The thing about baseball is that it brings out the oddest demographic of people to follow the game. There are of course the casual fans who watch baseball when necessary and only know about the game from what they can glean from an announcer or someone they met who was wearing a baseball cap of one team or another.

There are diehard baseball fans who live and breathe based on how their favorite team is doing. These fans are generally purists who believe that the game should be maintained much like a museum or the moonshine recipe that your uncle Bubba passed down since the times of prohibition. These are fans who can rattle off exact pitch sequences that led up to an historical moment of one game. Describing the roster of a baseball team sounds eerily like reading a list of prophets from the bible. There are a lot of begetting to get to what the team looks like today.

And then there are what I call “the analyticals”. These are the fans who dig deeply into the statistical bowels of the game who analyze every ball and strike during a game and run the numbers through a mathematical stew to come up with a number that represents everything in baseball.

To the other two groups, the analyticals are ruining the game. They don’t see the beauty of the game like the diehard fans, nor do they see the social interaction and entertainment value that the casual fans do. Instead, they dissect baseball into its atomic level breaking it down to such minutia that it seldom resembles the game being played.

That is not to say that these analytics are not valuable. On the contrary, it is these facts and figures that are closely held secrets to each baseball front office. These are the equivalent of the secret eleven herbs and spices that Colonel Sanders kept in his safe for fried chicken or the formula for Coca-Cola that is guarded in some secret location in Georgia.

Beyond these super top-secret analytics that the teams keep, there are others that are more generally available. One such calculation is PECOTA by Baseball Prospectus. PECOTA, which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is a projection system that was created by Nate Silver in the early 2000s. It is designed to forecast future production by players and teams based on prior year statistics.

Before each season, Baseball Prospectus comes out with their PECOTA predictions of how teams and players will do for the coming season. Shortly after its annual release, PECOTA is drug through the mud by fans and statisticians who are unhappy with the results the system is suggesting for their team.

For 2023, the PECOTA system projected that the Arizona Diamondbacks would finish with a record of 74.8-87.2. This is consistent with how PECOTA felt about the 2022 Dbacks when it predicted a record of 73-89. The funny thing is, in 2022 the Diamondbacks finished with a record of 74-88 so the prediction was only off one game.

Of course as a Diamondbacks fan I expected more out of the 2023 team than a 0.8 win improvement over last year. Maybe I was jaded by my love of the team or perhaps I had bought into the hype that comes every March when hope springs eternal.

I guess that is why today was so special for me. With a 3-2 win over the Chicago Cubs in ten innings, Arizona’s record moved to 75-68 with 19 games remaining. The Dbacks have now beaten the PECOTA predictions. Every win from here to the end of the season will act as a high water mark over the forecasting machines.

PECOTA adapts and changes as the season and the data move forward. Baseball Prospectus maintains a PECOTA Standings page where the latest simulation totals show where the computer thinks teams will be at the end of the regular season.

The totals for the Diamondbacks have moved upwards which is probably as close as the computer will ever come from admitting it was wrong with its first estimate. But even these updated totals have little confidence in the Arizona Diamondbacks. The team is now estimated to end with an 82.8-79.2 record, an increase of eight wins.

That win total according to PECOTA will not be enough to make the playoffs. The Divisional winners in the National League will be Atlanta (105.2-56.8), Los Angeles (98.7-63.3) and Milwaukee (89.6-72.4). The three wild card teams will be Philadelphia (89.4-72.6), Chicago Cubs (87.5-74.5), and Miami (83.0-79.0). Arizona would have the next best record on the outside looking in.

I’m hoping that the Diamondbacks prove PECOTA wrong again over the next 22 days and exceed the 83 win mark. Not just because I would love to see Arizona in the post season but also so that it tempers all this Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning talk so that people understand that while baseball is made up of an infinite amount of numbers and data it is still played by imperfect men whose heart and desire cannot yet be forecasted by a computer.