108 DOUBLE STITCHES: Updated AL Starting Pitcher Rankings

The Law of Truly Large Numbers

The Law of Truly Large Numbers
With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the mathematician Littlewood (1953) required for an event to be surprising] are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year.
Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events. When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/methods-for-studying-coincidences/

29 April 2011

Updated AL Starting Pitcher Rankings

Image via Wikipedia

After nearly a month in the books, it is time to update the AL starting pitcher rankings. As a fantasy baseball projectionist and owner, I am not much of a tinkerer and it takes a lot to change my opinion after only a month of play. At this point, I completely ignore a pitcher’s ERA and instead focus solely on the underlying skill set and metrics; it is process over results for me. So keep this in mind when perusing through the risers and fallers and remember that the original rankings were a compilation of eight RotoGraphers’ individual rankings. Although I would love to adjust all the rankings to reflect my own personal opinion, I will not give in to temptation and simply move players up and down based on potential new information we have learned so far.

Pearl Jam

Felix Hernandez
Jon Lester
C.C. Sabathia
No movement here as all three pitchers have performed as expected.

The Who