Rockies offseason journal: Doubling down on bad analysis

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First, they said he would never make it.

Then, they said he was one-dimensional.

Then, they said he was a fluke.

Now, they say trade him before his value drops.

Greetings, dear BSN Denver reader, and please forgive me but I must ask you a favor. We need a name for this phenomenon. Year after year, in every sport, analysis of all types is thrown at our faces in droves resembling the Night of the Living Dead and much of it gets lost in the oceanic expanse of numbers and hot takes.

It’s easy to see why so few talking heads in sports return to their early-season predictions, let alone their claims from years ago, but today’s food for thought is this: We should look for more consistency in our analysis.

The men and women who do this for a living are as imperfect as anyone else and nobody is going to be right all the time. But our reluctance to hold ourselves even the least bit accountable has resulted in an echo chamber of bad ideas. It’s tough because a 24-hour news cycle requires a lot of opinion-giving and it’s not like the experts in a certain field can just opt out of certain conversations … but it’s worth looking at someone’s resume when weighing their current analysis.

Look, I’m not going to call out anyone in particular here, these offseason journal entries are mostly supposed to be fun and informal. But one doesn’t need to look far to find multiple examples of what I showed to begin this article.

Charlie Blackmon, DJ LeMahieu, even Carlos Gonzalez and Nolan Arenado has been subjected to such logic. And maybe — just maybe — the people who have been underestimating these players at every single step of their careers shouldn’t be making such absolute claims about what the Rockies should do with them now.

Many of the same people who would have you believe at one point that Charlie Blackmon was no more than a hot April in 2014, or that DJ LeMahieu would never hold any value beyond his glove are now leading the charge to move one or the other out of town.

There are plenty of reasonable arguments for trading just about anyone on the roster, it would just be much easier to take if the logic wasn’t that they are at “peak value” and the Rockies just need to move them while they can. Of course, those who never thought they had this potential don’t see them continuing to play at this level. That would mean … they were wrong … again.

The argument gets stronger when couched in statistics but numbers like BABIP and FIP tend to ignore the basic and fundamental concept that professional athletes improve by working hard on both the physical and mental aspects of the game.

It doesn’t fit into the narrative, so the fact that LeMahieu and Blackmon are extraordinary workers and incredible baseball minds gets left out of the conversation when it may be the most salient detail for a team hoping to turn a corner in terms of competitiveness.

These are the characteristics the prognosticators have been ignoring this whole time which led to results they didn’t anticipate and now label “surprises” or “flukes” or “likely to recede.” But maybe we don’t listen to the people who have been wrong the whole time?

In fact, the logic even extends to teams at times, following the Kansas City Royals around during back-to-back World Series seasons.

Or, I guess they were a two-year fluke? Surely, that’s not an attempt to undercut the truth in order to protect an overly sensitive ego.

Yes, we need a name for this kind of doubling down. Which isn’t necessarily to say that any of these analysts are wrong now. It’s just hard to trust an argument based entirely on the value of a team or player in question when you have been consistently wrong about that team or player.

Or at least make a note that while your opinion may be strong, there are plenty of empirical reasons to believe you are probably wrong.