PECOTA may hate the Royals, but Bill Pecota is a believer

The phone rings back in Kansas City, and Bill Pecota has a pretty good idea why a reporter might be calling. It is late October, and the Royals are two victories from a World Series championship, and, yes, this is about the system, of course — the baseball projection model that bears his name. This is about the mathematical formula that did not believe in the Kansas City Royals.

Back in late January — nine months before the Royals would win another American League pennant — the respected projection system PECOTA, named for the former utility player, predicted that the Royals would finish 72-90.

Let’s say that once more: 72-90.

Pecota, who resides in Lee’s Summit, saw the numbers then. His friends around town ribbed him for his obvious pessimism. He heard his last named bandied about on local sports-talk radio and in the newspaper. So on Thursday afternoon, on the eve of Game 3 of the World Series here at Citi Field, Pecota wanted to make one thing clear.

PECOTA might hate the Kansas City Royals, but Bill Pecota was a believer from the beginning.

“They were so good,” Pecota says. “Seventy-two is a joke.”

That’s not to say that Pecota, the man, didn’t have some doubts. Like everyone else in Kansas City, he wondered if the young nucleus would continue to develop, if the Royals could replace James Shields’ innings, if the bullpen could repeat its masterful 2014. But for the most part, in this one instance, we can say that Pecota was more accurate than PECOTA.

“This is totally honest,” Pecota says. “If I would have been asked before the season what I thought their record would be, I would have honestly said: ‘All they have to do is show up, and they were an 81-win team.’ And if they even tried a little bit, they were pushing 90. And if they really concentrated, the sky was the limit. They were just incredibly talented.”

Pecota laughs as this subject comes up. For the last decade or so, people have asked about the projection system that uses his name. The questions and comments, he says, usually heat up in January, when the new batch of player and team projections come out.

Pecota, who spent his nine-year major-league career as a utility player for the Royals, Mets and Braves, says he never cared much about statistics as a player. (“I was old-school,” he says). But a few years ago, he was curious how his name ended up attached to baseball’s most popular and widespread preseason projections. Upon some research, he found the well-documented origin story.

In the early 2000s, a young analyst for Baseball Prospectus named Nate Silver had sketched together an algorithm to project a player’s future performance based on track record and other more advanced data. Silver, who would later take his formulas to the world of politics and founded the website FiveThirtyEight.com, needed a name for the system. A Detroit Tigers fan as a kid, Silver settled on Pecota, an obscure homage to a utility man from the late 80s who had routinely killed the Tigers.

Officially, PECOTA stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.

“At one time, I heard he wanted to find the most average player that he could find, statistically,” Bill Pecota says. “And he came upon my name. I guess my numbers were incredibly average.”

Like most people, Pecota has little idea how the formula works — other than the fact it is quite complicated, and was actually quite successful for many years. But for some reason, the current version of PECOTA has been unable to account for whatever makes this Royals club so formidable. The system, according to Baseball Prospectus editor Sam Miller, has trouble with teams that have elite bullpens and great defenses.

“It has a hard time,” Miller told The Star in August, “with any team that can outperform its raw stats for whatever reason, which the Royals have done.”

As the Royals piled up 95 victories and claimed another American League pennant, the 72-win projection has become a permanent part of club lore — a source of motivation in a clubhouse yearning for respect, and a number that most fans will never forget.

When spring training began, Eric Hosmer laughed at the prediction. Months later, owner David Glass was openly mocking it in interviews. Even the greatest player in franchise history has had some fun with PECOTA’s whiff.

"I know who Bill Pecota is,” George Brett said earlier this week. “I don't know who PECOTA is."

Oh, yes. Bill Pecota. Whatever happened to Nate Silver’s favorite ballplayer? Well, for the last 20 years, the former Royal has made his home in Kansas City, raising a family with his wife, Eastin. After beginning his career with the Royals in 1986, Pecota says he never really wanted to leave. When he was traded to the Mets after the 1991 season — a piece in the blockbuster Brett Saberhagen trade — Pecota says he felt “devastated.”

“I loved it here,” he says now. “Everything about Kansas City was so perfect. I couldn’t wait to get to the ballpark everyday.”

Nearly 24 years after that trade, Pecota sat inside Kauffman Stadium on Wednesday night and watched the Royals wipe out the Mets, 7-1, taking a 2-0 lead in the World Series. In that moment, one had to wonder how any system could have projected the Royals to win 72 games.

But here is where Pecota pauses. Here is where he sort of wants to defend the system that has come to be synonymous with his baseball career.

“I suppose the thing had a bad year,” he says. “I don’t want to defend the system, but I think the system is totally mathematical. It’s not like it’s one man’s opinion.”

This is true. At the very least, we can say this: It’s definitely not Bill Pecota’s prediction.

“I have nothing to do with the thing; it’s its own deal,” he says. “But what’s that thing they say? Any publicity is good publicity.”

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 6:37 PM with the headline "PECOTA may hate the Royals, but Bill Pecota is a believer."