September 29, 2003
ESPN Predictions
Daniel Shamah sends this link to the ESPN staff predictions on the post-season baseball tourament. Apart from the typo in Rick Sutcliffe predictions, it's time to see what the experts think.
On the most important question of who will win the World Series, we get the following votes:
| Team | Votes | Odds of Winning |
| Giants | 5 | 27.7% |
| Red Sox | 4 | 22.2% |
| Yankees | 4 | 22.2% |
| Braves | 3 | 16.7% |
| Twins | 2 | 11.1% |
None of the experts gives the A's, Marlins or Cubs a chance to win the World Series.
Another interesting item from this list is the near unanimous consensus that the Red Sox would beat Oakland in the ALDS. Only Scott Ridge picked the A's. The A's did win the season series against the Red Sox 4-3 this year. The Red Sox are a poor road team, and they will be playing up to three games at Oakland. I'm surprised this isn't closer to 50-50.
The experts pick the Cubs to beat the Braves 12-4 in the NLDS, but not one picks the Cubs to win the World Series. They can beat the best team in the NL, but they can't take the series? As I pointed out earlier, the Braves are very good at beating good pitchers. My gut here is that there's a lot of wishful thinking going on regarding the Cubs and the Red Sox.
Update: Michael Davidson writes:
You write that "None of the experts gives the A's, Marlins or Cubs a change to win the World Series". I'm sure you know this, but that's just not true. None of the experts thinks that those teams will win, but I'm sure they'd all give a probability of greater than zero if pressed. It looks like ESPN's survery isn't that nuanced.
Yes, that's true, and I knew that when I wrote it. However, I'm looking at the odds of these teams winning based on the predicitions of the experts. And based on their predictions, the probability of those teams winning is 0. Odds, after all, are no more than the consensus opinion of the betting public. Here, we have a very small public, so you have to expect the odds to be skewed a bit.