It was turned down, he just couldn't make the cut.
What is happening /r/fantasybaseball!
Nick Pollack here from Pitcher List and it's time for our weekly AMA. I love this tradition.
I'll be here with plenty of the Pitcher List crew to help answer questions throughout the day, so keep the questions coming.
In case you missed it, we released the official Pitcher List 2020 Fantasy Guide yesterday! It's FREE for PL+ members (sign up here!) and is plenty prettier than the respective articles across the site.
Oh and it's over 700 PAGES. 30+ Fantasy 101 articles to learn the game from Beginner to Expert, player profiles for every fantasy-relevant player, and our Staff Consensus rankings for every position. You should get it.
Alright, let's work out keepers and draft strategies on the official first day of spring training, but not really since it isn't televised for some ridiculous reason.
Let's talk about baseball.
So I've been playing with various scenarios and with the help of the game predictions from FiveThirtyEight's NBA Predictions, I've come up with the probability that the Raptors are in 2nd place in the East through the games played on Feb. 2nd, meaning that Nick Nurse would coach in the All-Star Game (since Budenholzer coached last year, he can't coach again.)
The Raptors have three games remaining in that time span, while the Heat have one and the Celtics have two. If the Raptors win two or three of their games (with a combined probability of 82.6%), then neither the Heat nor the Celtics can catch them in the standings. Conversely, if the Raptors some how manage to lose all three games (although there's only a 1.6% chance of that happening, I don't even like typing that), the Heat are guaranteed to finish ahead of them in the standings. It gets complicated if the Raptors only win one of their next three games (which only has a 15.9% probability). If that happens and the Heat win their game (a 36% probability) or the Celtics win both of their remaining games (a 47% probability), then the Raptors would fall out of the second seed. Combining all of these probabilities gives a 5.4% chance that the Raptors go 1-2, the Heat lose their game against Orlando and the Celtics lose one of their games. Adding up the positive scenarios give an overall probability of 88% that the Raptors have the second seed after all games are played through February 2nd.
(If anyone is interested in the calculations, I'll figure out some way to post the spreadsheet I used for this.)
Update: With tonight's win and updated probabilities for the remaining games, the new probability of the Raptors holding the second seed after the Feb. 2nd games are played is 96.1%! Here's a screenshot of the updated predictions - I got a little lazy and just set the Raptors and Celtics wins to 100% probability instead of redoing the formulas :)
