Nate Silver/538 Sports > The Boys of Spring Training Get The Data Crunched By Algorithms

The arrival of spring training brings with it a number of treats - thrills for baseball fans, mega-millions for team franchise owners, media and advertising, and sales tax revenues for cities like Mesa hosting spring training at two city-owned sports spots [an increase of $1M in the second year for a taxpayer-funded investment of $$28M].
If you’re a fan, it’s the hope that this might be the year your team wins the World Series.
For number crunchers, it’s a fresh batch of projections, ripe for statistical exploration.
Let's take a look

Those projections — generated by algorithms such as Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA¹ — endeavor to predict the performance of each major league player and team in the coming season. That’s a tough job, and often a thankless one . . . looks like good news for the Chicago Cubs according to a guy named Nate Silver who started out being the only guy who got some things right in the game of politics.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bored-with-balance-in-baseball-2016-could-be-your-year/
Which, I’m obliged to say, was originally developed by FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver. ^

His analytics applied to politics were so "on game" that he started his own company calling it 538.
Money in data you might say.
You can see in the image to the left how politics was the big dot in data when he started > now sports is even bigger]
If a projection system makes headlines at all, it’s usually for drawing the ire of a scorned team or fan base. (Never underestimate how quickly World Series joy can turn into anger when the computer calls for a sub-.500 record!) But projections are also invaluable because they provide a statistical snapshot, frozen in time, from which we can learn to become more accurate in the future, and suss out potential trends in the game.

And this year, PECOTA’s projections spat out something that may prove even more noteworthy than, say, the last-place finish they predict for the defending champion Kansas City Royals. The numbers suggest that MLB’s brief era of balance may soon be over.
The common thread is the transition from “building” to “built.” Graduating many of their most promising players to the majors in the last year or so, the Cubs and Mets are now seeing them play some of the best ball in decades. The concentration of so much young talent on so few teams, during an era where young players are more valuable than they’ve been in many years, has clearly played a role in the widening of win projections this season.
Anyhow, this all gets technical, but it looks like good news for the Cubs - they might break "the curse"