January 9, 2014

BP Unfiltered

YCPB and You Never Could

by Sam Miller

Printer-friendly

Contact Author

I learned a new phrase yesterday: Paleofuture. It's the "future" envisioned by people of the past, dug up retrospectively by people in the (as it usually turns out unenvisioned) future, or present, or whatever we're in now. When we all talked last week about Bill James' turn-of-the-century predictions for baseball in 2015--that's paleofuturism.

PaleoYCPB isn't quite the same thing, but it's the same basic premise: Predictions of baseball, mocked after the fact. Ben did it this week when he wrote about teams' own predictions for the 2013 season, which turned out to be, apparently, predictions about some other season entirely. Which is to say, as predictions they sucked. Ben did it last year, too. They sucked, too. I did it for GMs' anonymous predictions. They sucked. I did it for our own writing. We sucked. Easy shootin'.

But predicting baseball (wrongly) isn't new. And paleofuturizing those predictions is similarly not new. Sorry, Ben, but you were ripping off some unknown sports writer from 1914:

The Braves had just won the World Series.

Sam Miller is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @SamMillerBB
Click here to see Sam's other articles. You can contact Sam by clicking here