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June 15, 2005

Lies, Damned Lies

Forecasting the Future: Microculture

by Nate Silver

Much of what we do at Baseball Prospectus is looking forward and making predictions about the future. Usually, however, we aren’t looking very far into the future. We might look at an upcoming game or series (time horizon: three days). We might look at the conclusion of a pennant race (time horizon: one month). We’ll certainly try and predict what’s going to happen in the upcoming season (time horizon: six months). And occasionally, we’ll even look at a 19-year-old prospect or a 5-year PECOTA forecast, deigning to predict events five or ten years in advance.

Rarely, however, do we go much beyond this.

A slight detour. I’m not nearly as prolific a web-surfer as some of my good friends. There are probably five or ten websites that I visit more than once a week; for a lot of people my age, that number is more like fifty or one hundred. Occasionally, however, the mood will strike me just right, and I’ll go drifting to and fro between unfamiliar regions of the World Wide Web. A recent such excursion landed me at this strange destination, an article whose thesis is, among other things, that we tend to underestimate the rapidity of change within modern culture. In that spirit, I have decided to do a handful of articles trying to think about what baseball is going to look like not in the near future, but in the somewhat distant future--say fifteen or thirty years from now. (The next installment in the series might run next week, or it might run in August, depending on what else catches my attention).

The real problem with forecasting the future, of course, is the Law of Unforeseen Events. I got about a tenth of the way through the 9/11 Commission Report, and it would have been really, really nice if our government could have foreseen that a bunch of terrorists were planning on crashing commercial jetliners into buildings, but fundamentally the idea that something like that could happen was so far out of our collective worldview that it’s almost impossible to imagine a well-intentioned policymaker giving such a scenario much credence, any more than an Incan emperor could have prepared for Spanish warships coming o’er the horizon. The really pivotal things are the really unexpected things, and those are exactly the things that one can’t possibly hope to predict. If I took a very long nap and woke up thirty years from now and discovered that Brazilian shortstops were to 2035 what Dominican shortstops are to 2005, I could probably convince myself that it made some sort of sense, but I sure as hell couldn’t predict something like that now. My sense of the future is too linear. All of ours are.

With that admission in mind, I am going to do the next best thing, examining some current, wide-sweeping trends within baseball, and thinking critically about how those trends are likely to resolve themselves in the future.

Trend: Franchise values are increasing rapidly.