Dave Helling: Of baseball and butterflies
It’s a tough job, predicting the future.
Every day, weather forecasters study charts, review satellite pictures, stick wet fingers in the wind. They go on television and claim to know the unknowable: what’s going to happen tomorrow.
They’re pretty good at it, and getting better. But meteorologists can still be wrong.
Some butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and our “wintry mix” disappears.
Viewers get mad at this, but weathermen and women deserve a break. Most political reporters I know were pretty confident Hillary Clinton would win last November. Most electoral projections predicted a Clinton triumph.
She did win the popular vote, of course. But President Donald Trump won the only vote that matters.
Which brings us to the latest prognostication: PECOTA, the baseball projection formula, predicts the Royals will win 71 games this year, finishing last in the Central Division.
PECOTA’s prediction record is, uh, mixed. In 2015 it called the Royals a sub-.500 team. They won the World Series.
So baseball fans can probably relax. Somewhere, a butterfly is flapping its wings.
Dave Helling, dhelling@kcstar.com