33 games in those two seasons. And while he wasn’t actually very GOOD (his adjusted ERA was exactly league average over those two seasons), he did benefit from the Yankees’ offense to win 17 games in each season. Without those two years in New York, there’s no way he would have sniffed 300 wins.
- In a post about the myth that the Yankees sign every big free agent, I made two predictions: that Carlos Beltran would be good, and this about Gary Sheffield: “…if he is as productive as last year for more than another year, I will eat my shoe.” This was actually the prediction that made me think I could check my success rate. As it turns out, Sheffield played two more seasons for the Yankees, having one very productive season (2005) and one season where he was injured a lot and not nearly his old self when he was healthy enough to play. He did play three more seasons after leaving the Yankees, but his best season of the three didn’t even approach the level of his worst season of the previous decade.
Maybe I’ll post more as I keep reading through my old writing, if I can stop cringing long enough.