…if you look at it, the Brewers’ projected median finish is about five games back of the projected median finish of the Cardinals.

But there’s a lot of “play” in these forecasts – historically around nine wins or so, based on Root Mean Square Error. (Even “perfect” forecasts of talent and playing time would have about six wins or so of RMSE around them, simply based on random variation.)

So given that, what we can say from these is that the Cardinals are expected to have a better record than the Brewers only about 65% of the time. So yes, the Brewers are still very much in contention according to these projections.

It’s been fixed a couple of times, but I’m done worrying about it, because it’ll be moot once spring training starts anyway.

But I get it — BP has done a great job of branding themselves as the leader in sabermetric analysis, even if they have been superseded in just about every category by somebody else somewhere. Lots and lots of bloggers have to have something to update with, and you can only make so many Willy Taveras jokes.

It’s always a bit disconcerting to see the phenomenon at work in something like sabermetrics which long prided itself on making cutting-edge knowledge available for free, but perhaps it’s just a sign that it’s arrived in (or at least near) the mainstream – put a price on something, and many people will treat it as having credibility it might not actually deserve. After all, who in their right mind would put a price on something that is no better than plentiful free alternatives? (In fact, I think that’s much of the BP branding Jeff mentions these days – not just that they’re the leader, but that they’re the only ones sufficiently convinced of their stuff to ask the public for money for it.)

That said, of course many people won’t actually pay for it (after all, there are still all those free alternatives), but I think even those people are susceptible to the idea that BP’s stuff is “worth money” and thus somehow a little more trustworthy or what-have-you. Only a minority of even saber-friendly baseball fans will be clued in to how the free alternatives are better. Specifically better in each “category” as Jeff put it, that is, not just in general terms.

how many home runs Escobar will haul in from over the wall.