You know, my preseason MLB predictions are so far off - mainly because I B.S.’d them for the most part - that I decided a newer, better prediction needed to be made. So I visited Baseball Prospectus (BP), which is essentially the holy land for baseball geeks. BP has a system set up to predict playoff winners, called their “secret sauce”, which was written up in Sports Illustrated last week. It’s obviously a good system, but I wanted to know who might get into the playoffs, not who is going to win the whole thing. The one stat that BP offers but does not include in their calculations is luck.

Baseball is fun for guys like me for two reasons: 1) you get to play around with numbers all day long to see if you can’t calculate your prediction rather than just pull it out of your ass and 2) luck and chance make it completely and totally impossible to make an accurate prediction from data. Call it the Yin and Yang of sabermetrics.

Anyway, according to BP, here is a breakdown of the five luckiest, and five most unlucky teams in baseball as of 7/15/07:

Whatever you do, don’t change your socks… never change your socks when you’re lucky:

• Detroit Tigers
• Cleveland Indians
• Boston Red Sox
• Los Angeles Angels
• Philadelphis Phillies

Time for new socks, underwear… well, just burn your shit in front of the duguout.

• Houston Astros
• Pittsburgh Pirates
• Chicago White Sox
• Oakland A’s
• St. Louis Cardinals

First of all, obviously the NL Central is the most unlucky division in baseball: 4 teams out of the 7 un-luckiest. Many people might think that being a lucky team would be a great thing but nay… I argue it is not. Luck tends to even out over the course of a season. So in my thinking, teams with poor luck should have catch some breaks in the second half and those who get every lucky hop known to man will soon get frustrated by slumps and bad voodoo. So that’s why for my second-half predictions I counted bad luck as a positive stat, since blue skies are bound to come. So with the current standings in mind, and my crazy, completely and totally unreliable mathematical model here are my predictions for how things wrap up this year:

AL East - Boston
AL Central - Minnesota
AL West - Los Angeles
AL Wildcard - Oakland

NL East - New York
NL Central - Chicago
NL West - San Diego
NL Wildcard - Los Angeles

AL Winners - Boston beats Los Angeles
NL Winners - New York Beats San Diego

MLB Champ - New York Mets