2016 Baseball Preview

Baseball season is coming! Which means it's time for my least-analytical post of the year, the baseball preview in which I incorrectly predict about half of the playoff teams and inadvertently doom two pitchers to having terrible and/or injurious seasons.

Seriously, though, my Cy Young picks have been very, very bad for quite a while now. I've posted two years of predictions here, and was able to track down my picks for every year since 2009 in old emails. I correctly picked Felix Hernandez to win the AL Cy in 2010, and CC Sabathia wasn't a terrible pick in 2009 (6.2 WAR, 4th in the voting). Outside of that, none of my picks have ever received a single Cy Young vote, and the extent to which they have tended to get injured or have bad seasons or both is rather alarming. Last year's picks were Trevor Bauer, who at least managed to qualify for the ERA title but had a below-average ERA, and Adam Wainwright, who was great until he tore his Achilles tendon four starts into the season.

So, as a Cubs fan, I'm definitely not picking Jake Arrieta to defend his award from last year. But there are other things to pick too, which we'll cover before I get to ruining people's careers.

Melog Rankings: Post-Indian Wells 2016

Since we last checked in on present-day tennis, Novak Djokovic has won his third consecutive title at Indian Wells. His performance in the final against a possibly-injured Milos Raonic was particularly dominant, as he won 27 of the 30 points on Raonic's second serve - far and away the worst second-serve performance of Raonic's career, and the second-best Djokovic has ever done on an opponent's second serve (for matches in which Tennis Abstract has the data). Given that Raonic is one of the best servers on tour... yeah, Novak had a good match there.

His fellow highly-ranked players didn't fare quite as well, however. Andy Murray lost in the round of 32 to Federico Delbonis, and Roger Federer missed the tournament entirely due to injury. So let's see how the overall ratings have changed in the last three weeks (remember, we've also seen the first round of Davis Cup play since the last update):

Past Melog rankings: 2012

2012 was a strange tennis year in some ways. Most notably, it was the first time in nearly a decade that the four Grand Slams were won by four different players. The previous eight years had been dominated by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal almost exclusively, with Novak Djokovic sprinting past both of them and seizing the top spot in 2011. But the relative parity of major success in 2012 might have seemed like an indicator that the tennis commoners would soon have their chances to move up in the world again. (Sure, the four Slam winners were Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Andy Murray, and they exclusively faced each other in the finals. On the other hand, David Ferrer won the Paris Masters, the first non-big-four player to take a title at that level in two years, and Juan Martin del Potro won the Olympic bronze medal, beating Djokovic to clinch third place after losing an epic to Federer in the semis.)

Let's take a closer look and see if there really was reason for hope for the sport's proletariat.

Prospect hunting: The meaning of a Junior Grand Slam title

Who's next?

It's one of the central questions that defines sports. In team sports, every franchise devotes a significant portion of its resources to scouting, acquiring, and developing the next generation of stars. Fans are far from immune to the allure of this question, as the NFL and NBA drafts are subject to considerable speculation even years in advance (a Google search for 2018 NFL Mock Draft, analysis of an event that is over two years away, returns nearly 100,000 results, with just over 90,000 for the NBA). The draft is somewhat less-publicized in baseball (though I believe it's still televised on the MLB Network), but several popular websites (such as Baseball America) are completely dedicated to scouting and projecting amateur and minor league players.

This side of sports becomes trickier when you look at individual competitions, such as tennis. Outside of national tennis federations (which are not fully cohesive competitive units), there are no teams searching for the next big thing, so curious fans of the sport are left on their own in seeking out prospects to a much greater extent than they are in football or basketball.

That's not to say that the fans are completely without resources; information about the Challenger, Futures, and Junior tours can easily be found on the ATP and ITF websites, and the ITF even publishes junior rankings. But following the ATP World Tour itself takes a good bit of time, and most fans will direct their attention where it has the best chance of paying off - watching the major events and waiting for young players to produce results there.

There is one simple compromise that can be struck between focusing on the biggest events in tennis and keeping an eye on young players: the Junior Grand Slams. Held during the second week of each Slam (once the mens' and womens' singles and doubles draws are winnowed down and therefore take up fewer courts), the Junior Slams offer young players a chance to compete against their peers on a stage that's at least adjacent to the most important courts in the sport. And for the fans, moving from the main singles draw on the Slam's website to a junior singles draw requires just two clicks of a mouse.

The question then becomes: Is this an effective way of finding future tennis stars? What does it mean for a player to win a Junior Grand Slam title?

Let's find out.

Someone's projecting: 2016 Davis Cup Projections (kind of)

One of the things I've been toying with this year is a basic system for projecting the outcomes of tennis matches. (Like, absurdly basic. No adjustments for surface or anything; the only tweak is that it differentiates between best-of-3 and best-of-5 matches.) I'm using this year to test the system and see if its absurdly basic nature hampers its accuracy within general groups of matches, and I'll be posting about the results at the end of the year.

But since it's Davis Cup week, I thought it might be fun to wheel out the nascent projections and see what they think about the odds of each of the eight first-round World Group ties being played this week. (Kind of. There is, of course, a doubles match in each tie, and I'm not even going to pretend I know what to do with that, so I'm treating each doubles match as a 50-50 proposition. This is clearly incorrect and the results should be evaluated with the requisite grains of salt.)

Melog Rankings: End of February 2016

The tennis schedule is kind of weird.

It's a sport that is played almost year-round, but it has only four events that the casual fans care about, two of which are played within a month of each other despite being on completely different surfaces, allowing very little time to transition between them. And another one is played almost immediately at the beginning of the year, with essentially no time leading up to it. The schedule goes offseason (basically only the month of December), then two weeks of small events, then AUSTRALIAN OPEN!!! And then small events again for the next month.

There are benefits to this, I'm sure; for one thing, it puts the sport's biggest names at center stage right away, which wouldn't necessarily happen without a Slam leading off. (On the other hand, if they moved the Asian swing, including the Shanghai Masters, from October to January and made it part of the ramp-up to the Australian, which would then be held in mid-late February... I'm just saying, that could work.)

But there are also drawbacks, and one of them comes in the sleepy month of February. The tennis stories in January were about Djokovic and Federer and Murray, and then you move into smaller events and the stories are still kind of about those guys, but instead of a Grand Slam, they're about knee surgery and paternity leave and pulling out of moderately important events with eye ailments.

With the big names out of focus for the last four weeks, the casual fan's attention may have wavered - but there's still plenty to intrigue a more dedicated follower of the sport. And foremost on that list this February is a pair of young players who are jetting up the rankings.

Let's go to the numbers...

Past Melog rankings: 2013

The biggest story of men's tennis in 2013 was Rafael Nadal.

Nadal was injured at Wimbledon in 2012, and missed the remainder of the season. The ailment kept him off the court through the 2013 Australian Open, leaving him to make his comeback in February on the clay courts of South America. He reached the final in his first event back, then won the next two, highlighted by a thrashing of David Ferrer in Acapulco. The season shifted temporarily to hard courts next, and Rafa didn't miss a beat, dropping only two sets on the way to the Masters title at Indian Wells.

Up next was European clay season, and Nadal performed with typical excellence on his favorite surface; he lost the Monte Carlo final to World #1 Novak Djokovic, but rebounded with titles in Barcelona, Madrid, and Rome. He would be drawn to face Djokovic in the semifinals at the French Open, and prevailed in a classic match, 9-7 in the fifth set. He then dismissed Ferrer in perfunctory straight sets to take yet another Roland Garros title, the eighth of his career.

And then he lost to Steve Darcis in the first round at Wimbledon, and it seemed as though the second half of the season might not treat him quite so well as the first.

That impression was short-lived. Nadal charged to Masters titles in Montreal and Cincinnati, his fourth and fifth Masters crowns of the year, and then thoroughly dominated the US Open, dropping only two sets and capping his run with a victory over Djokovic in the final. He reclaimed the #1 ranking by reaching the final in Beijing (losing to Djokovic), and posted solid (albeit title-free) results of the rest of the year (semis in Shanghai and Paris and the final at the World Finals). It was enough to secure his third finish as the ATP's #1 player, all of which have come in non-consecutive years.

So let's see what Melog thinks of Rafa's resurgence. Just like last time, the table will include every player who was in either Melog's top 75 or the ATP's.